SPELLED OUT: How is Pharma Taking Advantage of Digital Health?
Is it time to stop talking about digital health and just focus on health? Where, in which department, do digital health innovations fit within Pharma? Do we expect too much in terms of the speed of digital health innovation in Pharma?
These were just some of the questions discussed at SPELLED OUT: Digital Health and Pharma event. SPELLED OUT is a group name of a series of events organised by Curated Health and Faces of digital health, with which we wish to bring clarity to specific digital health-related topics.
Key points:
There are probably less than 200 DTx on the market atm, said Jessica Shull, Director of Digital Therapeutics at Vicore Pharma AB.
When it comes to leveraging digital in pharma, the industry doesn't look at existing channels enough, mentioned Jennifer Butler, Chief Marketing Officer at Medisafe.
We are too impatient! said Paul Simms, CEO of Impatient Health. “How is industry ready to wait a decade or more in drug development and gives up digital in a year or two, while regulation still expects clinical trial and rigorous regulation?”
The big question in digital and pharma is still: should we build this, should we buy this, should we partner this? said Christophe Jauquet, International keynote Speaker on making customers healthy & happy.
Different people look differently at digital health, and we are slowly transitioning to omitting the word digital and just talking about health, with new, digital tools that are a new normal. “I often compare web 1.0 and 2.0. We don’t hear anymore about companies from the 1.0 era, like AOL and Alta Vista. They've died completely. The disruption in big tech has been so severe in the last 20 years that the first generation is gone. The second generation dominates today because the internet got a bit faster and it got a bit more mobile. That's all that happened. But what people realized suddenly is that we hit a threshold where you can create a digital-only business model. These digital-only businesses are not just repetitions of what happened before. We need to be thinking of health in a world where digital means are available to a much larger group of us than they were before,” Paul Simms said.
Using existing channels to improve disease outcomes
An important part of finding new ways to interact with patients through digital means is to look for and find channels patients are naturally going to already, emphasized Jennifer Butler from Medisafe. Medisafe is one of the globally most successful apps for medication adherence. The app is free for the users, but the company works with partners such as Pharma companies to offer patients in-app additional guidance and programs for better adherence to their treatment. “What we have seen at Medisafe in working with Pharma is that it’s not just about reaching the patients, but engaging them. That means that an intervention needs to be a personalized behavior modification engagement. You need to look at patients holistically. The solution needs to have that patient support, not just the patient awareness, it needs to intervene at the right times of the treatments that are needed for the patients,” Jennifer Butler said.
When considering the understanding of existing channels to reach patients, Paul Simms, who is a consultant to life-science companies, expressed criticism regarding the understanding of social media inside Pharma companies. “I find that the average digital maturity within the average organization is low. I tell them stories about how Tik Tok is popular and there are gasps in the room. It amazes me how people inside Pharma don't invest the time in studying these trends and what's happening in the world of tokenization or gamification,” he noted.
The era of Digital Therapeutics
Digital therapeutics (DTx), clinically validated digital interventions with a significant impact on specific conditions, have been one of the digital health innovations that perhaps has the clearest potential relation to Pharma. A successful DTx treatment can have a significant impact on the amount and kind of drugs prescribed to patients. Examples of DTx include solutions to treat anxiety, depression, decrease pain, and more.
»Digital therapeutics are a very small subset of digital health. They are software that makes an impact on a disease state. So not just monitoring or diagnosis, we're talking about actual interventions moving clinical endpoints, and the effects are proven through clinical trials. I would say there are less than 200 products on the market right now doing this or trying to do this. Pharma companies realize that this lock and key hypothesis about trying to solve a problem by putting a drug into a certain formula only works for 40 to 50% of people in the first place. We know about poor adherence. So you cannot treat people and be successful just by using drugs. I think Pharma is starting to realize this,” said Jessica Shull, who is Director of Digital Therapeutics at Vicore Pharma AB, which is developing a DTx for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Even if Pharma recognizes the potential of digital health and digital therapeutics, the dilemma then is whether a Pharma company should build a solution inside the company, buy an existing startup, or partner with a developer, observes Christophe Jauquet. Vicore AB decided for a partnership, because that way, each team did what it is best at, said Jessica Shull. “In Pharma, what we do best is the clinical trials, setting up the evidence generation so we can get to the regulatory process. The DTX company is great at frontend, backend, AI, all of the things that Pharma has never been doing and probably won't ever do well. But it takes a lot of iteration and sprints, and development.”
Additionally, it’s not just about the companies to get solutions to the market fast. A large impact lies on the side of regulatory bodies. This is an often forgotten part of the equation when judging the pace of innovation adoption. “The regulators are also very stuck in what they've been doing for the last 50 years. A new kind of evidence, a new kind of clinical endpoint may be rejected. So we're dealing with end-points that we've had for 50 years,” noted Jessica Shull.
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