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A Q&A with Agustin Lamas, Global Managing Director – Globant HLS
The healthcare and life sciences ecosystem is under mounting pressure to serve more people at a lower cost while delivering better patient outcomes. At the same time, the sector is facing an ever-evolving and increasing array of challenges – from global health events to changing regulations and supply chain disruptions.
In this landscape, organizations understand the need to embrace digital and data to help optimize the entire value chain, better serve the patient, and improve clinical and cost outcomes. But transformation of this scale is often easier said than done.
Here to share his insights on the current state of the healthcare and life sciences ecosystem – and how technology like Salesforce can help organizations address their most pressing issues – is Globant Healthcare & Life Sciences Global Managing Director Agustin Lamas.
What challenges within the healthcare and life sciences industry is Salesforce helping organizations address?
Customer engagement is one of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare and life sciences industry today. By that, I mean engagement across the entire value chain – with patients, partners, healthcare professionals, health agencies, insurers, researchers – basically any person or entity within the lifecycle.
The Salesforce platform, which includes a robust ecosystem of tools and products like Health Cloud, Marketing Cloud, MuleSoft, Einstein, Tableau, and Genie, provides the foundation for connecting and coordinating those different stakeholders in a seamless way to improve the metrics that matter most: quality of care, time to care, patient adherence, health outcomes, cost to serve, and so on.
This is especially important today because the world is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that placed significant strain on healthcare systems around the globe. Add to that ongoing economic uncertainty, sector staff shortages, and supply chain constraints and you can see that organizations really need to find ways to optimize processes and create a more efficient system for all. If Salesforce were used at scale, the impact would be truly unbelievable within the healthcare and life sciences industry.
How are healthcare and life sciences organizations using Salesforce today?
Right now, the biggest opportunity with respect to Salesforce within the healthcare and life sciences industry is optimization. This is true across many subsectors and verticals, including pharmaceutical, med-tech, healthcare providers, healthcare professionals, insurers, and health agencies. Many of these organizations have implemented tools within the Salesforce ecosystem and pay for licenses. Still, they may not use their investment to its fullest potential or integrate Salesforce data across the business.
For example, a pharmaceutical company may be using Salesforce to collect and process data from patient services, but they may not be taking the next step of mining that data to unlock insights that might influence program design, inform R&D, impact clinical decisions, or otherwise help the company achieve its goals. Another example would be around shifting to digital. Companies that want to enable an omnichannel strategy need a strong understanding of their stakeholders and insights about how to engage them, which can only be achieved through a robust CRM like Salesforce.
What’s important to remember is that as an engagement platform, Salesforce holds enormous potential, but the value is not straightforward. To realize the full potential of the Salesforce ecosystem, organizations need to unite stakeholders across the entire leadership team and define the processes that will allow them to constantly draw a return on their investment.
How does having a transformation partner like Globant help organizations address this issue of underuse and other challenges that organizations may face?
For life sciences organizations, part of the value of working with a transformation partner like Globant is that we can help them define and execute a Salesforce strategy that helps them draw value from the platform across the entire business. To do this successfully, you often need a partner that truly understands the complexities of the landscape, the nature of the business, and its aspirations for the future, and also has the digital and software development capabilities to convert those dreams into reality.
What sets Globant apart as a Salesforce transformation partner within the healthcare and life sciences industry, particularly?
First, Globant stands out as a transformation partner because of our deep expertise in both Salesforce and the healthcare and life sciences industry. We bring to every engagement a fundamental understanding of what Salesforce can do and the specific industry issues and challenges it can solve.
Second, Globant is a digitally native company. Our business was built on the digital engineering and software development capabilities needed for these transformation programs. It’s very much part of our DNA and the foundation of our business.
I also want to point out that when Globant talks about industry experience, we have a very high standard. The HLS team members at Globant often join our organization after spending 15-20 years working in the industry. They have built their careers inside HLS organizations – for pharmaceutical companies, health insurance providers, health systems, and biotech companies; we have on our team people who have worked as medical doctors, biomedical engineers, and healthcare informaticians, as well as experts who hold PhDs in biology, neuroscience or biophysics.
Living and breathing the complexity of the landscape brings a deep, authentic, and practical understanding of the challenges facing healthcare and life sciences organizations that cannot be gained from a traditional consultant team. We take great pride in this level of expertise; it makes a difference when interacting with clients and helping them solve their challenges.
What’s the future of Salesforce for healthcare and life sciences?
The Salesforce platform holds enormous potential, especially if companies can successfully integrate data from across the value chain – both pre-commercialization and post-commercialization – so that the business can produce more precise insights. For example, if Salesforce is used to track when and how a person takes a medication, that data is often used to understand patient adherence and safety. However, it can also be applied to the value chain to inform the R&D strategy.
That is the goal for many organizations using the Salesforce ecosystem, and it is a future that Globant is incredibly excited to help build.
What excites you about the work you and your team are doing with Salesforce and clients in this sector?
Salesforce is without question one of the top engagement platforms in the healthcare and life sciences space. Add to that Globant’s unique digital engineering and software development capabilities, and I believe – my team believes – that we can reinvent the healthcare and life sciences industries. Our goal, every day, is to help our clients tackle the issues that are going to improve the health system overall and make a real difference in the lives of patients.
Ready to reinvent your organization? Contact us to schedule a consultation to learn more about how Globant can help your business use Salesforce to its fullest potential.
