A recent pharmaphorum webinar examined the ways that health technology can be used to develop public utility projects and enhance healthcare communications, and how the current health emergency has made the pharmaceutical industry’s ongoing need for digital transformation even more pressing.

The 10 years in 10 days: the new global digital health paradigm in life sciences webinar, held in association with Healthware Group, also proposed a response model for COVID-19 and addressed the deep transformation of marketing, customer engagement and adaptation of business processes.

Opening the webinar, Healthware’s CEO Roberto Ascione noted:

Digital transformation in the COVID-19 age is a disruptor for our industry. Of course, this has been first and foremost a human crisis, but the word ‘crisis’ comes from the ancient Greek meaning ‘change’, and there are also opportunities that we can catch.

Read the full article published by pharmaphorum on their latest Deep Dive magazine at deep-dive.pharmaphorum.com

One of the biggest challenges in transforming a company is to keep a workforce up to date with the current skills needed to be part of this change.

To achieve a true digital transformation, you need a team of passionate, curious and mission-motivated people. It is important to understand that an organization, in addition to a clear strategy on technology, needs a strategy for people. Transformation can be significantly disruptive for customers, employees and end users alike. Beware the impact of change or your initiative may suffer consequences.

A possible way is to embrace the Agile methodology. This helps the whole team not only to think for successive evolutions (sprint cycles) but also to create a culture of learning based on feedback.

The Agile methodology aims at opposing the waterfall logic, i.e. the linear processes, with the introduction of small teams called “scrums” that work on different processes with a duration of two or more weeks called “sprints” which allow to evaluate and continuously reassess the status of the project and the direction itself.
At the end of each new evolution is important to analyse what went well and what didn’t. This phase in Agile methodology is called Retrospective.

Promote collaboration between teams

Often, an organization drops technology on an employee’s lap without helping them understand utilization and incentivization patterns. That leads to resentment, and ultimately, the technology doesn’t get used.
While technology teams are focused on specific areas and trends is necessary to create more transversal teams that can discuss innovation and represent all areas of the company in order to foster greater collaboration. For example, development teams in the technology area can focus on how to adopt an agile approach to different projects and how to use continuous delivery on all products. Finally, share best practices and involve IT activities (DevOps).

All areas can contribute to the innovation of internal processes and how they interact outside the company. For example, in digital transformation, the area of technology is more and more at the centre of business dynamics than in the past.

Adopt a startup mentality

Transforming people is not for faint-hearted managers. You have to be able to break the moulds and keep the bar straight. The path will be neither simple nor lined up.
A startup mentality helps to break the moulds and encourages collaboration between teams by creating working groups that work closely together.
Once these hurdles are overcome, everything can scale and grow globally and be able to make decisions quickly with the consciousness that all areas of the company can follow and change quickly if necessary.

As part of the Frontiers agenda I was invited to run a live (and now on-demand) video roundtable with Oliver Stohlmann from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer’s John Gordon, Sammeli Liikkanen from Orion Corporation and AstraZeneca’s Roeland van der Heiden.

These heads of innovation, communication and digital strategy formed an expert panel to explore how digital is impacting pharma, covering both the digital customer/consumer and the digitalisation of the product.

‘Digital’ is, of course, very broad in healthcare and can be applied in communications, new ways of diagnosing, patient engagement, technological interventions and many more areas. We started out looking at the way that pharma uses digital to communicate.

Oliver Stohlmann, global head of external innovation communication at Johnson & Johnson, began the session by noting the transition he’s seen in the industry’s use of digital:

Very early on in my career, working as an agency consultant, I remember making the case to big pharma clients for investing in the web when it first emerged, only to hear that a wait-and-see approach was being preferred, since many weren’t sure about this novel phenomenon called a web site!

“Fast-forward to today and communications are much more integrated and digitally-enabled. We have realised in many industries that the way to keep people engaged is to create experiences, dialogue and tell stories”.

It’s an area where some feel our industry still needs to catch up.

Roeland van der Heiden, digital director of corporate affairs at AstraZeneca, said:

The development of new communications platforms is as important for pharma as for society in general, but the industry has lagged behind in its use of them to date.

Read the full post on Paul Tunnah’s LinkedIn Pulse

It is now a 500-people capped event, split in equal parts between start-ups, industry (pharma, devices, insurance, tech) and investors together with the top ecosystem activators.

As a platform event, many of the global key players, including Digital Therapeutics Alliance or HealthXL, are official partners hosting breakout sessions, which is allowing for a unique deep dive into the digital health scene in just two days.

Combining the iconic Startup Discovery sessions featuring 20 hand-picked companies, the Health Transformers Showcase by StartUp Health, the Bayer G4A cohort showcase together with the presence of the 2018 batches from all the top acceleration/incubation programs including Startupbootcamp and Vertical, Frontiers Health will be home to more than 100 start-up companies to meet alongside game changing, fast growing, companies like Proteus Digital Health, Voluntis, Your.MD, Headspace, Akili, mySugr and Tunstall to name a few.

Innovative panels such as Digital Health: opportunities for large investors, Digital Health for the Developing World, or The future of pharma in a digital world will uncover all new angles of the growing digital health ecosystem.

As in the past years, Frontiers Health will offer plenty of opportunities to learn and experience innovation first hand through workshops and masterclasses such as: Disruptive digital business models for the health insurance industry, Explainable AI and Autonomous Agents in healthcare and Blockchains, between hype and promising applications .

Roberto Ascione, CEO at Healthware Group and Chairman of Frontiers Health, says:

Frontiers Health became a true platform for the digital health innovation ecosystem to thrive. It’s a unique global gathering of people driving the digital transformation of health and fostering collaborations and convergence between industry players in pharma, consumer health, device, insurance and innovative start-ups.

About Frontiers Health 
It is a spin-off event of Frontiers Conferences, which designs and produces international conferences about technology and innovation since 2005. Frontiers Health is one of the leading conferences in the digital health space, combining a unique mix of attendees from investment funds, life science companies, health innovation hubs, insurance companies and start-ups, providing for a unique platform to discuss how innovations in their respective fields are converging to transform healthcare. More at http://www.frontiershealth.co.

What is SandozHACk?

As a company, we are really focused on finding novel approaches to help people access high quality medicines around the world. That is the way we that we support people around the world, particularly those in under-served communities. We absolutely understand that there are healthcare challenges around the world, but we do not always know what all of the challenges are or where they are.

Since we don’t always have all the answers, we decided that we wanted to support people in their own countries and communities – on their own streets – who could spot the healthcare challenges around them. They are really at the grassroots of knowing what the problem is and having ideas about how to solve it.

To link into that agenda we decided to run a challenge called SantozHACk to find new ideas to improve healthcare access at the grassroots level. HAC stand for “Healthcare Access Challenge”, while hack is a way of tackling a problem and finding a solution.

We launched the competition back in September 2016 via social media – mainly through Facebook. We asked people if they had spotted a healthcare access challenge in their local community and whether they had an idea or solution to solve that problem through mobile or digital health.

The essence of the hack was that the solution should be an application, or something else where mobile technology could help solve their healthcare access challenge. But in turn, their solution should then increase access to medicine for patients, improve clinical information or improve the smooth running of their country’s healthcare system.

That explains why it is part of corporate responsibility and not in the digital innovation business line.

Yes. We are not looking for ideas that Sandoz can take on. This is a about backing other people’s ideas and supporting people who can help us to reach patients who struggle to receive healthcare.

Is the competition just for ideas?

The competition was open for about eight weeks and by December we had received 150 ideas from over 30 countries. It was great – we had a lot of lovely ideas that came through. We then judged those entries against the criteria for the competition and shortlisted six finalists who we helped to take their idea and share it with a broader community of people.

We partnered with an organisation called OpenIDEO, which is an online global community of thinkers who are trying to improve the situations around the world and tackle global challenges. Then, in March, we invited the finalists to London, to an event where they had access to a network of experts, people ranging from Novartis and Sandoz to people from a broader industry who could get them help and support. Over three days in London we helped them refine their ideas and at the end of the three days we took the ideas to the Wired Health conference. The six finalists pitched their ideas to a panel of judges at Wired Health, who put them through more questioning and found out how their idea would work out in practice. The judges then selected three overall winners, who received 20,000 euros each and additional support from the company.

The three winners were from Ghana, Maldives and Philippines.

What has happened to the teams since March? Are their products on the market?

They are not on the market yet. SandozHACk is very much about helping people who have got a kernel of an idea. These are people who have a great idea, but don’t know where to go with it. When we got to them they were very much in the early stages. Our funding wouldn’t help them get things to market, but would help to get things kick-started.

I didn’t think the winning ideas looked like world-changing, out of the box startup ideas…

We were looking for relatively small, local ideas that had the ability to make impactful difference to people’s lives at the local level, so that probably framed the nature of the ideas that came through.
We were not looking for the next massive innovation. For example, the idea from the Philippines is a CPR application. Being able to deliver CPR is a mandatory requirement in the Philippines. It is very difficult for the emergency services to reach patients quickly because of the diverse nature of the geography of the country, so people need to have CPR training and know how to react. A simple phone application will help the person on the street to deliver easy, life-saving treatment at the touch of a button. While this might not be as cutting edge as some of the other ideas we are seeing on the market today, it is a very local, small idea, that could be implemented easily and really make an impact in people’s lives.

Local ideas can be kick-started with 20,000 – you cannot build a world-changing startup in London with that money.

Money was one part of it, but we were very committed to giving young people access to ongoing support, expertise and access to a community of people too, not just money. Since we met in London, we now have a Facebook community. That’s where the discussion happens, talking about how we can collectively make a contribution to increase access to medicine and give young people access to a wider network of people who can help bring their ideas to life.

How do you measure the first results from this?

We are in the process of looking at that. Obviously we needed to give the winners time to gather their thoughts, but we needed to pay them the money and get all the administration out of the way early on. Now is when we are starting to go back and check in on their progress.

This is a priority for us, because as a company this is not just about passing over money and leaving people to it. It is about ongoing support, helping them when they need it and providing access to a broader community. That is where Frontiers Health comes in. We will be speaking to a few hundred people who we would like to invite to join our Facebook community. People who will hopefully be able to help the winners advance their ideas.

SandozHACk is not an isolated programme in the company. It is part of a much bigger commitment and investment in digital, which is a big priority for Sandoz and, going forward, to Novartis. So this links into the priorities of our business and where we see things moving forward.

What is next for SandozHACk? Another round in 2018?

For sure! We are still planning how we will launch it, but I would say another SandozHACk will launch in early 2018. We are looking at new ways to evolve the programme: in the first one we learned what worked well and where we can make enhancements and improvements. We are looking to bring in more support – face-to-face opportunities that will really help our investment, the ideas and the eventual finalists. For example, we hope to integrate hosting a bootcamp, which is not something we did the first time. Right now though, we are looking at what the challenge will be that we set. It will be about Digital Health though – I know that for sure.