In an increasingly digital world, healthcare is witnessing a transformation in the way businesses operate. Digital channels are becoming the preferred means for managing health and wellness. But despite the evident potential, pharma companies are not yet fully grasping the value of digital channels. This has resulted in missed opportunities to engage with patients and healthcare professionals.
A survey conducted by DT Consulting, involving 32 digital leaders from prominent pharma companies, including AbbVie, Astellas Pharma, AstraZeneca, and Bayer, revealed that the most significant barriers to achieving digital excellence are not related to capability-building but rather to navigating cultural complexities and charting a clear path towards the digital vision.
The road towards digital maturity in the healthcare industry is lined with obstacles, such as defining and executing a clear digital strategy, changing organizational culture, and garnering departmental support. Half of digital leaders face resistance from their company's internal culture, making it difficult to embrace digital capabilities and drive a mindset change among marketers. Moreover, companies without a clear digital mission often struggle to prioritize digital programs, leading to disjointed paths.
As these hurdles present themselves, the critical question arises: how can healthcare companies manoeuvre past these roadblocks and reach their full digital potential? Let us discuss:
✔ Ensure a customer-centric approach: Pharma companies must adopt a deep understanding of the patient and provider journeys, which can lead to improved care outcomes. The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson serves as an example with its Invokana campaign, which achieved high engagement among Hispanic patients by carefully studying the cultural nuances and building tailored marketing strategies.
✔ Prioritize digital engagement: Understand how patients and physicians prefer to engage and design digital initiatives that fit these preferences.
✔ Build stakeholder alignment: Organize offsite workshops to align senior executives on digital and data priorities, ensuring continued support and accountability at the leadership level.
✔ Invest in data capabilities: Collect and analyze data to gain insights into patient and provider preferences and behaviours, allowing healthcare companies to make informed decisions.
As the healthcare industry continues to evolve at a rapid pace, the winners of tomorrow are not necessarily the strongest today, but the ones that can swiftly adapt and embrace digitization. Agile structures, processes, and forward-thinking mindsets will become the key differentiators in a fluid healthcare landscape.
#DigitalHealth #MedicalTechnology #PatientEngagement #Lifesciences
Senior Researcher @ Health Research Foundation | Ph.D., Analytical Chemistry
2moWe are not robots. We cannot digitalize our living organisms. We have to consider analog movements. Present clinical tests are far from perfect for digitalizing human health conditions. We have to develop more specified analytical tests to reflect personal health conditions.