Bharat welcome to PharmaCommsTV, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.
You were speaking on a panel at the eyeforpharma conference and I want
to just talk a little bit more around that. So can you expand more on the panel
discussion and the growing importance of exponential collaboration.
- Collaboration is a very essential part of Pharma whether you consider external
collaborations or internal collaboration. Internal is very clear because of
the speed of innovation, teams inside the company need to work better together in
a more transparent way and share information. Very difficult to do that
because companies need to recognize collaboration and reward it
appropriately for teams then to share or individuals to share information with
each other as I said very much needed. When I move to the external
collaboration there the reason that it is growing is the fact that drug
development is very complex, very expensive, so at some stage, you want to
collaborate with others to share risk, reduce cost, to get access to different
IP's to get access to different sources of capital or basically to strengthen a
certain area of weakness so collaboration is there to say;
"stay and it will increase even more".
- Can you discuss the importance of patient centricity and working with partners to maximize patient value?
In the end, the patient-centricity should result in solutions with how patients achieve
their goal. Now even if you have the solutions you want to make sure that you
bring these solutions with the best individual experience to those patients
otherwise they won't take it and if you don't take your drug, it doesn't work.
Right and then thirdly you have to make sure that for those from whom the
medicine is meant. That they get access to it right so first the solutions to
help achieve their goal the best individual experience
and then access. Those are actually three pillars of what patient-centricity truly
would mean to help a patient. Now for some of these pillars you would need to
partner, you we need to collaborate to find out what it is that patients value
when I say to help patient achieve their goal then you have to know what those
goals are. You need to get insights and their needs, you need many times new
technology tools and to get access to new technology tools like for instance
artificial intelligence you many times work with partners to bring the solution
with the best individual experience to the patient many times you need partners
to figure out with appropriate channels to use because not every
patient wants a specific channel. Everybody has their individual tastes in
this case and here is another example where you need partnership.
- What new platforms do you see being used effectively now?
Augment reality, virtual reality, AI, that sort of thing?
You see AI being used now to gain insight. We have just published a study where we instead of doing
market research to find out what are the needs of patients we used artificial intelligence to
listen to half a million patients across ten diseases and then found out using
their lens what it is that they need so that's the use of AI you see you see
virtual reality being used today too in marketing for branding purposes right
because it has a certain wow factor it has staying power from a
creating a memorable experience point of view. It is being used to actually
create an experience about, with a product or a service while you're not
even there or is being used for training. So that is where virtual reality is used.
Augmented reality is being used today in a sales call to show for instance the
mechanism of action or it is even used now to improve patient outcomes you see
that in certain cases during operations surgeons actually superimpose the
augmented reality on the area that they are going to operate upon to then figure
out exactly what they need to do. So that will help with patient outcomes
of course right. Yes, those are a few examples how these new technologies are being used.