We speak to Lance Hill, CEO of Within3, about how life sciences companies should embrace the power of insights management throughout the total life-cycle of their products to deliver value for the whole industry.
How has Within3 helped sites and sponsors navigate the challenges of the last year?
Our job over the last year has been to show pharma companies a more efficient, viable and sustainable alternative to their traditional insight-gathering methods. This isn’t just giving companies our tools and saying ‘good luck’, it’s showing them the best way to use insights management to benefit their HCPs and patients.
A lot of companies had to implement a decade-long transition in just a few months. It’s our job to not only make sure insights management powers life science forward, but that it does so in a way that’s beneficial for HCPs and patients, too.
This isn’t just theoretical, and it isn’t just the pandemic. The problems we solve existed before Covid, but our insights management capabilities – enabling better KOL identification, a higher quality and volume of feedback, and a shorter runway to actionable insights – are here to make sure they don’t exist after.
One of these major points is long trial timelines. This was an issue before Covid, and a costly one, but for companies looking to get back on track after pandemic-induced delays, it became essential to solve.
As an example – we worked with a clinical development team to optimize a trial design. The experts that needed to be included were located in the US, Europe, and Australia, pretty much ruling out an in-person meeting or the ability for everyone to attend a video call at the same time.
Shifting the advisory board to a virtual discussion – where everyone can participate on their own schedule during a two-week period – meant the clinical team got 100% participation. But more importantly, the participation resulted in actionable information: based on the insights collected, the team learned that a randomized trial would work best. They also identified study sites, set the trial duration, and determined the target patient population. These results were possible not just because of the convenience of the virtual environment, but the quality of dialogue that results when people have the ability to focus and contribute.
For us, that’s a great result, and a great example of how technology is going to power pharma going forward.
How has virtual communication altered over the last year? How will it continue to change?
The biggest change for virtual communication over the last year is its necessity. It’s not very glamorous, but it’s true. Trials were disrupted massively, and sponsors and sites had to adapt extremely quickly. Virtual engagement was on everyone’s horizon anyway, but now it’s front and centre.
But I think the biggest awakening with this shift has been in understanding how virtual engagement is part of a larger process. What a lot of companies have realised is that a more organised approach to insight-gathering has benefits for every part of the product development lifecycle, and that treating it as a single issue is a better approach that yields more value.
Virtual engagement has made its value clear. Now, we’ll see the smartest pharma companies use Within3 to unify the whole insights management process – clinical development and operations, medical affairs and marketing.
What are some of the primary ‘pain points’ that life science companies hope to solve through the application of digital solutions?
I spoke about the potential for shorter trial timelines before, but with insights management, there are potential benefits across the product development lifecycle.
Inefficiencies are built into the process due to disparate data sets, changing stakeholders, siloed information systems, and evolving scientific narrative as products move from R&D to medical affairs to marketing. And the responsibility for solving these challenges used to live with different teams across geographies and lines of business.
So the pain point would be the fragmented process of pulling together all of this data sitting in different places, which is slow and expensive. Insights management solves this problem by treating insight gathering as one process, from KOL selection to decision-making.
After the successful development of COVID vaccines, life science companies are expected to bring global solutions to global problems. Insights management is the way to do that, because organizations can have a better view of what they’re working on, from a scientific perspective, a market perspective, and a patient perspective.
Patient centricity is a big focus of the life science industry and has been at risk throughout the pandemic. How can pharma and device companies work to continue this trend going forward?
Whilst many organisations view themselves as patient-centric because they involve the patient, there is often more they can do. A key aspect of that is having a better understanding of a specific disease community and what patients and patient advocates are talking about. With this information, life science companies are in a better position to have a patient focus from trial design through product launch. Insights management enables this process.
Clinical teams can also involve patients at a deeper level with the right virtual engagement tactics and tools – our asynchronous discussion platform, for example, is designed to get more frank feedback from patients, with capabilities like private questions or double-blinded discussions. These options allow life science companies to prioritize patients and understand a deeper dimension of their experience.
And with our insights management platform, teams will have real-time access to the outcome of patient engagements, which drives patient-centric strategy and patient-centric decision-making. This allows life science organizations to really live up to the goal of patient-centricity whilst also doing their work more efficiently and with more precision.
How can advanced technologies such as AI play a role in how life science companies work?
The last two years have been characterised by innovation in every aspect of how life science organizations do business, from financial planning and manufacturing to research and development. Insight gathering is no different, and we think we’re leading the way in making that process a more tech-enabled one that moves faster and produces better results.
Artificial intelligence holds massive potential to improve the speed at which life science organizations can understand HCP insights and wider market signals, and use that information to improve decision-making processes and drive business strategy.
The potential to increase the agility of the drug and device development process, and ultimately the speed at which patients and consumers have access to life-altering therapies, makes AI a critical tool for pharmaceutical and medical device companies now and in the longer term.