Agustin Lamas recently joined the Globant family. With an academic & experience background in marketing & finance, he has worked for the past 18 years with some of the most important pharmaceutical companies across the European Union, LatAm, Africa, and Asia.
His priorities throughout his career -on top of developing Business and Go to Market Models- have been improving access to medicine and treatment adherence, two major healthcare unmet needs. He is a firm believer in the significant impact of deeply understanding customer behavior and how innovative tech solutions can address the industry’s unmet needs and grant the capacity to build a better end-to-end journey. All of this will improve the experiences of patients, doctors, and, more importantly, people’s lives.
As Globant’s new Life Sciences Managing Director, he trusts in the power of reinvention:
“Life Sciences ecosystem must evolve, and we need to participate in that reinvention. A reinvention for Healthcare and Life Sciences which focuses on needs that might have been left aside in the past or have not been easily fulfilled.”
Lamas says reinvention is boosted by the need to accelerate drug discovery and assets time to market, data integration to improve clinical & financial decision-making processes across healthcare players, generate efficiencies in the ecosystem, and improve the end-to-end customer experience. People live longer, and despite the increasing healthier trends, we may face more diseases and difficulties in keeping up with the increasing health demands and budget management. Hence, there is a need to adjust customer behavior to make it more efficient and accessible and extend treatment adherence, one of the global healthcare issues to be addressed.
Through technology innovation and digital integration, the reinvention of Life Sciences will benefit everyone since it will maximize its potential for patients, Health Care Participants, payers, providers, and pharmaceutical and device companies. However, he confirms there are essential opportunities ahead; one of them is to seek industry reinvention using Technology and Data integration as the primary enablers:
“Technology and Life Sciences are now intertwined. Therefore, tech companies that understand life sciences will become the new player in the value chain as the ideal partner to propel and help reinvent this industry.”
According to Lamas, tech companies will apply their broad technical expertise toward industry reinvention through 5 main verticals of the ecosystem.
- Evolution of R&D & drug discovery platforms and precision medicine policies, through AI and predictive analytics, towards accelerating more personalized assets and their time to market.
- Decentralization of clinical trials, leveraged by its digitalization and a more democratic (and faster) population enrollment; all boosted by At Home Caring technology. Globant can leverage its data strategy, infrastructure, and architecture capabilities, AI/ML, blockchain, and IoT to help organizations develop innovative data and data platform solutions for DCTS.
- Enabling real health economics, value-based healthcare policies, and diseases management/Prevention through integrated data platforms that will support accurate decision-making processes across stakeholders
- Build up new standards for continuous scientific education, decentralized into best-in-class Omni-Channel platforms so that all players can be part of it and HCP & Patients, according to legislation, can have democratic and easy access to all the information.
- Evolve retail & institutional business channels, ensuring a better vertical integration to data, better supply chain & purchasing experience, and an adherence program that can help tackle disease management issues for chronic diseases.
These five verticals include emerging technologies. Lamas adds that some of the most significant development in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and Biotech in the past few years is related to the fields of Data Science, IoT, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, virtual reality, and big data.
For example, VR solutions allow physicians to virtually experience real-world scenarios with zero risks for actual patients. Lamas believes Artificial Intelligence will be one of the cornerstones of the future, helping from drug discovery to commercialization, using its predictive analytics to support decisions from early assets staged to value-based healthcare and anticipating decisions around clinical outcomes or business.
According to Lamas, the life sciences industry heads towards an automated value chain, where there will be less “push” to market and an increased decentralized decision-making process. Data integration and data-driven decisions will be the core of the ecosystem.
“I am personally passionate about access to medicine, ensuring that the 30-50% of the population with little or no access to medicine can fulfill their rights. With data and technology solutions, we will be part of the key enablers to reduce that population percentage as much as possible.”
Lamas is enthusiastic about his new journey at Globant, assuring Globant’s unique position, deep knowledge, and understanding of the life sciences industry and its challenges can shape its future and lead it towards reinvention.
