Pharmaceutical companies are significantly increasing investments in innovative solutions to meet a demand for health increasingly based on data, clinical evidence and greater patient awareness. Over the past year, investment in smart phone applications, educational websites, social media, wireless devices and other initiatives grew by 78%.
Some of these initiatives have led to the need for pharmaceutical companies to collaborate in an innovative way with companies in other sectors that have a higher level of investment than the pharmaceutical companies themselves.
It is what emerges from Progressions: Building Pharma 3.0, the global annual report of Ernst & Young on the pharmaceutical sector.
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"The 'Progression' research shows the way forward in our country too," he says Antonio Irione [in the picture] Life Science leader of Ernst & Young in Italy “In a context characterized by new healthcare players increasingly attentive to optimizing resources, by the greater ability to measure the effectiveness of products and by patients able to play an increasingly active role in managing their own health, pharmaceutical companies they have the unique opportunity to present themselves as a partner towards their interlocutors in the health system by providing them with know-how and resources to highlight the benefits in terms of clinical outcomes and costs linked to an appropriate use of health resources”.
The recently released research provides an in-depth update on the transformation taking place in the pharmaceutical sector, in which companies can no longer limit themselves to producing medicines, even if they are innovative and effective, but must increasingly try to "sell health" by creating innovative solutions and models capable to make it possible to appreciate improvements in clinical evidence: an ecosystem that Ernst & Young has called “Pharma 3.0”.
The potential opportunities of these changes are attracting a growing influx of non-traditional players in the healthcare sector. The report estimates that non-pharma players have publicly invested at least $20 billion in testing related to Pharma 3.0 business models, a much higher level of investment than the pharmaceutical industry.
The report also contains revelations from the first detailed database of Pharma 3.0 initiatives initiated by pharmaceutical companies in the last 5 years.
Some key findings:
• Pharma 3.0 initiatives are driven by investments in health-related mobile technology, especially smart phone applications. Between 2006 and 2009, 16% of the initiatives concerned the field of mobile healthcare. In 2010 this category counted one initiative out of two.
• These smart phone applications, previously focused on diabetes management tools, rapidly expanded to other diseases in 2010, with applications popping up for 14 disease groups. These applications include, for example, tools to help patients and consumers follow vaccination schedules, manage infusions for the treatment of haemophilia, find a cancer clinical trial unit within a 150 mile radius of the location
