Digital Change in Life Sciences is inevitable. Those who are prepared, succeed!

Few things in life are certain other than death and taxes. However, in the digital age we all live in today, maybe the addition of ongoing IT change should be added to that list? In Life Sciences, IT innovation plays an ever increasingly crucial role in helping bring life changing and potentially life saving medications to market safely and faster than ever before. Covid-19 showed the entire world just how critical nimble, cloud-based IT systems were in researching and developing vaccines which only 15 years ago would have likely taken years, rather than months to demonstrate primary end point effectiveness.

Change is completely inevitable, especially in Life Sciences. The question is simply how fast and how innovate a company wishes to be, and how clear the alignment is between the corporate goals, business objectives and the IT infrastructure that will enable them to get there.
Technology is enabling life science companies to innovate faster and more effectively than ever before. Until recent times, a patient was only able to take part in a clinical study if they were able to access or travel to a testing facility. Over half the population of the world lack access to essential healthcare (1) but in many cases do have access to the internet. It’s a sad fact in 2024 that it’s estimated that billions of people in the world have a social media account but do not have access to essential medications and healthcare (2).

Advances in technology are transforming clinical trials, with digital trials reaching patients and intelligent trials utilizing real-world data, AI, and predictive algorithms. Data scientists leverage technology for fast, data-driven decisions, combining multiple sources to identify trends in drug adoption and effectiveness. Life Science companies must go beyond R&D and sales teams, prioritizing compliant and reliable IT systems to align with corporate objectives. However, challenges like company maturity and fear of change hinder many from adopting strategies that keep pace with tech innovation. Effective IT change management is crucial for agility, ensuring companies can swiftly adapt to IT and business changes, gaining a competitive edge in bringing products to market faster.

Digital Transformation in Life Sciences

It’s fair to say that it would be hard to find anybody working in the Life Science sector that isn’t familiar with the term digital transformation. There is increasing pressure on organisations to be ready to adapt and evolve in ways they can’t easily predict, requiring smart approaches to balance standardisation with agility and always with an eye on technological innovation and system harmonisation. Having a clear strategy on how a company will react to a required change, or a potential new system addition to the IT Infrastructure will enable them to embrace the change while also reaming clear on the overall corporate vision of strategic differentiation. On the contrary, a lack of strategy for digital transformation will invariably disassociate corporate objectives of speed, innovation and customer satisfaction from the ability to achieve them.
Many companies spend many thousands or even millions of dollars on IT systems which are wrong for their business or don’t fit into the overall corporate strategy, only to be replaced again at significant additional cost at a later point and achieving virtually no return on the investment. In many cases, this could have been completely avoided with the right governance in place during the planning and evaluation phase of the project.

Successful change management that embraces the ever-growing fluidity of digital transformation isn’t only about change to the systems. It’s ensuring that the systems you select can genuinely be viewed as an appreciating asset because they evolve and offer more ROI over time. They must be easily absorbed into the IT Landscape, be compliant with the relevant regulatory guidelines, and be harmonious with the corporate IT strategy.
IT strategy and conscious system/vendor choice are both fundamental, but the third and most important piece of the success continuum is the people that will be responsible for the execution. The team working on any IT project usually comprises of a mix of IT and Business stakeholders, an IT/software provider and sometimes an experienced technology partner.
Before any IT decision, the proposed project team will be responsible for working with IT to conduct an impact and risk assessment, align the business requirements with the IT strategy and put together a list of desired outcomes from the change together with a projected ROI from it. This will usually be presented to senior leadership for approval and an associated budget for the project. The project team can then advance to vendor assessment and selection.

This sounds a lot simpler on paper than it is in practice because there are a lot of factors to consider. For example, what impact will the change have on current infrastructure, what potential integrations will need to be updated to facilitate the change. Potential data migrations from current state to desired state and details such as expected user adoption and how the technology can be consumed in the conditions it will be used (manufacturing production environment for example, or even how the data will be accessed as part of a potentially larger digital asset management (DAM) strategy). On a more holistic scale, will this technology help in the mission to get life saving medications to market as safely, compliantly and as quickly as possible?
Like most things in life, experience is often the difference between success and failure. With the very best intentions, even excellent IT strategies and the most innovative technologies will only really be impactful if the people executing the projects have the experience and industry knowledge to successfully align all the moving variables that make up the desired outcome for all of the stakeholders involved.

How can Aqurance help?

For the past 12 years, Aqurance has been helping Life Science companies select, adopt and extract value from the leading platforms for research, capture, decision making and commercialisation of drug development. We are dedicated to Life Sciences exclusively and as a result, our team of consultants are constantly aligned with the ever-changing requirements in this sector.
We pride ourselves on our agile approach and commitment to customer success which compliments the technology partners that we support. Collectively, we’ve overseen hundreds of successful digital transformation projects across a variety of Life Science companies ranging from small Biotechs with limited resources to large Pharma with very complex IT landscapes who wish to take advantage of our experience to facilitate successful change.

Our values are based on accuracy, quality and speed and our mission is to exceed customer expectation in every project we work on. We have experts who can help through the planning stage (Phase zero), working with key stakeholders to clearly identify criteria for success, risk identification and mitigation as well as validation requirements.
We offer services to help manage the change management process including identification of working practices and standard operating procedures that will need to be revisited. We help customers align project goals with requirements and importantly, overarching governance to support ongoing success. If the project requires a migration plan and execution, then we have that covered with our experienced business analytics and data service teams.

If your company is considering a digital transformation project and could benefit from a partner with over 400 cumulative years of Life Science consulting experience, then Aqurance can help. We are fully accredited partners of Veeva and Salesforce and offer end-2-end services from pre technology adoption, implementation services and post go live consulting and customer success activities.

To learn more about how we can help in your specific project, please contact Jody Spooner our VP of Sales on : jody.spooner@aqurance.com

References:

1. https://www.philips.com/a-w/about/news/archive/features/2022/20221129-10-things-to-know-about-global-access-to-healthcare.html
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwide/#:~:text=Worldwide%20digital%20population%202023&text=As%20of%20October%202023%2C%20there,population%2C%20were%20social%20media%20users.