Why doesn’t success with digital flow in pharma?

Turning inwards to create impact with digital

The pharma digital community had a collective ‘heart sink’ this week with the news of another dismantled innovation unit and tech partnership. But we shouldn’t be surprised – there’s a growing sense in our industry that digital is just too risky. This isn’t true – but we do need a new approach – one that puts textbooks aside and focuses on experience.

Digital innovation in healthcare is hard – period. We operate in a complex environment, work within large, matrix organisations and have diverse stakeholder perspectives to manage. We need to recalibrate digital projects to avoid bottlenecks and the cycle of diminishing confidence that ensues.

Digital success can flow when pharma businesses prioritise getting internal digital readiness right and creating the environment for success to thrive. Here are a few learnings from our journey in breaking through internal bottlenecks:

1. Anticipate and act. Change management mantra has talked about ‘people, processes and technology’ for decades so it should come as no surprise that bottlenecks to digital success often reside in these domains. Examples may be a lack of alignment within cross-functional teams, decision making processes that aren’t relevant for digital or legacy technologies creating integration challenges. These issues are typical – so let’s anticipate them, mitigate them and create the course for digital to flow.
2. Make it real. Design ‘sprints’ often take too long and don’t get digital solutions into people’s hands fast enough – the consequence – design ‘decisions’ are a work of theory that get reversed later in the process. Resource is wasted, projects stall and stakeholders ‘fall off the bus’. Yet it’s completely understandable that the way people react to objects/services changes when they experience them – and that’s why rapid prototyping is so important for digital success to flow – it’s a critical internal requirement to get right.
3. Don’t ‘go to market’: go to people. Teams often talk about ‘go to market’ models for digital and this is important – understanding the regulatory, reimbursement and readiness for digital adoption in countries is foundational for digital strategy. But arguably it’s more important to understand colleagues in-market – confidence and capabilities for digital initiatives will, of course, vary – and the variation will come down to human rather than segmentation factors. We need to understand this and enable our colleagues to unblock digital innovation in-market.
4. Avoid the data drain. Digital and data go together so the potential for informed decision-making is huge, but so is the risk of analysis-paralysis. We need to create data strategies that work backwards from outcomes and prioritise data needs against the life cycle of digital innovation. Data should always power us forward rather than limit flow – so let’s develop evidence generation programmes that create the environment for digital success.

Recent news about digital in healthcare should encourage us to pause and reflect, but not stop. The potential of digital to help resolve the significant and growing challenges of healthcare delivery is real. But our industry will only make a meaningful contribution if we turn inwards to deliver external impact – and that’s what it will take for digital innovation to flow.

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