Life sciences organizations: Empowering faster drug development and innovation
By sharing data and working collaboratively within a connected ecosystem, life sciences organizations are able to improve market access and deliver value-based therapies. With greater access to real-world evidence, they can accelerate drug development and regulatory and payer approvals, as well as improve collaboration with payers and providers for value-based care.
Practical examples could include:
- Enrolling patients in clinical trials sooner: Applying AI models to clinical, claims, patient-reported, and genomic data can help ecosystem partners identify potential indicators of rare diseases in undiagnosed patients. Working together to provide these tools, life sciences and digital health partners could identify patients earlier in their care journey and start them on an appropriate treatment pathway, including clinical trials where necessary.
- Producing tailored health messaging: Medical affairs, commercial, marketing, and field teams at life science organizations produce written content for different purposes. At the same time, that content must meet strict legal requirements and maintain consistent language in communicating about indications, efficacy, and side effects. The combination of a centralized platform for integrating disparate datasets and purpose-built generative AI tools can make it possible to unify approved messaging across various channels to healthcare providers, patients, insurers, and more.
Retail pharmacies: Expanding pharmacists’ roles and integrated services
The ecosystem approach is critical for helping retail pharmacies transform into healthcare hubs for personalized, preventive care. Pharmacies need to be aligned with other healthcare stakeholders to help leverage data to deliver more personalized, clinically focused care and build stronger, more collaborative relationships with payers and providers. Ultimately, this serves the retail industry’s momentum in expanding its service lines and its pharmacists’ roles beyond dispensing medications.
Examples of ecosystem collaboration in action for pharmacies could include:
- Streamlining medication reconciliation: In a connected ecosystem, stakeholders can access an updated medication list and receive alerts when new prescriptions are filled and old prescriptions are dropped. Along with reducing the likelihood of preventable drug interactions that can result in costly episodes of care, better medication reconciliation helps pharmacists improve the patient experience by cutting down the confusion of managing many medications.
- Embedding care management in the pharmacy: Research has shown more than 80% of patients are comfortable going to their pharmacy for low-acuity care. Couple that with a projected shortage of 40,000 primary care physicians by 2036, and there are clear incentives to empower pharmacists to more effectively support care delivery. Ecosystem transformation makes this possible by providing pharmacy partners with the same access to patient data, insights, and evidence-based recommendations as other care stakeholders, allowing them to become the “quarterback” of the care team when applicable.
- Bringing education to the community: Digital medical education can augment traditional in-person learning. With consistent educational programs available through pharmacists, behavioral health providers, and non-clinical professionals such as social workers, it offers more touchpoints with patients than primary or specialty care.
Payers and PBMs: Aligning member outcomes with cost savings
Payers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) have to focus on reducing costs, but when they can align with ecosystem partners such as providers and life sciences organizations through data-driven, value-based care, they are able to actively improve member outcomes without compromising cost-reduction strategies. Ecosystem partnerships help payers use data to predict and prevent costly health events.
Some ways payers and PBMs can benefit from an ecosystem approach include:
- Getting patients on new therapies faster: The sooner stakeholders know a therapy has been approved for a new indication, the sooner patients can benefit from it. When payers and PBMs can access peer-reviewed research showing a therapy’s effectiveness, they can add a therapy to a formulary and advocate its use that much sooner.
- Recognize – and intervene on – rising risk factors: All ecosystem partners benefit when patients at risk of a chronic condition are identified and flagged early enough to begin proactive and preventive care management. Predictive analytics models may be effective here, especially when they have access to a complete member or patient record. Validated AI tools capable of providing evidence-based treatment recommendations can help payers encourage healthy behaviors and prioritize the scheduling of necessary care.
- Adapt education to user context and preference: Creating educational materials that are appropriate for the situation and tailored to a member’s stated preferences, benefits, and current health status as documented in a shared longitudinal record can help improve adherence to treatment plans, reduce avoidable utilization, and provide peace of mind for both patients and payers.
Digital health tech: Seamless integration leads to proven ROI
The connected healthcare ecosystem is simultaneously powered by the digital health technology industry and enables companies to create more scalable, interoperable solutions to unite healthcare stakeholders. By driving adoption of digital-first, AI-powered tools that facilitate and optimize care delivery, digital health tech can demonstrate return on investment (ROI) and value to its ecosystem partners.
