It’s All in the Data

From the Session: Create a Winning Partnership Through Collaboration and Innovation

Presenter: David Lennon, VP & Franchise Head, US Oncology – Lung, Melanoma, and Neuroendocrine Tumors, Novartis

David Lennon
VP & Franchise Head
US Oncology, Novartis

With the digitization of the patient journey, pharma companies have access to valuable details as to what’s happening with patients, caregivers, and practitioners. “It also allows us to study behaviors we’re seeing in the market,” says David Lennon, VP & Franchise Head, US Oncology – Lung, Melanoma, and Neuroendocrine Tumors, Novartis.

We can see some of the decision patterns emerging around common pathways and ultimately how we can start to predict patients and healthcare practitioners’ decisions.”

Going a step further, Lennon adds that all this insight helps spotlight interventions that might allow a pharmaceutical company or other industry to change a decision or an outcome.

So, Lennon asks, “If information is digitizing so fast, why don’t we spend more in digital.”

One barrier is an issue of regulation. A second, and perhaps larger barrier according to Lennon, is that the pharma industry has yet to unequivocally embrace digitalization’s ROI. When done right, analyzing data from every angle can take time; it’s not a solution for speed fiends. In addition, digitization requires investment, and that means scaling the budget to favor the digital side. In of 2015, pharmaceutical companies’ estimated promotional spending by budget was scaled against digital:

• $24 billion in personal promotion
• 5.6 billion in Direct to Consumers
• 1.9 billion in digital advertising

To work around these barriers and build a partnership with technology companies that can revolutionize your business model and boost your commercial success, Lennon offers several suggestions.

“It begins by making sure you understand the business questions to be addressed,” he emphasizes. From there, the key points go something like this:

1. Ingest: Determine how you will ingest information and data. This helps avoid overlapping data sets as well as other issues.
2. Process: Decide how data is be processed for insights. If data can’t be read or interpreted then it’s not useful.
3. Deploy: Establish a uniform plan to deploy the data so everyone who needs to see it sees it. What are the operational platforms that will allow you to integrate to scale for the business opportunities you discover? “You have to think about how you’re going to raise the competency of the folks who will be using these tools,” Lennon says. “That’s important because a lot of organizations have digital teams who sit outside the marketing organization and frankly, there’s a reluctance to fully integrate digital into the marketing process.
4. Impact: Be prepared to analyze the data for impact. “The issue is that we haven’t had the rigor and discipline to incorporate measurements into standard processes and build that back into resourcing, budgeting, and strategic planning for our organizations,” Lennon says.

The final word? Integrate digital into your marketing process and be prepared to advance your patient-centric model.