Vishal Pratap Singh | Sunday, 13 February 2022
Recently, pharmaceutical company Abbott said it has tied up with various health tech firms like BeatO, Sugar.fit, PharmaEasy, GOQii, 1MG and Zyla for diabetes care. The company said that it has also joined hands with Health, Healthifyme and Fitterfly under the initiative.
The aim of Abbott through these collaborations is to offer glucose monitoring solutions to 8 million people living with diabetes. Out of these 8 million, 6.5 million people can access through PharmaEasy and 1MG. According to reports, the global pharma revenue totalled $1.25 trillion in 2019 and is projected to rise upwards in the coming years.
“We are continuously striving to make disease management more effective and convenient for our members and this programme is a step in the same direction”, says Gautam Chopra, CEO and Co-founder, BeatO. It can be clearly seen that when technology is combined with science and human coaching, it can help millions of Indians manage and reverse diseases through a highly consumer centric data-driven digital health experience.
Growing Interest in the Healthcare Market
In the recent times, growing interest of many big technical firms in the healthcare sector has largely been seen to put it on a collision course with big pharma. Collaboration has widely been deemed a silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic. The growing culture of collaboration in healthcare is starting to lead to partnerships not only within life sciences but also with other sectors, such as technology.
Big tech companies’ growing interest in the lucrative healthcare market has largely led to them entering the pharma landscape. For instance, Amazon’s first foray into healthcare was its 2018 acquisition of PillPack. The e-commerce giant has now signalled its continued interest in the sector by launching Amazon Pharmacy at the end of 2020. Whereas Google has formed its own healthcare company, Verily, to focus on life science research across a range of indications, including COVID-19.
Increasing Number of Deals Signed
Both pharmaceutical industry and tech firms are increasingly realising these two sectors have more to gain from working together, than by competing. This has led to a flurry of deals being signed in the past few years between pharma companies and tech firms.
One recent example is Boehringer Ingelheim teaming up with Google to apply the tech giant’s quantum computing expertise to pharma research and development. Healthcare is considered as an extremely lucrative market. The industry is on a positive growth trajectory, which is likely to have been accelerated further by pharma industry coming to the world’s aid in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Technology Helps in Effective Care
The problems in healthcare are so large and complex that pharmaceutical companies need all the help it can get to address those issues. This is where the role of tech giants comes in. Technology can help streamline care and improve access to care. It can empower patients, caregivers and providers to get the right information at the right time and improve decision making, which leads to better outcomes.
Therefore, it makes sense that many big pharma companies are turning to technology to alleviate some of the challenges. Many big players in pharmaceutical industry were already evaluating partnership and collaboration with big technical companies. The pandemic has accelerated those plans and shown the value of technology to connect with patients and drive innovation in science. Big tech companies see collaboration as a way into the market that is dominating conversations.
Technology Eases Data Management
Another reason why pharmaceutical industry is so attractive to big tech firms is that there is a tonne of data associated with the sector. However, a lot of that valuable data is untapped and underutilised because it is in a variety of structures.
Technology enables data that was previously in siloed to be translated to insights that help in right disease. In addition, technology can help with data integration, normalisation, enrichment and management through leveraging tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Technology can reshape Healthcare Sector
New technologies can expedite drug discovery, optimise pharmaceutical functions and improve interactions with stakeholders. Pharmaceutical companies enabled by these technologies will outperform their competitors through increased speed to market, better margins, patient and key opinion leader relationships.
The ability to harness technology and accelerate innovation will become increasingly critical, as macro-economic and industry trends reshape the healthcare marketplace, creating new demands and pressures, as well as intensifying competition.
What can be Expected from the Future
The growing trend in establishment of productive partnerships between pharma companies and health tech firms can lead to new combination of products that move beyond the traditional drug forms in the coming years. Technology will advance the ability of pharma industry to treat diseases in a fast and effective manner.
Industry experts also believe that different drug leads will be chosen by the pharmaceutical company depending on the proposed method of the delivery on the medtech side. It all boils down to communication between the formulation team and the device group, as the best business partners are strong communicators, good team players, and are focused on the patient.
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