The Future of Applications in Life SciencesNew application strategies to unlock the digital opportunity

Accenture Life SciencesRethink Reshape Restructure….for better patient outcomes

Are current approaches to application development inhibiting growth?

Reimbursement changes, geographic shifts and scientific advances are collectively driving a need for rapid change in operating models and the technologies that support them for all life sciences companies. M&A activity last year was at an all-time high,1 affecting IT departments and their ability to integrate and divest multiple systems swiftly and seamlessly. In addition, after years of selling primarily to institutions and providers, life sciences companies are pivoting to provide additional services to patients to drive better health outcomes. This shift is driving new requirements in systems and processes across R&D, sales and marketing, and supply chain.

Underpinning all of these changes is the omnipresent shift to digital. Digital offers a significant opportunity for life sciences companies to unlock business value through new business models. However, many of them are trying to compete in the digital world with applications that were designed for another era. A critical reason for this state of affairs has been the way applications are designed and developed—monolithic systems that are slow to implement and slow to change.

In R&D, for example, most life sciences companies have several dozen applications—most not integrated and not sharing data. The new era of data consolidation, integration of external data sets and cognitive computing provides an opportunity to rethink and reshape R&D.

In sales and marketing, similarly, marketing content is still significantly paper-based. Campaigns, content and channels are not integrated. The digitization of content and the tight integration of traceable digitized content from marketing and medical through to the multiple digital and physical channels provide the opportunity to significantly amplify brand performance. Additionally, the analytics on external data sets such as EMR, genomic and lifestyle data from fitness wearables and other sources provide the opportunity to better understand and service patient needs and positively affect patient outcomes.

In the supply chain, in-house and contracted manufacturing systems are not always integrated effectively with supply systems. New cloud-based technologies and analytics capabilities are needed to provide the visibility and controls necessary to operate more efficiently going forward.

Three strategies are especially important when developing and maintaining applications for life sciences companies:

LIQUID Developing applications that are more modular or component based and API driven, enabling quick composition of functional applications.

INTELLIGENT Embedding software intelligence in applications to manage growing volume, velocity and complexity, and to maximize the business value of internal and external data—including from the physical world.

CONNECTED Creating applications capable of connecting with other applications both inside and outside the enterprise boundary of the life sciences company.

THE FUTURE OF APPLICATIONS IN LIFE SCIENCES: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

To seize the digital opportunity, life sciences companies need to fundamentally rethink how applications should be built and deployed.

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To compete with agility and speed, companies can no longer focus only on complex, lengthy and expensive coding of applications, or rigid systems built from the ground up. What’s needed is a new way to build software—one that is faster, flexible and more liquid. Liquid applications are those that are assembled leveraging modular architectures and platforms, next-generation integration techniques and a cloud-first, mobile-first mindset. These elements, combined with engineering approaches such as Agile, mean that software can be continuously delivered and evolve as business needs change.

Also important is DevOps, an approach that uses automation techniques for deployment, environment setup and configuration and monitoring. This streamlines and accelerates the interaction between development teams—which focus on assembling liquid applications—and operations teams, which are accountable for releasing those applications for live service availability. The result: faster, more predictable deployments to market, performed with greater efficiency.

Within the idea of liquid is the concept of first standing something up quickly, iterating on how it works, and then continuing to build elements and feeding them back into a platform. This method of application development can give companies a competitive edge, helping them respond faster to the marketplace, reshaping applications for new opportunities.

What do liquid applications look like in practice? Consider the CRM area, where liquid development could enable applications to collect and integrate all channel activity as modular components—from sales rep activity, to content downloads from app stores and websites, to interactions on social channels, data from wearable devices, relevant EMRs, genomic profiles and external sources. The result is a holistic view of the patient-doctor-payer experience and interests. With liquid development, applications can support business opportunities faster and at lower cost, while allowing organizations to become more patient-centric and consumer-oriented.

A modular approach can decrease complexity and increase the speed of development and deployment. Pegasystems, for example— a developer of strategic applications for sales, marketing, service and operations— is demonstrating the flexibility and speed of liquid application development. Pega can improve time to market and the speed of application deployment through plug-and-play approaches that avoid the need for unit and regression testing cycles.

Accenture is building on Pega technology to create a prototype patient-care management platform. This will enable healthcare providers to deliver timely advice and guidance by allowing them to accurately and easily follow diabetes and high-cholesterol patients during the first months of their treatment. Patients benefit from more accurate assessment of their condition, more timely treatment and better adherence to medical regimens. The platform can also detect adverse events and connect to pharmacovigilance. This could potentially reduce the risk of patients stopping treatment, provide caregivers with improved tracking and patient follow-up, and help build a stronger patient community through the sharing of educational content.

Modular, liquid apps can even lead to new business models. WellDoc, for example, creates apps that complement prescription therapy by tracking a patient’s health. WellDoc’s BlueStar™, a mobile prescription therapy for type 2 diabetes, has demonstrated the ability to predict hypoglycemia in patients with type 2 diabetes. The WellDoc prediction model can alert for hypoglycemic events that are likely to occur within the next 24 hours.2

LIQUID APPLICATIONSA fundamentally new way to build software

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With liquid development, applications can support business opportunities faster and at lower cost, while allowing organizations to become more patient-centric and consumer-oriented.

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To compete with agility and speed, companies can no longer focus only on complex, lengthy and expensive coding of applications, or monolithic systems built from the ground up. What’s needed is a new way to build software—one that is faster, flexible and more liquid.

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To manage growing volume, velocity and complexity, and to maximize the business value of internal and external data, companies need to embed software intelligence everywhere. Software intelligence is made possible by increased processing power, advances in data science, and innovations in natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive computing. Thanks to these advancements, software can be taught to automate decision making through algorithms, and evolve and innovate on its own through advanced learning techniques.

Intelligent applications offer three critical capabilities—intelligent automation, integrated analytics and self-governance. That is, intelligent applications can be taught to act as digital agents and to learn and govern themselves autonomously—revolutionizing customer service, IT management and business innovation.

Intelligent, analytics-based applications provide enormous opportunities for R&D when it comes to compliance and the discovery phase of regulatory approval. Intelligence can also support scientists by enabling faster decisions and adjustments to studies.

Eisai, Merck and Pfizer have joined a coalition to bring innovation to the Accenture Life Sciences Cloud for R&D platform—digitally enabling the R&D function and speeding up the drug development process while improving quality and cost for the industry.3 Accenture Life Sciences Cloud for R&D brings together multiple internal and external data sources across clinical, safety, regulatory and operational functions into a single analytics platform, creating actionable insights to accelerate drug development and improve patient outcomes. The cloud platform transforms the R&D technology landscape by providing new ways to use data across the development lifecycle to bring life-enhancing products to patients faster.

Intelligent applications can also have a significant impact on supply chain efficiency by combining and analyzing data from different logistic centers. One global pharmaceutical company was able to improve delivery in emerging markets with a transportation control tower. The company realized an almost 9 percent reduction in costs. Equally important, the increased control over global transportation and duty management operations allowed the company to distribute its products to customers and patients globally with greater speed, consistency, responsiveness and security.

Clinical operations present another good opportunity to use intelligent capabilities. Accenture is in discussions with Novartis on a predictive analytics solution using Predixion Software. In clinical operations today, data is collected in applications that focus on patient characteristics, what their clinical charts look like, and how they react to certain clinical drugs. The new solution attaches modules on top of those applications that will analyze this data to determine (1) if a patient in the clinical trial is at risk for any adverse events and (2) if there is data risk—that is, data anomalies that might lead to halting the clinical trials.

On the marketing side of the house, one can see innovations in intelligent campaign management. Intelligent software can now analyze and micro-segment physicians based on their search patterns, and provide real-time, relevant messaging and ads (equivalent to Amazon’s ability to analyze product searches) and coordinate next-best actions across multiple channels (sales force, emails, speaker events, etc.).

INTELLIGENT APPLICATIONS When applications comprehend, act and learn

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Intelligent, analytics-based applications provide enormous opportunities for R&D when it comes to compliance and the discovery phase of regulatory approval.

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To manage growing volume, velocity and complexity, and to maximize the business value of internal and external data, companies need to embed software intelligence everywhere.

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Connectivity in the age of the software-driven business is about more than application integration. It’s about creating new competitive frontiers using software. To grow revenue and defend their market position, businesses must open new dimensions of application connectivity—within the enterprise, with business partner and customer ecosystems, with the rapidly growing Internet of Things, and using different devices and channels.

Connected applications in the life sciences industry are particularly valuable across several dimensions:

• R&D: Enabling faster gathering of clinical trial information

• Supply chain: Linking to partners and providing visibility across the end-to-end supply chain

• Patient services: Providing personalized and value-add services to patients and affecting health outcomes

Connected applications are required to dynamically interface with business partner and customer ecosystems in today’s highly networked, digital business environment. When properly designed and managed, an ecosystem multiplies the power of all the participants, leading to combinations of functionality—and revenue opportunities—that would previously have been difficult to achieve.

In R&D, an effective connected ecosystem can accelerate drug development and reduce costs. TransCelerate BioPharma Inc., for example, is a non-profit entity that enables collaboration across the global R&D community to identify, facilitate and implement solutions that simplify and accelerate the delivery of important new medicines for patients. The R&D leaders from 20+ major pharmaceutical member companies are combining non-sensitive financial and personnel resources to solve industry-wide challenges.

Pfizer has also adopted an innovative, cloud-based clinical data platform that enables the company to securely exchange clinical data with its research partners.

Participants can aggregate, analyze and visualize clinical trial patient data across studies and drug programs, supporting intelligent trial design, precision medicine, pharmacovigilance and regulatory enquiries.4

Consider the host of healthcare ecosystem partners that touch a patient—from initial diagnosis, through treatment, through prescription or non-prescription treatments, all the way through wellness programs on the back end. In the traditional model, all those players have acted independently. Today, however, we are seeing a convergence of connections between the various providers and payers. Connected applications have the potential to redefine patient services—including hospital networks, doctors, physicians and caregivers.

The application environment today is quite fragmented, with a host of standalone applications, different devices and even paper-based processes. What needs to happen instead is a rethinking of the connectivity between those currently unconnected applications. IT departments have a couple of options available to them. They can manually create the connective tissue between the applications, or they can move to a more agile platform model that enables easier integration with mobile applications, the call center, campaign management applications, and other ways to track communications and interactions with customers.

For example, Accenture, working with Salesforce.com, has developed the Intelligent Patient Platform that aggregates patient data from multiple sources and connects both client and external vendor technology solutions to create a single view of all patient interactions. The platform also integrates:

• Patient engagement: Coordinates and delivers a seamless customer experience with physicians and patients by directing and facilitating interactions across all channels.

• Insights and analytics: Enables internal and external data analysis to bring unique insights into patient treatment and engagement.

• Connected devices and applications: Enables design and operation of regulated applications and devices that assist healthcare providers in managing patient care

• Patient data management and service exchange: Aggregates patient data from multiple sources and connects both client and external vendor technology solutions to create a single view of all patient interactions.

By using the platform, pharmaceutical companies can measure the impact of their patient programs across all modes of engagement (both in-person and digital) to refine program effectiveness for each patient segment.

Connectivity to the Internet of Things is also spurring significant innovations in the medical devices industry. Consider Alcon, a division of Novartis, which focuses on the eye care space. Alcon is currently working with Google to create “smart” contact lenses—capable of reading the blood vessels in the back of the eye and using that to report about current blood sugar levels to healthcare professionals.5

In the sales and marketing space, connected applications can also offer great value. One global pharmaceutical company sought to improve patient usage and adherence. The company lacked a retail pharmacy marketing capability and needed assistance to navigate through the fragmented pharmacy landscape. Accenture worked with the company and its retail pharmacy partners to develop, test and launch a managed marketing program. The program’s HIPAA-compliant Patient Cloud Solution tracks patients from their initial call to the pharmacist through product training. The retail pharmacies benefit from improved workflow management, reimbursement and performance reporting.

The pharmaceutical company achieved a 3-to-1 return on its investment as patient education and adherence translated to sales. Its client/retailer relationships were strengthened and more than 100,000 patients were educated through 30,000 pharmacists at eleven retailers.

CONNECTED APPLICATIONSExtending company boundaries through software

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Connectivity in the age of the software-driven business is about more than application integration. It’s about creating new competitive frontiers using software. To grow revenue and defend their market position, businesses must open new dimensions of application connectivity.

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Making it happen Supporting new design principles

MOBILIZING FOR LIQUID• Implement new architecture and

abstraction strategies: Ensure that your enterprise architecture supports platform integration capabilities, security, monitoring and API lifecycle services to support liquid applications.

• Future-proof your applications: Liquid applications are less focused on technology and more focused on business processes, and must enable the digital business. Set the bar high with user experience expectations and engineering standards that are appropriate for the digital world, and embrace cloud-first and mobile-first principles as appropriate.

EMBEDDING INTELLIGENCE EVERYWHERE• Apply intelligent automation to application

lifecycle practices: Life sciences companies can use software intelligence across application development, testing, deployment and maintenance to manage increasing volume, velocity and complexity. Look for automation opportunities across the application lifecycle.

• Integrate analytics with business processes: Companies should evaluate how to embed Big Data architectures in their applications—not just build them on the side. By integrating Big Data and analytics in business processes and applications, companies can move away from having a separate analytics function whose reports then need to be interpreted and acted on.

BUILDING AND NURTURING ECOSYSTEMS• Develop and implement a strategy for

managing a larger network of partners: Enterprises need multiphase strategies to build and nurture an ecosystem. Start—and learn—with your internal developers and business functions, and then create a broader ecosystem that includes external entities such as business partners and customers.

• Prepare for resiliency: As applications become increasingly connected, life sciences companies need to design for resiliency and proactively manage security across the extended business ecosystem and the physical world.

How can life sciences companies move forward with these three important design principles? Here are a few “how-to’s”:

THE FUTURE OF APPLICATIONS IN LIFE SCIENCES: CONCLUSION10

CONCLUSION

Digital is redefining how applications are created, how they incorporate and manage intelligence, and how they are connected to a broader ecosystem inside and outside a company. Accenture estimates that digital disruption has the potential to unlock more than $100 billion of commercial value in the US life sciences industry alone over a five-year period through new digital business models.6

The success of life sciences companies in achieving this level of value will be determined in part by their ability to challenge current approaches to software development. Many companies’ existing operating models for software development are not fit for purpose for today’s business environment. Software must be viewed as a revenue-generating product of the company, and business and IT teams will need to work even closer to drive continuous innovation.

Today’s life sciences industry is increasingly high velocity and software driven. Sooner or later, these two realities will push every company to rethink its potential and reinvent itself. The opportunity is there to begin that reinvention today, starting with a fundamentally new approach to the business of applications.

THE FUTURE OF APPLICATIONS IN LIFE SCIENCES: CONCLUSION

1 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/05/us-pharmacyclics-m-a-abbvie-deals-idUSKBN0M11HC20150305

2 http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20131030005899/en/WellDoc-Data-Models-Show-Promise-Predicting-Hypoglycemia#.VXILWPlViko

3 http://newsroom.accenture.com/news/leading-pharma-companies-help-shape-new-accenture-life-sciences-cloud-for-r-and-d.htm

NOTES4 https://www.accenture.com/

t20150523T061922__w__/us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/Microsites/Documents3/Accenture-Pharmas-Sharp-Right-Turn-On-RD-Old.pdf

5 http://www.alcon.com/news-center/news-item.aspx?id=307

6 https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-capturing-opportunity-life-sciences-digital-transformation

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About Accenture Life Sciences

Accenture’s Life Sciences group is dedicated to helping companies rethink, reshape or restructure their businesses to deliver better patient outcomes and drive shareholder returns. We provide end-to-end business services as well as individual strategy, digital, technology and operations projects around the globe in all strategic and functional areas—with a strong focus on R&D, Sales & Marketing and the Supply Chain.

We have decades of experiences working hand-in-hand with the world’s most successful companies to improve their performance across the entire Life Sciences value chain. Accenture’s Life Sciences group connects more than 10,000 skilled professionals in over 50 countries who are personally committed to helping our clients achieve their business objectives and deliver better health outcomes for people around the world.

About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 336,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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Ramnath Venkataraman Global Application Services Lead ramnath.venkataraman@accenture.com

Brags Srinivasan Global Life Sciences Technology Lead brags.srinivasan@accenture.com

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