While COVID-19 continues to spread across the world it has, amazingly, had some positive impact on the way the pharmaceutical industry works. Some trends that had already started are being accelerated and some new ways of working to combat the virus will hopefully change the way biopharma works for the long-term. Here are some changes COVID-19 has brought about in biopharma commercial analytics.
Interactions with Healthcare Professionals
Even before the pandemic biopharma commercial analytics was seeing diminishing returns on face-to-face interactions with healthcare providers. Clearly the pandemic has accelerated this trend. Clinicians prefer to access disease and product information through online and remote channels freeing up time for patients that previously was used for direct meetings with sales reps and medical science liaisons.
Biopharma companies have to improve personalized messaging and microsegment campaigns. One-size-fits-all general messages will be replaced through the use of predictive analytics to tailor individual content. Moving from using historical prescription data to call plans based on the prediction of prescribing behavior from the characteristics of the health care provider must happen. Streamlining the next-best-action engines to deliver fewer insights but targeted insights for sales reps actions is critical for the success of biopharma commercial analytics.
Patient Contact Centers
Telehealth has surged due to the coronavirus. As reported in our recent telehealth blog, virtual urgent care visits at NYU Langone grew by 683% and non-urgent virtual care visits grew by a staggering 4345% between March 2 and April 14. Two-thirds of patients have said the pandemic has increased their willingness to try virtual care. Utilizing digital tools to increase patient-centricity is already working and expanding that for post-pandemic will improve pharma’s ability to better meet the needs of patients, caregivers and advocacy organizations. Remote contact centers could also create huge capital investment savings due to the reduced need for physical structures.
Novel Collaborations, Increased Data Sharing
“What we are seeing are unprecedented collaborations,” said Haribabu Arthanari, PhD, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Dana Farber Cancer Institute. “This situation has opened up doors that we would have never thought to knock on.” Google has offered researchers free access to critical coronoavirus information in order to further accelerate biopharma commercial analytics. “To help with these projects, we’ve expanded the coverage of our public data set program and launched a COVID-19-specific public data set program, so that people can query these datasets themselves and join them with other data, “ said Joe Corkery, Google Cloud Director.
These co-disciplinary efforts are leading to more comprehensive research, and more comprehensive results. “Over the last ten to fifteen years, health systems and large providers have been moving their data systems and assets into the cloud, so healthcare executives have become more comfortable with analytics and analytical platforms, “ Corkery went on to say. “This pandemic has shown that policymakers – public health departments in particular – who are coordinating response efforts want to have access to information, but their infrastructure is not at the same level that it is in health systems.”
“One of the lasting effects of this pandemic is the understanding that connectivity needs to be in place and that the infrastructure in public health is just as important as it is in healthcare systems. There needs to be the ability to not only rapidly collect data, but then analyze that data and move it around to the parties that need it,” said Brian Dixon, PhD, Director of Public Health Informatics, Regenstrief Institute. “It makes us ask, why weren’t we doing this before? And after this pandemic, how can we continue to do this? How can we continue to work together and invest in these infrastructures so that we can collect data, share that data, and analyze that data rapidly in pandemic situations? Or even in smaller-scale situations, like a localized outbreak of food poisoning or salmonella,” said Michael Dennis, Vice President of Innovation at CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society. “If there’s any silver lining of COVID-19, that’s one of them- that organizations that might have been competitors are now partnering for the good of the world. And I think we’re going to continue to see that in the future.”
