A good friend of mine, a physician, once told me “healthcare would be great if it weren’t for the patients.” She’s an interesting physician, well respected in her field, caring, compassionate, and clinically brilliant. There’s a reality, however, that as we go from bench to in vivo trials to full-scale clinical distribution, outcomes are increasingly a confusing function of multiple factors, including the foremost mysterious and confusing of all . . . people! What my friend meant was that within the translation from clinical research to clinical practice, to reliably produce the simplest outcomes, we'd like a way more expansive view of what constitutes “best care,” during a way that accommodates environment, social support, behavior, habits, and therefore the myriad factors that influence the effectiveness of a specific course of treatment.
As I write this text, I'm sitting on a terrace in Cambridge, overlooking the Charles. Google is three blocks away. Pivotal is six blocks away. And almost every major drug company within the world features a major commercial center or technology outpost, either right here or within a 30-minute drive. Why?
I would argue that our focus has shifted from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Genomics and advanced diagnostic technologies have enabled personalized medicine that gives the proper treatment to the proper patient at the proper time. Yet, there's still an immense opportunity for transparent communication with patients to enable holistic treatment approaches. Patient support and engagement models create avenues for a quantum jump in treatment effectiveness for therapies.
We expect to ascertain a fundamental shift in our relationship with clinicians, patients, and insurers, during which the main target shifts from the molecule and its performance in research to the entire patient care solution and its performance in practice.
What drives this shift in thinking, and enables us to approach our partners, patients, and customers during a new way is that the innovation that you simply, because the healthcare informatics community, have engaged in and driven, dating back to Larry Weed and Clem McDonald. Using the facility of the pc to store, organize, retrieve, connect, mine, interpret, and predict, alongside the facility of the network to transmit, and innovations in devices and mobile communications to watch and have interaction, you've got created the knowledge environment for vastly improved patient monitoring and support.
How can we truly get organized around and more fully support the patients’ needs, and what role can pharma play therein support model? the primary and most blatant opportunity is with smart devices and technology for drug delivery, both for orals and injectables. Whether it’s process and technology in supply chain and tracking, technology-enabled packaging, automation in drug injection, or tracking at disposal, clinicians want to understand their patients are receiving the proper drug at the proper time within the right dose. This has been through with closed-loop order management, dispensing, and administration in inpatient and clinic settings, and that we can help in home-based administration and tracking.
The second opportunity is through digitally-enhanced patient support programs: extending our patient programs to capture and present information when and the way it’s most convenient to the patient. At now, it’s a foregone conclusion to mention this suggests engaging patients online and on mobile. We are providing services that fill within the gaps between clinical encounters, and to be truly meaningful, we'd like to be more flexible in how we offer those services.
Lastly, we'd like to urge connected. Everyone wants to interact with patients, and everybody is happy to return up with one more reason why the physician and patient care team must use another system or capture another data-set or provide another report or track another set of indicators. We are deliberately killing our physicians with administrative, data, and technology overload. Usually, our insistence on data interoperability actually means “create a billboard opportunity on behalf of me, a technology vendor.” What we actually got to do is be working to compile patient monitoring/device technologies, care and treatment systems, data exchanges, and patient support programs to simplify the trouble of the care team, and therefore the patient, to make sure that the treatment plan has the simplest opportunity for fulfillment.
