The discussion about pharmaceutical companies’ adoption of digital health tends to revolve around what Big Pharma businesses are doing. But at the annual Health 2.0 Fall conference this week, BTG Digital Health Innovation Director Amanda Goltz made a case for the advantages of being a smaller player.
Goltz noted that the UK-based specialty pharma company’s relatively small size meant it could be more agile.
Goltz drew attention to BTG’s collaboration with Tonic Health — a digital health business that has moved from engaging patients to fill out electronic medical forms in a doctor’s office to working with payers as well as for pharma companies. With BTG, Tonic is providing support on clinical trials in interventional oncology and patient-reported outcomes in interventional medicine. She also highlighted BTG’s work with Deloitte to develop Snakebite 911 — an app to support for its snake bite antivenom. But it was with a new initiative to support cancer patients where she viewed the company’s size as an advantage.
The de novo digital project on cancer is intended to add value to providers and patients, Goltz said. One aim is to help patients assess the side effects of cancer treatment options such as chemotherapy. Since BTG is a specialty player in the cancer treatment space, that would give this digital health tool the flexibility to recommend treatment options without running the risk of undermining its drug arsenal for cancer.
“If we do a digital service to help patients manage a condition, communicate better with their physician, [and other applications], we are not going to cannibalize our own market. We don’t run that risk,” said Goltz.
The conversation also touched on the mechanics of technology collaboration, how companies decide on whether to develop a tool or service internally or through external partners and the processes they use to screen those partners. Other panelists included Boehringer Ingelheim Director of Business Innovation in Digital Health, Larry Brooks, Eugene Borukhovich — the global head of digital health incubation and innovation at Bayer —and Healthware International CEO Roberto Ascione.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Borukhovich, the most outspoken of the group, said he strongly believed there’s no such thing as technology innovation; it is more about how pharma companies work with patients, in partnership with clinicians, to improve patient outcomes. But external partners can give pharma companies a considerable advantage. Bayer has core IT in-house, but pharma companies don’t have the skill sets that Google has, Borukhovich conceded. He said there needs to be more attention on how to use digital health tools to help change behavior.
“Pharma has been talking about beyond the pill for 10 years now. The pill is old,” Borukhovich said. “We really need to lift the digital health portion rather than the pill.”
That issue prompted the moderator to ask Brooks to explain how developing a digital solution differed from developing a drug.
“There is a series of processes and capabilities that need to be put in place
in the design process,” said Brooks. He explained that the company has to ensure it has the right adverse reporting structure in place.
Acknowledging that most pharma companies seem like they are in perpetual pilot mode when it comes to digital health adoption, Borukhovich joked that there were more pilots in the NHS than British Airways or Lufthansa, but added,
“It is not about just taking the plane into the sky. It is about landing it safely.”
Photo: Proteus Digital Health
