Technology working as the puzzle piece to bring better outcomes to patients

While at Reuters Pharma Europe in Barcelona the other week, pharmaphorum web editor Nicole Raleigh spoke with Florian Schnappauf, VP of enterprise commercial strategy at Veeva Europe, about commercial strategy and digitalising commercial operations.

Perhaps regretting slightly not going down the life sciences road, but through computer science and business finding himself in the sector anyway, Schnappauf speaks of Medical Affair’s important link between the clinical and the commercial world. Indeed, he explains how technology works as a puzzle piece to bring better outcomes to patients, and Veeva’s role in this.

On conversations heard and themes explored at Reuters, Schnappauf notes the commercialisation cycles of medicines shortening as a key talking point, pharma companies having less time to bring drugs to market successfully, less time within the R&D, increasing an overall sense of urgency. Additionally, turning technology from a mere business enabler, to a business driver.

On the topic of speciality medicines, and on partnership, Schnappauf mentions the ‘ever-growing’ nature of that area of research and development, with 8,000 or more drug candidates in the pipeline when it comes to speciality medicines. It is the future of pharma, with EMA having approved 77 treatments in the past year, but increasing complexities correlate with decreasing patient numbers – in other words, the rare disease space – and understanding of more complicated treatments needs to be translated for HCPs.

Additionally, there is a macro and a micro level in bringing treatments to patients: medicines need to be more widely available, on the macro level, taking in the differentiating reimbursement landscape and timelines, and partnership between all stakeholders can help here, Schnappauf says. While, on the micro level, pharma needs to understand better the needs of the HCPs and what they truly need to make a decision.

You can listen to episode 129a of the pharmaphorum podcast in the player below, download the episode to your computer, or find it - and subscribe to the rest of the series - in iTunes, Spotify, acast, Stitcher, and Podbean.