COVID-19 has changed how people work across continents, countries and sectors. In Europe, these changes may be irreversible. Research in the UK, for example, suggests that 60% of workers would now like to work from home more often, while just a third would like to revert to the status quo. The life sciences industry is at the forefront of these changes, with data that shows a dramatic and significant shift away from face-to-face interaction towards digital engagement.
The challenge for any organization is to manage these changes over the short, medium, and long term. With a critical need to maintain connections between pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals, the life sciences industry is ideally placed to lead digital transformations that address fast moving trends, meet workers’ needs and deliver business continuity.
Accelerate digital engagement
COVID-19 has driven significant shifts in the work environment, but this is an acceleration of ongoing trends rather than the genesis of something totally new. In Europe, for example, there are five countries where over 70% of HCPs are under the age of 45. Typically, younger physicians expect the more digitally sophisticated interactions delivered by cloud technologies.
‘Digital native’ HCPs’ experiences with mobile, social, and digital technologies in their personal lives have also resulted in higher expectations of the technologies they use at work. They expect personalized, relevant, and frictionless experiences regardless of the platform or device.
Consequently, and independently of the pandemic, the life sciences industry has made significant progress towards the use of digital channels to complement in-person visits. It means that many companies are well-prepared to keep doctors informed on the latest treatment options for their patients in any therapeutic area.
Many in the industry have been able to pivot at pace and adopt virtual HCP engagement. Life sciences cloud technology provider, Veeva Systems, reports a huge shift in working practice, based on real-world insights on what is happening across its customer base. The number of remote meetings has increased more than 50 times from February to May, with companies meeting with hundreds of thousands of HCPs online. Engagements have also been longer and more in-depth, lasting an average 22 minutes versus the industry average 6 minutes.
Recent events have simply increased the urgency of ongoing digital transformation efforts and accelerated their use to connect with HCPs. Digital engagement – remote video, email, and text messaging – can help to ensure that doctors get the information they need when traditional engagements suddenly and unexpectedly become impractical.
Beyond information sharing, remote signature capture for drug sampling enables field reps to create sample orders and fulfill HCP sample requests while hosting an online meeting. In just over a month since Veeva launched its remote sampling capability, more than 50,000 sample requests have been captured using remote sampling.
In the longer term, digital engagement will become an increasingly important component of companies’ engagement strategies.
Enhance engagement with digital technologies
While the world focuses on pandemic patients, care for patients with acute and chronic illnesses needs to continue. Pharmaceutical reps and medical professionals must continue to act as a link for doctors to access the latest research and information on medicines.
Oncology is an area of particular need. More than two-thirds of surveyed oncologists said pharmaceutical sales representatives play an important role in helping them learn about new drugs and 44% said reps rank as one of the most valued sources of information.
Eli Phillips, Jr., vice president of insights and engagement at Cardinal Health Specialty Solutions explains the importance of this link: “Specialty therapeutic areas that once only had one or two possible treatments may today have a dozen or more and new therapies continue to become more specialized, creating an environment where healthcare providers need more data and a deeper understanding of all treatment options to select the best therapy for each patient.”
The expansion of digital engagement technologies will increase in importance as they keep lines of communication open between the industry and doctors. In fact, many pharmaceutical companies already benefit from industry-specific technologies that enable both compliant and impactful digital interactions.
Digital technologies can actually enhance engagements, with significantly longer HCP engagement times through online meetings — which can last seven to eight times longer than in-person visits. For specialists such as oncologists, video calls last an average of 30 minutes. It is additional time that can be used to provide valuable content and assist physicians to make more accurate determinations about a course of treatment, which can translate into better patient care.
Virtual events are also an effective substitution for traditional lunch-and-learns, invite-only seminars, and industry conferences. They offer alternative channels to share information, develop relationships, and build credibility. With digital lunch-and-learns, for example, an entire office can gather in a conference room to hear the latest information from a life sciences field rep using video. With screen-sharing functionality, field teams can present the same information as they would in person.
Invite-only seminars, a standard among specialists, can be similarly structured, but use multiple locations to conduct one-to-many group meetings. The pharmaceutical rep host can conduct the seminar just as they would if all participants were in the same room, including the ability to answer questions in real-time or point attendees to the process for capturing medical information requests.
Even larger, multi-day conferences can become online summits, with each day’s agenda published in advance and registration options that include all-access passes, one-day passes, or even lifetime replay access to the content after the completion of the summit. At the designated time of the session, instead of attendees pouring into a conference room, they simply click a link on their computer to participate in the meeting.
Additional long-term advantages include reduced travel expenses – the typical cost of a face-to-face visit is six-times higher than the average monthly cost to license a video engagement platform – and more time with patients.
Now is the time to accelerate and enhance digital transformation
Most life sciences companies have made progress towards digital transformation. The COVID-19 pandemic is only ever going to accelerate these changes as they move from ‘desirable’ to ‘business critical’. Until now, pace has been measured, but there is now a greater sense of urgency. Post pandemic, we are likely to see digital transformation initiatives shift into overdrive as the industry ensures it is better prepared to avoid future disruption to business continuity.
About the author
David Logue, senior vice president, commercial strategy, Veeva Europe
David Logue is Veeva’s Senior Vice President of Commercial Strategy and is responsible for the strategy of Veeva Commercial Cloud in Europe. Before Veeva, David spent 20+ years at Accenture delivering digital strategy projects and large-scale business transformation programs, focused in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. He aims to leverage his experience to bring a broad perspective of how an effective digital and data strategy can be truly transformative in the life sciences industry.