Building a future-ready digital workforce in pharma

Digital transformation has proven highly valuable for the fast-paced and ever-evolving pharmaceutical and life science industries. Digitisation initiatives in pharma focus on enhancing operational efficiency, driving innovation, providing better customer experiences, and improving the quality of products and services. However, many companies struggle to adopt full-scale digital solutions across the value chain due to various challenges, including user adoption, the highly regulated nature of the industry, fragmented legacy systems, heavy technology investment, and lack of data interoperability.

Companies that truly scale and implement digitisation will be better positioned to take on the pressures of increasing costs for the industry. According to PwC’s 2023 Emerging Technology Survey, 9 in 10 companies are planning to increase their overall technology budget over the next 12 months. This investment would mean cost optimisation, adherence to stringent regulations, operational excellence, rapid speed-to-market, competitive advantage, product quality, and supply chain efficiency for pharmaceutical companies.

However, fostering a highly proficient digital workforce is essential for organisations to achieve these objectives, positioning them at the forefront of delivering cutting-edge healthcare solutions to patients worldwide.

Challenges to technology adoption

Across the pharmaceutical value chain – from research and development to manufacturing and distribution – users must be equipped with the knowledge and skills required to navigate complex workflows and processes effectively.

As a highly regulated industry, pharmaceutical and life science organisations have a low tolerance for inefficiencies, errors, and regulatory non-compliance. Errors and inefficacy may cause delays in research or clinical trials, thereby slowing down the overall process of drug production. Companies need to be fast, adaptable, and resilient to maintain a competitive advantage. To achieve this, digitisation is a must, but a surge in technology adoption will only cause friction and broken digital experiences among end users as employees require training for new tools. If not educated properly on how to use the technology, this will cause inefficiencies and a dissatisfied workforce, resulting in suboptimal ROI in the company’s technology stack.

Empowering workers with digital adoption software

This is where digital adoption solutions such as Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) integrated with product analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) come into play. The projected value of AI and product analytics technology is impressive. According to PwC, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies can achieve a 60-70% reduction in process timelines due to data-driven decision-making and real-time intervention in clinical trials. AI and product analytics can also drive content automation, improve data quality, and automate data collection and processing, resulting in a 30% or greater reduction in operational costs. Eventually, this will reduce the burden on patients, providers, and companies through task optimisation and operational improvements.

DAPs can be used to integrate within existing and new business applications used by providers and patients across the value chain, such as Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), Clinical Trial Management Systems (CTMS), Regulatory Information Management (RIM), and Quality Management Systems (QMS). DAPs enable pharma application end-users with contextual, guided in-app experiences to improve productivity, drive adoption, and achieve pharmaceutical and life sciences business outcomes. Ultimately, this will promote digital transformation and encourage user adoption through seamless application experiences.

Non-power users sometimes fail to adopt new technology at the same pace that it is being introduced, hence they are not able to maximise the full potential of business applications. Moving towards a cloud Quality Management (QM) suite is integral to the ongoing digital transformation in the life sciences industry, requiring robust change management practices to ensure favourable ROI.

DAPs can analyse non-tech savvy users’ behaviour within applications to continuously optimise employee and customer experience, streamline clinical trials and supply chain processes, and improve overall efficiency. DAPs help employees more easily adopt technology by giving them the guidance through steps that connect workflows that spam over 20-step processes. They also identify the friction points users are experiencing in an application and prevent users from entering invalid data that would then require rework. As a result, organisations can keep up-to-date with quality policies, increase speed-to-market of drugs, and improve patient and worker safety. Digital adoption software can also help pharmaceutical and life sciences organisations avoid non-conformance and compliance issues with ever-changing FDA regulations.

In one real-life case study, employees in a medical equipment manufacturing company were using Trackwise, a quality management application, to file required eMDR (Electronic Medical Device Reporting). These complex reports were sent to the FDA for approval and frequently contained errors due to the complicated nature of the forms; the FDA would reject these faulty reports, resulting in significant time and cost spent re-filling out of the forms. By integrating a DAP within Trackwise, smart nudges were delivered in key fields that either could not be left blank or the right data format needed to be entered. Employees were blocked from submitting the form until all required fields were completed, and pop-up notifications served as reminders for specific users with approaching deadlines and delays in submitting forms. As a result, the manufacturing company experienced an improvement in user productivity, fewer rejected reports from the FDA, and saved time and money by minimising user errors in the application.

In the fast-paced and highly regulated pharmaceutical and life sciences industry, the importance of digitisation cannot be overstated. Successful software adoption will allow companies to maximise their objectives, increase employee efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure regulatory compliance. This will prove to be a game changer as competition and financial pressures increase.

Slow adoption of smart technologies in the industry will negatively impact the healthcare sector by causing slower research, inefficient clinical trials, and poor SCM/quality management. With smart technologies poised to reshape the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, there is no better time than now for organisations to begin their digital transformation journey and build a future-ready digital workforce.