Hannover, 3. May 2024

 

Last week, our Managing Director, Andreas Buchholz, and Commercial Strategy Manager, Christoph Herrmann, attended the Reuters Pharma event in Barcelona – the world’s leading cross-functional gathering for pharma changemakers.

Themed “Align Purpose, Unleash Innovation, Unlock Healthcare,” the event piqued our curiosity about its key themes.

Here are  Andreas Key takeaways and insights from the event:

GenAI

  • Undoubtedly, GenAI took center stage and dominated discussions with its widespread adoption being celebrated as a milestone in technology history. In particular, the most popular AI tool, ChatGPT, reached 100 million users in just two months, thanks to its simplicity, accessibility, and rapid time to value.

  • There’s no denying the many benefits of GenAI in pharma, especially when it comes to commercial use cases such as personalized content creation. Moreover, GenAI can also take on more challenging tasks, such as co-piloting specific use cases or uncovering strategic insights in data.

    But can GenAI also help optimize target customer segmentation or territory structures?  These use cases may be more complex to understand and build, but they offer great potential for pharma insights.

  • In addition, many use cases extend beyond pharma’s commercial applications, including clinical trials, research and development, and early discovery. While initial projects yield impressive results, scaling up poses challenges that require significant change management efforts.

  • The appeal of GenAI lies in its low investment cost and rapid implementation. However, creating a competitive advantage requires leveraging individualized data from each pharmaceutical customer and seamlessly integrating GenAI into all organizational processes.

 

Interestingly, many initial sessions and panels focused on GenAI rather than Pharma itself. While GenAI is just one of the many relevant topics at a pharma congress, its prominence underscores its importance to the audience and merits serious consideration.

Besides, there were numerous other interesting topics, but two themes that our managing director would particularly like to outline are:

 

Patient centricity & integration of medical and commercial teams

  • Patient Centricity remains a critical focus for pharmaceutical companies, striving to achieve a fundamental shift in company culture towards prioritizing patients. While it’s often touted in marketing, implementing a truly patient-first approach is immensely challenging. One significant obstacle is the disparity between global and local perspectives, posing a hurdle to this goal. Astella provided in their panel session valuable insights, emphasizing the necessity of leveraging data and insights.

    However, the question remains: how can we truly achieve patient centricity? One way is by delivering tangible value to customers, such as integrating pharmaceuticals with digital devices or applications. Innovation and experimentation are key; there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.  Additionally, gathering data directly from patients enhances our understanding of their needs.

  • Another crucial discussion point is the integration of medical and commercial teams. Despite legal restrictions on commercial representatives accessing certain medical topics, such as off-label usage, there is a considerable overlap in data. This presents an opportunity to leverage this shared information. Some pharmaceutical companies have already begun integrating both commercial and medical representatives into unified teams, which is especially vital in the context of GenAI.

 

What are your impressions of Reuters Pharma event?

How do you see AI being used to improve patient outcomes and experiences?

Let us know your thoughts!

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