How technology is changing the pharmaceutical industry

Expectations are changing fast in the world of pharma. People don’t just want a consumer-like experience from retail or streaming services, they want fast access to personalised medical information from anywhere.

New innovations in the pharmaceutical industry are poised to transform a once-traditional sector to make it more efficient, and patient-centric, and drive next-generation personalised healthcare.

But we’re not there yet. All too often customers are frustrated by disconnected services, complex processes, and having to share the same information with a host of different agents before getting the support they need.

With Salesforce Hyperforce, that’s all set to change. Our Salesforce Customer 360 has the agility of the public cloud, yet data can be stored locally in line with regulations such as GDPR. This means biopharma, CROs, CDMOs, animal health, and nutraceutical companies can harness data to engage patients and clinicians in a more meaningful way and work towards a truly personalised healthcare experience.

This isn’t just better for patient outcomes, it is also a competitive advantage for pharma companies. Studies reveal that 48% of adults are either using or would like to use digital pharma assets, and 68% of physicians are more likely to prescribe a product with good patient support services.

Connecting the patient experience

Getting closer to patients at every step of their journey will allow pharmaceutical companies to enhance patient programmes. From intelligent document automation to appointment management and medicine review to health plan benefits, joined-up processes and smarter services can transform both the patient and clinician experience.

Salesforce Health Cloud​​ empowers the pharmaceutical industry by humanising the provider and patient experience through orchestrated, personalised engagement. This also helps to build trust, which is vital when it comes to patient adherence.

Salesforce supports and accelerates the end-to-end product lifecycle through data and process harmonisation, leveraging a secure, scalable, unified platform. And it reduces stakeholder burden, fostering collaboration between pharma companies, CROs, CMOs, payers, and providers. The result? A people-centric healthcare ecosystem for driving better patient outcomes at a lower cost.

Take the leading Swiss company, Novartis, for example. It slashed patient enrolment times by 27% and increased territorial reach by 10% after launching its Patient Engagement and Care Hub on the Salesforce platform. It also saved 87% on operational costs while enabling the team to set up new care plans three times faster – which is good news for the business and great news for patients.

Delivering personalised treatments

Salesforce understands that Patient Services Programs (PSPs) can provide the critical socioeconomic support needed throughout the patient journey, including financial support and community resources, especially for complex disease states. When it comes to complex therapies or medical technology that need more than taking “a pill a day” or a “quick reading”, such programs can reduce the time to onboard a patient to a new therapy, improve long-term adherence, and overall patient experience.

No two people have the same healthcare requirements, just as no two people will have the exact same response to a particular medicine, and the industry is moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach. But, delivering personalised medicines and therapies tailored to the individual can be extremely complex, involving multiple stakeholders.

The Personalised Medicines Innovator Programme feature in Health Cloud connects pharmaceutical companies with their customers to architect, accelerate, and de-risk how personalised therapies are delivered at scale. It combines patient-centric design methodology, best practices, and a unique collaboration of partners to speed up clinical and commercial launches for cell and gene therapies, for example.

This can transform how new treatments go to market, swapping silos for truly personalised treatment on a global scale.

Targeted therapy – medicines 2.0

According to Personalised Medicine 101 ‘Improving Patient Care in the 21st Century’, personalised medicines improve patient outcomes and the overall healthcare system efficiency. Just check out these stats:

• 2x increase in five-year survival rate for myelogenous leukaemia following the introduction of targeted therapy
• 30% decrease in hospitalisations for cardiac conditions when genetic information was used to determine the dose of warfarin
• 34% fewer patients needed chemotherapy for breast cancer when they received genetic testing before treatment
• €580 cost saving if metastatic colorectal cancer patients receive genetic testing before treatment

Supplier relationship management

As the world’s #1 CRM platform, decades of innovation and best practices have gone into our supplier relationship management solution for the pharmaceutical sector. In a nutshell, supplier relationship management is the systematic approach to the full lifecycle management of suppliers across the value chain.

Platform capabilities include awareness and onboarding, education and support, contract and compliance, and performance monitoring. These have been specifically tailored to address the challenges we see with legacy supplier and procurement systems, which often don’t communicate well, create silos, and cannot surface data at a holistic level.

Supplier360 provides a single source of truth and unified supplier profiles. It acts as a central hub of data from key systems to enhance visibility and collaboration, improve operational excellence, and reduce spend at scale.

• Increase in supplier satisfaction
• 15-40% higher supplier engagement
• 30% higher user productivity
• Shortens time to resolve vendor issues
• Accelerates time to value
• 25% higher developer productivity

The future of medical affairs call centres

In an ever-changing industry, it’s becoming difficult to build brand trust and awareness with healthcare professionals. They expect timely, accurate, and compliant responses to medical information requests, but the process is often slow and manual.

Up to 81% of physicians are dissatisfied with interactions over personalised content or communication channels, and 28% struggle to find the relevant content they need. Considering they spend an average of 1.5 hours per day conducting online research for medical information, there’s a significant opportunity for improvement.

With Salesforce, healthcare professionals can submit their requests to the medical information team on any channel. A case is automatically created and populated with the relevant information. It’s then routed to the right specialists for input and delivered as a comprehensive medical information response package back to the clinician on their preferred channel.

The response is stored for audit or reuse and is searchable. By elevating and personalising the experience for the clinician, they have everything they need at their fingertips to deliver better patient outcomes.

• 30% increase in healthcare practitioner satisfaction
• 29% decrease in case resolution time
• 32% first contact resolution
• 24% reduction in support costs