New Technology, New Medicine: Digital Pharma

The pharmaceutical industry is entering a new era alongside the medical industry, a new era defined by technological advancement and digitalization. Changes prompted by our digital world have impacted the pharmaceutical industry in positive and negative ways, but this new era (widely referred to as “digital pharma”) is undoubtedly helpful for consumers and patients. Consumers can communicate more efficiently with companies and doctors through technology, and the companies are forced to be more transparent and upfront with their customers. Drug development is booming with the advancements being made in AI technology. Overall, digital pharma is a phenomenon in its early stages of growth, but it’s important to get familiar with the changes because they are happening more quickly than expected and they are our future.

 

Customer Communication

In a time when anyone can post online about their experiences, when everyone is encouraged to write reviews for everything from products to services, and when crowd-sourcing is a popular means of getting information on a wide range of topics, it is not surprising that pharmaceutical companies must work harder to please their customers. Instead of being in complete control of the information published on their products’ effectiveness, pharmaceutical companies have no control over what is published online in regards to their products. For example, many online patient communities enable patients to discuss the effectiveness of various pharmaceutical products and treatment options candidly, with no restrictions placed on what they can publish. This serves as a check for pharmaceutical companies and empowers patients to receive the most accurate information possible.

 

Apps and Wearables

Patients are empowered in another way with digital pharma; they have their own tools to monitor their own health without needing to see a doctor all the time. First, there is a large variety of health apps, all created to help people analyze their own health without professional help. Some apps, like MyFitnessPal and Nudge, are designed to help people to eat and exercise more healthily, as a type of preventative medicine. Other apps, like Apple Health and Google Fit, are focused on monitoring vitals like heart rate and sleep, but they also provide resources related to exercise and physical activity. These apps are not designed to directly change behaviors, but they do give people the power to monitor their own health from a subjective standpoint.

 

Digital pharma would not have come this far without the use of wearable technology like Apple Watches and Fitbits. This type of computer-mediated advising can be very helpful for consumers, but also for pharmaceutical companies and clinical trials. Instead of providing extensive equipment or requiring patients to visit daily for their vital signs to be monitored, scientists can access far more data about their patients without them leaving home. This has direct applications to drug development, as well, because more information provided to researchers usually translates to safer, better-designed products.

 

Drug Discovery and Development Technology

In addition to the influx of data provided to researchers from new technology, there are also new ways to analyze the data in a more efficient and useful way. Data visualization is one way to make data more accessible, as it serves as a translation between numbers and outcomes for people who find themselves too often stuck in numerical interpretations. There are three broad ways data analytics are used by pharmaceutical companies:

1. Descriptive analytics: Includes data such as cost, quality, and even bioinformatic data. These analytics are mostly first-level data points on the feasibility of plans and their impact on consumers overall; they are based on current plans, not future plans.
2. Predictive analytics: Projected analytics of future plans based on current ones. These involve using descriptive analytics (as close to real-time as possible) to predict the outcomes of future plans in order to enable better decision-making.
3. Prescriptive analytics: Offering insights and proposing adjustments to current plans by taking descriptive and predictive analytics and analyzing what is being wasted or what could be avoided. This type of analysis is essentially the highest level possible, and it is made more possible and more useful with AI and other new technologies that can more easily understand where processes may not be optimized.

Data visualization makes these analytics more useful for companies when making decisions, and it also is more easily understandable by the general public.

 

Returning to the concept of AI (artificial intelligence), this new technology is being developed so rapidly that it is already being used by pharmaceutical companies in drug discovery as well as the analytic process analysis described above. Some AI platforms are able to combine overwhelming amounts of data to create conclusions, and they learn from each new sample they test. This helps in drug discovery, as the machine begins to learn the nature of the disease and how it is molecularly displayed. Other types of AI are used to classify genes and connect them to molecular outcomes, like specific proteins and functions. This type of analysis would take humans an exorbitant amount of time to complete, but an AI system can complete and organize the information much more quickly. Finally, AI can be used in personalized medicine, because an AI-driven system can connect specific patients’ metrics to the best possible treatments as long as it has enough data on the patients and the consequences of treatments. Obviously, this technology has yet to be fully developed and optimized, but it is one of the most exciting applications of digital pharma. Overall, digital pharma will change experiences for companies and patients alike, but I believe that the patient experience will certainly change for the better.