Key Takeaways from IQVIA TechIQ Global Virtual Conference

This autumn, innovations are on the lips of almost every major pharmaceutical conference. IQVIA TechIQ brought together more than a thousand experts from Abbvie, AstraZeneca, Bayer, GSK, Novartis, Roche, Salesforce, and other global pharma and tech leaders to share their experience in orchestrating outcomes for the life sciences industry. The changing environment has redefined and accelerated the role of digital transformation in the day-to-day approach to healthcare. That’s why the development of lifesaving therapies through virtual and digital channels had become front and center of the event. Let’s dive deep into the hot topics discussed at the premier TechIQ Global Virtual Conference.

How the voice of the patients boosts brand success

Effective communication and understanding of the patients’ needs is a challenge. Digital technologies are getting more involved in the healthcare sector, and now patients want to be treated in a more personalized manner. The modern healthcare approach goes beyond the pill and revolves around smart disease management. It is crucial to target the right patient and provide support and encouragement at the points they need it the most. That’s why one of the recurrent themes of the TechIQ conference was awareness, adherence, and market intelligence that boost brand success.

During one of the sessions, AJ Ploszay, Ph.D. Vice President, Digital Strategy IQVIA Technologies emphasized the point:

“I think we all know that a growing priority for life sciences is to embed and amplify the patient voice across the entire value chain of medicine development. Here at IQVIA Technologies, we are trying to do the same thing. As part of this ambition, we want to learn how to build trusted relationships with patients”.

It is hard to disagree considering the number of challenges that brand managers face these days. According to the conference data, 25% of drug launches didn’t reach 50% of the sales target during the past 8 years.
To achieve better results, pharma companies strive for greater patient centricity and a deeper understanding of patients’ routine needs.

“The clock is against the brand manager. There is a huge pressure to make a successful drug launch and the amount of time they have to do this is continuously shrinking” – Martin Collyer Global Head, Orchestrated Patient Engagement IQVIA

Currently, both HCPs and patients are bombarded with all sorts of information that is becoming harder to differentiate. Non personalized communication and gaps in daily interaction of patient and healthcare provider often result in poor patient adherence and impose another challenge for a brand manager.

Hence the growing urge to integrate more and more data about the patients into customer engagement strategies.

The question is how to reach the target audience at the right time?

The target is to give them differentiated and applicable information and provide services they need at the time.

In that sense, the rise of artificial intelligence is multiplying opportunities for life science companies as 85% of executives say that AI is advancing faster than their organization’s pace of adoption.

IQVIA TechIQ Conference revealed the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning for HCPs engagement at its best.

One of the sessions conducted by Paolo Molinari, Senior Principal, Commercial Effectiveness, IQVIA, addressed the role of advanced analytics for connected commercial platforms. One of the takeaways of this session is that AI helps to address the current challenges in commercial analytics faced by global teams in pharma.

It also lifts the veil over the role that AI/ML algorithms played in the development of comprehensive solutions that will have a significant impact on healthcare management in the future. The conference addresses the AI and ML technologies as those able to change the outcome for the patient.

One such solution is patient communities that integrate AI/ML, real-world data, transformative technologies, and advanced analytics.

Patients are moving to more digital avenues and looking for holistic engagement. Accordingly, the engagement techniques must speak to the customer directly.

Connected AI/ML-powered Commercial Insights Apps provide a single predictive view through:

• Identification of the target patient
• Filling gaps in performance to maximize brand success across HCPs and patients.
• Providing alerts to target the right HCPs at the right time
• Channel optimization
• Submitting predictive metrics and smart segmentation.

AI/ML algorithms extract information from medical records, free text, and chats to establish patients’ journeys in real-time. Meanwhile, сommunities provide clinical, social, and emotional support when and where the patients need it.

When patients are starting to take medicine, they have plenty of questions. Martin believes that all of them can be answered inside patient communities that provide personalized experiences for patients through the use of AI and ML. Inside they interact, ask questions, share information, and getting more involved in their healthcare program.

In other words, this technology has the potential to become a single source of truth for the patients where they can get an answers to their questions from the right people at the right time. They help to embed the patient’s voice into customer engagement strategy and augment patient support programs.

How to Thrive in the New World of Hybrid HCP Engagements

The highly changeable pharma landscape creates competition for the most diverse digital HCP engagement models. Another urgent topic of the conference was how the pandemic has redefined and accelerated digital transformation.

The industry is slowly but surely moving towards hybrid interaction models. Commercial teams and creative agencies are racing to adjust to new modes modified by the COVID crisis.

COVID-19 prioritized virtual engagement, but it seems that doctors have also fully appreciated remote communication and the flexibility it gives. These tools have proved to be those that can reduce sales costs and increase the efficiency of communication – which is relevant at any time.

IQVIA’s customer engagement model is built on a trusted and valued HCP relationship. They build this model on three pillars – extensible platform, omnichannel optimization, and orchestrated relationships. They consider remote communication in 4 aspects – remote interactions, virtual events, and webinars, HCP portal, communities.

Another point is that transition to remote engagement is quite challenging. The main obstacles are usually as follows:

• Disconnected and siloed system
• Lack of tools for remote work
• Lack of time
• Lack of previous experience
• Hard to scale
• Adjusting to policies & regulations
• No single source of truth

How to handle the shift to remote engagement and drive innovations through technology partnerships

Up to this point, virtual engagement had not been well-established in the pharmaceutical industry at all. Changes of this nature always require new models of work and readiness to adjust quickly and cost-effectively.

The question is how to provide a safe and cost-efficient transition for your organization?

HCP engagement is a complex area where many components come together. It requires both the precise work of creative minds and technological solutions at a fundamental level.

That is why, among other things, collaborations were the central theme of this conference, namely, how to drive innovations through technology partnership.

IQVIA OCE ecosystem is built on the base of the Salesforce platform. Their relationship was established in 2004, since then, IQVIA is one of Salesforces’ largest customers and industry partners.
This type of partnership guarantees that information can be shared across the enterprise, driving actionable insights and tailored, relevant interactions with customers.

 “We aim to build an ecosystem of partners and developers to continuously enhance the OCE ecosystem and quickly deploy its capabilities to the customers.” – Manish Goel General Manager Customer Engagement GBU

Together with IQVIA, Salesforce launched the first clinically-focused technology solution suite for life sciences on Salesforce health could. One of the purposes of this solution is to build stronger connections between patients and clinicians. This suite contains valuable R&D insights from AI and ML.

In 2021, pharma business is going to focus more on collaboration between organizations. The technological partnership of IQVIA and Salesforce is the reflection of cross-enterprise collaboration that will help digital agencies to tackle global challenges by joint efforts.

IQVIA + VISEVEN

IQVIA is a great partner for pharma and everyone involved in the health sector. The end-to-end capabilities of IQVIA and their leading could technologies constitute significant competition in the innovation market. The content produced by Viseven Team or exported from eWizard is perfectly compatible with IQVIA system requirements. Viseven is proud to be IQVIA’s timeproof Content Partner. Together we create and manage content to deliver customer success.

Our approach to partnerships implies long-term relationships with robust technology leaders such as IQVIA, Veeva, Salesforce, Adobe Experience Manager, etc. We turn to partnerships and collaborations as a strategic move when navigating the challenges in life sciences. We invite digital agencies to join the community of our partners to achieve common goals, fuel greater achievement and augment our capabilities.

Viseven can help achieve digital excellence for pharma companies in many different aspects of the omnichannel strategy. We will help you to build an elaborate omnichannel architecture that you will be able to expand gradually and get the expected outcomes for your brand.
Don’t hesitate to contact our experts for insights and guidance to drive pharmaceutical innovations together!