Since its beginning, the pandemic has had a huge impact in the way companies in the Life Science and Healthcare industries operate. There is an increased need to reorganize in order to cope with a faster time to market and the personalized products and services needed for customers. To be able to address present and future market demands, the following five areas should be key focus points as we kick off 2022.
1. Processes streamlining
Life Science companies need to revise and enhance their processes to deliver the right products and services to their clients at the right time, so reviewing current processes, solving current issues, and finding new ways to managetheir business is extremely important in a context with highly complex processes and regulatory requirements.
Process mining platforms, such as our Navigate solution, combine different technologies including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Advanced Analytics, and Data Science, which allow us to streamline processes and enhance decision making.
The creation of “digital twins” of organizations enables businesses to obtain real-time insights on processes, deviations, performance, throughput, and compliance.
2. Cloud adoption and migration to cloud-based solutions
The Covid-19 pandemic was an unprecedented situation that required the industry to implement product developments such as new vaccines and new processes and services at a faster rate to cope with global demands.
As an example, traditional clinical trial processes were severely impacted when participants could not physically attend at the selected locations. Remote clinical trials had to be rapidly implemented to continue vaccine development processes. This also required collaboration between different organizations to complement their product and procedures across large ecosystems.
Collaboration and communication between organizations can be greatly enhanced through the implementation of cloud-based solutions. Though this initially was a concern for the industry because of the perceived risks, currently, cloud adoption and the implementation of cloud-based solutions are a necessary enabler for the industry.
3. RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
The healthcare industry operates under strict regulations and requirements from government organizations such as the FDA and equivalents. RPA is increasingly gaining its place in these industries due to its potential to improve end-to-end processes. RPA brings benefits such as business process automation and reduced processing times and costs related to many areas, such as: GxP practices, Good Manufacturing, Laboratories, and Clinical Practices, finance (i.e: automatic invoice vs. purchase orders processing), official records maintenance, compliance, data validation processes, clinical trial data processing, and medical image processing such as x-rays interpretation.
4. Personalized products, services, and solutions
The pandemic also dramatically changed the way patients normally interact with practitioners and health providers’ institutions. The physical attendance previously considered usual changed to virtual doctor-patient contact as dictated by lockdown conditions and was a frequent choice selected by patients.
As a more health-conscious mindset is being developed where we as patients are participating more in health-related actions, we feel more confident with new interactive care applications which require the development of custom solutions and applications oriented to remote prognosis and treatments, customized medicines, and healthcare procedures.
Great advancements in healthcare will be provided by IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) initiatives. Caring for elders will be improved sensibly through remote monitoring systems, sensors, and wearables that can immediately notify healthcare providers and family members of emergencies. It is expected that new interconnected IoMT devices and applications will bring more value in 2022.
Together with devices and applications, medical data generation, collection, transmission and analysis is what really allows an ecosystem to provide personalized care services.
5. Data management and governance
These industries gather and handle huge amounts of data, whether for medical trials, drugs research and manufacturing, or patient health records, among others.
Combined with cloud integration, data management and governance provides the information to prescribe medicines with more precision, to predict possible responses from patients to treatments, to develop new treatments, and to reduce the time to market for new products and services.
Conclusion
As a final thought, the increased adoption and convergence of new technologies, government agencies such as the FDA fostering new digital solutions, a rise in global population demands, and the Covid-19 pandemic being far from over are all creating a palpable need for Life Sciences and Healthcare organizations to continue investing in the development of breakthrough products and services in 2022.
