Keynote
9:30 AM - 10:30 AM
Bayer’s Sebastian Guth and Brian Cantwell
believe the industry is embracing its
potential to provide deeper insights and
better value to
customers.
Sebastian points to the
2 big approaches or learnings that have
defined Bayer’s path since the start of
the pandemic. First, “the power of focus
on purpose” that is reflected in the
company’s ethos of “help for all,
hunger for none,” which has catalyzed the
company to ensure continued and robust
product supply, safety of co-workers, and
value for customers. Second, he emphasizes
the importance of customer obsession. Even
in a crisis, the healthcare professionals
need information to help them best serve
patients.
Brian
says, to be effective, the digital team
must be truly integrated with the brand
and franchise teams. This is vital in
order to translate strategies into
real-world digital engagement.
Insight-driven design must govern
customer engagement and campaign plans.
Data show what the right tactic is, the
right time to execute it, and the right
channels to use. These, and customers’
feedback, must define what comprises a
good experience. Agile and robust
operations must be in place in order to
bring these ideas to life in the real
world. There must be a test and learn
mindset for innovation and
experimentation. Some of the team must
be focused on future
developments.
Sebastian believes
that the right mindset is crucial
across all company functions. Everyone
must be imbued with a willingness to
learn and to embrace failure as a
natural part of development. He
considers it critically important to
equip the salesforce with new
technology, and give them confidence to
test, experiment, learn and,
ultimately, grow in their profession.
Medical science liaison personnel will
become even more important for engaging
with customers on scientific questions.
Therefore, they must have the right
technology and tools so that they can
have these conversations at any time,
from anywhere, and where customers
prefer.
He quotes, “Don’t
predict the future, choose it.” He
believes the industry must start making
the future it believes in. Failure will
be a part of that, but what matters is
the act of engaging in transformation,
which offers tremendous opportunity to
bring greater value to our
customers.

Medical Affairs
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
The growth of personalization in
healthcare delivery and the
characterization of individual patients
have driven the need to differentiate
products based on outcomes and to optimize
care delivery.
Medical Affairs’
(MA) core role in scientific exchange with
Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) and
customers places it in a strategic,
leading position, which is driven by HCPs’
expectations of high-level,
non-promotional, scientific content.
MA must
concentrate on supporting physicians
with the relevant information they
need, when they need it, as well as
providing trusted information for
patients. Another important angle is
how the regulators will examine the new
ways of communicating and sharing
information with HCPs and patients.
HCPs want scientific data and trust MA
to support them with easily accessible
content that they can digest
quickly.
What is the blueprint
for a good customer experience enabling
digital transformation? Start with the
customer and gather insights to build
the physician journey. Understand who
they are, what their day looks like,
and what they need to achieve. Then
work with them to provide useful
scientific communications that help to
improve patient outcomes. The MA
function needs to collaborate both
internally and externally to achieve
this, gathering data from all sources.
Endorsement from the leadership team is
important.
The provision of
accurate, comprehensive content remains
the cornerstone. Those who supply it in
a very specific manner for very
specific needs will be the
differentiators.
Digital is
critical for multichannel delivery. The
goal is a data-driven, customer-centric
experience that flows seamlessly across
devices. Within companies, the mindset
must be to build a customer-centric
culture. This means embedding digital
in every action, every day, to sustain
this.
In addition, measurement
is vital. Find out what impact a piece
of content is having, as well as which
channels are most effective. Anticipate
customers’ needs. The industry must
transform itself from a provider of
products to a provider of services,
which will help to broaden the
perspective of the world in which we
work.





Commercial Excellence
11:30 AM - 12:30 AM
Global Commercial Operations have been
challenged to grow the digital content
multifold, run more digital campaigns and
superior virtual meeting capability, and
enhance reporting capabilities on
engagements during the
pandemic.
Delivering omnichannel
solutions at scale requires 3 strategic
priorities: The supply of modular and
rapid content refreshers, AI or smart
content orchestration, and strategic
analytics.
Traditionally,
pharma has been focused on interactions
at the doctor’s office; now it must
establish ways to engage with HCPs in a
multichannel way. More personalized,
relevant engagement with customers has
to be operationalized, but this is not
a simple or quick task. The mission
must be clearly articulated internally
to gain support and align both human
and financial resources. The sales rep
model needs to evolve into a hybrid
sales model that interacts with all the
other touchpoints, including media,
CRM, and social.
Understanding
of customers must be gained and
integrated with business strategy,
leading to delivery of the right
content to the right customer via the
right channel at the right time.
Additionally, a robust change
management program is needed, with
multiple functions given the
flexibility to work
together.
Large organizational
change cannot be achieved all at once,
so companies must recognize the
priorities now, invest where there will
be the most tangible impact, and let
other elements follow later.
In
terms of partnering externally, a
hybrid model can work. There is value
in outsourcing in areas like campaign
orchestration and marketing automation,
which can drive a scalable approach.
While third parties bring the vision to
life, strategy is the one thing pharma
should not outsource.
To ensure
future competitive advantage, pharma
companies must be ready to adapt to
novel therapeutics and adjust the
business accordingly. Omnichannel at
scale requires greater coordination
between operations, brand, field, and
all other functions to support delivery
of the right message.





Content Strategy
12:30 AM - 1:30 AM
Content is critical to drive better
customer experience, especially in a
pandemic, when less face-to-face
interaction is possible. Pharma’s content
creators have seen the demand rise
exponentially as companies race to
redefine their commercial
approach
While consumers’
expectations are being shaped by their
experiences with content from companies
outside pharma, pressure on margins and
balance between personalization and
regulatory compliance, have compelled some
pharma companies’ senior leadership to
fundamentally rethink content.
Demand
for content has exploded from one
channel (field force focused content),
into many other channels. The
challenges are to generate greater
volume, as well as content that is fit
for each channel, without more
resources. This necessitates a next
level of operational excellence,
applied to content operations, breaking
paradigms, news ways of working and a
change of pharma’s mindset.
In
order to speed internal processes,
content creators need to adopt a
disciplined, modular and repurposing
approach to content that is already
approved. Content discipline needs to
be applied to content creation not just
to speed up the processes but also to
enable insights to be derived from that
content.
Content should be
thought of as a ‘product’ in its own
right and purposely designed, packaged,
produced, distributed and tested. It
should be created to address a specific
problem, then put in front of the right
consumers, in order to create value. A
constant production line must deliver
this content at speed. Packaging can
make a big difference to content too.
It is no longer enough to market with
content, as now the content itself must
be marketed.
Pharma’s also has
been limited by the lack of end-to-end
technology solution stacks for content,
from content creation, to approval, to
omnichannel orchestration, to
measurement.
The reporting
structures on content need to advance
from just informing on operational
excellence parameters to intelligence
around engagement. The industry needs
to embrace the concept of “content
equals data”; digital data mean
strategic questions can be answered.
They show what is engaging, what
channels work, and why.
Content
transformation will have a ripple
effect on pharma’s entire commercial
ecosystem. Alongside the need for
internal functions to change, there
will be new roles created, especially
those revolving around content
strategy. These new roles will focus
more on the customer experience than
the brand experience.



Customer Facing Teams
12:30 AM - 1:30 AM
Both the field force and customers have
resisted using digital technology in
recent years. Now, COVID has forced a
fundamental change by challenging the
relevance of the field force and nudged
them to embrace change.
Digital
works better when there is an existing
relationship but it can be hard to
establish new relationships for a new
product through digital and virtual
channels only. Some of the early data are
indicating that HCPs are more cautious
about prescribing new products when they
cannot see reps and patients in
person.
Digital
transformation is, however, enabling
greater access and new opportunities.
Digital channels have allowed HCPs to
access MSLs at their convenience, with
more flexibility, by enabling more
“on-demand” interactions. The shift
towards specialty medications has led
to a demand for a more scientific focus
and a greater thirst for peer-to-peer
knowledge sharing via webinars,
compared to traditional detailing,
which is already becoming
archaic.
In terms of new
launches, pharma should engage the
payers in the process as early as
possible. Products that are between
Phases 2 and 3 should be discussed,
with routine commercial updates
provided to payers each quarter. Payers
are often seen as blocking innovation,
but they see their role as challenging
it. There are many launches, which are
therapeutically equivalent to existing
products in the market, but there are
very few truly innovative molecules.
Developers of these new therapeutically
equivalent products often have a biased
view towards their own product and tend
not to be objective of the value of
their own innovation. Their market
research is often narrow and has gaps
which can be offset by deeper
engagement with payers.
Pharma
should also take account of the voice
of the patient and advocacy groups, and
their ability to influence payers,
especially as the trend is towards more
specialty medicines. Pharma should have
an engagement strategy for patient
advocacy groups which could influence
payers and impact market access
decisions.
Customer-facing teams
also need upskilling. MSLs have the
scientific knowledge but need new
skills like social listening, tweeting
and the ability to have real-time
conversations. It is not just about
having access to HCPs and patients, but
also about ensuring access to the right
tools, and knowledge about how to use
them, so information can be shared.
Knowing the best format to deliver
personalized information is important,
to ensure it is most effective.
However, in the current state of “Zoom
fatigue”, the key to retaining
attention and effective engagement with
customers is the content.



Keynote 2
12:30 AM - 1:30 AM
The convergence of technology can reshape
the future of health, medicine, and
biopharma. COVID-19 is catalyzing smart
ways to improve health and
medicine.
The future of hospital
care is moving to home or “homespital,”
with the advent of virtualized care. Now
is the time to break out of old mindsets
and silos, and consider disease in a more
holistic, molecular, and genetic way.
Healthcare professionals (HCPs) must move
on from reactive, intermittent, and
episodic care, based on limited data, and
use a technology to provide continuous
data for more personalized and proactive
care.
Precision
medicine has some way to go to provide
the right drug, at the right dose, at
the right time. However, the genomic
age is bringing highly specific patient
metrics.
The challenge is to
translate all the data into actionable
insights. Incentives must shift from
volume to value.
Care is moving
from hospital to homes, to phones, to
on, and inside our bodies. Pharmacies
are becoming primary care centers,
either via traditional methods or
virtualized care. Companies such as
Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens are
creating one-stop shops for healthcare,
leveraging connected tools. Uber, Lift,
and Amazon are entering the healthcare
and pharmacy
sectors.
Developments such as
AI, big data, 3D printing, and
synthetic biology are converging and
becoming faster, cheaper, and more
widely available. They are bringing
opportunities in computational biology,
drug discovery and development with
quantum computing, designer antibodies,
companion diagnostics, plus AI with
radiology and robotic surgery as well
as continuous
monitoring.
Wearables can
measure almost every element of
physiology and behavior and, in the
near future, every drug will be related
to a sensor. The “quantified self” will
become “quantified health,” bringing
personal data to the doctor,
pharmacist, nutritionist, or clinical
trial manager. Digital biomarkers will
diagnose disease early, monitor
continuously, and provide feedback to
enable smart treatment.
There is
not one size that fits all in terms of
innovative technologies. As with
precision medicine, precision
interfaces are needed that suit
individual users.
The challenge
here, of course, is connecting the
dots. The convergence of citizen
science, body computing sensors,
genomics, AI analytics, and Internet of
Things, machine learning is driving the
pace of change from x to 10x. All we
need is an exponential mindset to take
us 10x.
