IMS Health Study: New Wave of Technology Drives Breakthrough Approaches in Life Sciences Commercial Operations
Cloud-Based Applications, Embedded Analytics and Integrated Systems Focused on Lowering Pharma and Payer Costs, Improving Patient Outcomes
PARSIPPANY, NJ, March 12, 2014 – Life sciences companies are aggressively embracing new technology-driven approaches to commercialize their products and reduce operating costs, according to a new report issued today by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The current technology wave in life sciences – including cloud-based business intelligence applications and storage, embedded analytics and systems integration – has the potential to drive transformational change over the next three years in overall healthcare system efficiency and the effectiveness of treatments. The availability and adoption of secure, healthcare-specific tools and services are key to accelerating that opportunity and deriving greater value from new, expanded sources of health information to optimize patient outcomes.
The study – Riding the Information Technology Wave in Life Sciences: Priorities, Pitfalls and Promise – found that life sciences companies are aggressively shifting their technology-based approaches to align cross-functional activities, optimize their organizations and improve the effectiveness and agility of commercial teams. In addition, new investment is being focused on enabling greater patient engagement.
The report cites findings from an IMS Institute survey of decision makers in IT, marketing, sales, operations and management from 70 life sciences organizations who were asked about their current and planned use of new IT solutions. Overall, respondents expect continued cost reductions across the industry, and 40 percent pointed to planned cuts of more than 10 percent in their organizations during the next three years. In addition, 74 percent of survey participants are looking to derive greater value from the influx of healthcare information that includes anonymized Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and other real-world data. New investments in a range of commercial operations applications, such as customer relationship management, social media or integrated multi-channel marketing solutions, were cited by more than 70 percent of respondents as a priority. "Realizing the full benefit from new technologies will be a high priority for all life sciences companies as commercialization approaches are revised amid changing customer demands and a growing need for efficiency," said Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. "Applications that are healthcare-specific, cloud-based, integrated, secure and analytically powerful will yield tremendous advantage to these organizations, and ultimately to patients and the health system overall."
The report's key findings include the following:
• The largest global pharmaceutical companies will need to reduce combined operating costs by $36 billion annually through 2017 to maintain their operating margins and current levels of R&D activities. Pressure on operating margins is expected to grow as companies face rising costs at the same time drug prices are being constrained or reduced. With an estimated R&D cost inflation rate of 5 percent annually, organizations will need to reduce other operating costs to maintain margins. While the source of cost cutting will vary by company, a primary focus likely will be on sales, marketing and administration costs, which amount to nearly 30 percent of net sales. Of those surveyed by the IMS Institute, 87 percent indicated that their commercial organizations are being optimized through a range of approaches, including selective insourcing and outsourcing, resource shifting and implementation of previously unavailable technology-based solutions.
• Companies see interoperability of technology systems as an urgent and critical need. As technology systems and applications within life sciences companies have proliferated during the past decade, they often have remained siloed and inefficient. Integrated systems, cited by 85 percent of survey respondents as a need for optimizing their commercial organizations, are increasingly viewed as a means to improve workflow speed, eliminate conflicting data interpretations across departments, and reduce the cost of vendor teams managing manual data handoffs. Life sciences organizations are seeking pre-built, cloud-based application suites as a means to achieve these enterprise-wide system efficiencies.
• Life sciences companies are shifting their primary data storage to the cloud, and investing in new sales and marketing-related applications. Due to the sensitive nature of healthcare data, the adoption of remote, cloud-based technologies by life sciences companies has been slow compared to other industries. Organizations are embracing efforts by cloud providers to accelerate progress in establishing and maintaining secure and compliant environments for the collection and storage of health information. Seventy percent of participants expressed a need to utilize third-party, cloud-based applications.
• Technology is enabling the healthcare industry to derive greater value from Big Data. Large, connected anonymized patient datasets are already accessible for analysis in some countries with national health systems; in other countries, the pooling of EMR, claims and other data sets will be essential to creating repositories representative of patient populations. In the U.S., some hospital systems are collaborating to pool data for analysis, with the aim of refining treatment algorithms to achieve the best possible patient outcomes. The ability of life sciences companies to benefit from these data sources currently is limited due to the lack of consistent formats and privacy standards among cloud-based service providers. Progress is being made to facilitate access to shared repositories in the cloud that can be used by multiple stakeholders to examine the burden of illness and understand the value of medicines.
• Analytic systems designed to interpret and create actionable insights have not kept pace with the abundant and growing amounts of data generated or accessed by life sciences companies. As competition among life sciences companies intensifies, and the mix of new medicines skews toward those with relatively small target patient populations, analytic systems that help bring medicines to the right patients and their physicians are essential. Implementation of these systems accelerates the improvement of health outcomes while also bringing more efficiency to the entire health system. Querying large, observational data sets, however, requires clinical expertise that is often highly specialized. Cloud applications that translate complex disease measures into pre-built definitions enable non-expert users to derive greater insights.
• New mobile applications for both patients and physicians are seen as increasingly important for strengthening healthcare engagement. As life sciences companies focus on innovative ways to bring value and services to their customers, mobile applications are likely to play a greater role in keeping patients more engaged in their own healthcare, facilitating communication between patients and healthcare professionals, and delivering targeted, helpful information to physicians and payers. Nearly 60 percent of survey respondents rated patient apps as extremely or very important to address commercial challenges, while 69 percent similarly rated investments in physician apps. Currently, apps for physicians and other healthcare providers can offer drug-agnostic disease education and training to help guide decision making, as well as dosing calculators and web-based access to information about specific drugs. The full version of the report, including a detailed description of the methodology, is available at www.theimsinstitute.org. It can also be downloaded as an app via iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/app/ims-institute/id625347542.The study was produced independently as a public service, without industry or government funding.
About the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics
The IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics provides key policy setters and decision makers in the global health sector with unique and transformational insights into healthcare dynamics derived from granular analysis of information. It is a research-driven entity with a worldwide reach that collaborates with external healthcare experts from across academia and the public and private sectors to objectively apply IMS Health's proprietary global information and analytical assets. More information about the IMS Institute can be found at: http://www.theimsinstitute.org.
About IMS Health
IMS Health is a leading global information and technology services company providing clients in the healthcare industry with comprehensive solutions to measure and improve their performance. By applying sophisticated analytics and proprietary application suites hosted on the IMS One intelligent cloud, the company connects more than 10 petabytes of complex healthcare data on diseases, treatments, costs and outcomes to help its clients run their operations more efficiently. Drawing on information from 100,000 suppliers, and on insights from more than 45 billion healthcare transactions processed annually, IMS Health's 9,500 professionals drive results for over 5,000 healthcare clients globally. Customers include pharmaceutical, consumer health and medical device manufacturers and distributors, providers, payers, government agencies, policymakers, researchers and the financial community.
As a global leader in protecting individual patient privacy, IMS Health uses anonymous healthcare data to deliver critical,real-world disease and treatment insights. These insights help biotech and pharmaceutical companies, medical researchers, government agencies, payers and other healthcare stakeholders to identify unmet treatment needs and understand the effectiveness and value of pharmaceutical products in improving overall health outcomes.
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IMS Health
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