5 Reasons Every Pharmaceutical Company Should Prioritize Digital Transformation

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most exciting, innovative industries to be part of. Known for its cutting-edge R&D, groundbreaking clinical trials, and tightly managed production processes, pharmaceutical companies have alleviated pain and suffering for countless patients, eradicated diseases, and dramatically extended patients’ lives. 

Despite these remarkable healthcare advances, the pharmaceutical industry is not leading the way with digital transformation. In fact, pharmaceutical industries aren’t even keeping pace with digital transformation in other industries. Just 39% of pharmaceutical and life science companies report that they’re modernizing their workplaces using digital collaboration tools—5% less than the global average for companies across all industries, according to 2021 PwC industry research. 

This gap between medical innovation and technology innovation poses significant challenges:Pharmaceutical companies work in an ultra-competitive, fast-paced industry marked by high R&D costs and unrelenting regulatory oversight. If pharmaceutical companies want to survive and thrive in this environment, they must work toward operating more rapidly, more cost-effectively, and more collaboratively and creatively every year.

Digital Transformation in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Digital transformation is key to helping pharmaceutical companies comprehensively transform how they operate and become the modern, resilient companies they want to be. Through digital transformation, pharmaceutical companies eliminate disconnected, manual processes that cause key information to become siloed and prevent teams from communicating and collaborating effectively. Through digital transformation, pharmaceutical companies create seamless, modern experiences for their workforce, as well as the patients and healthcare providers they serve. Through digital transformation, pharmaceutical companies build an operating ecosystem that supports continuous innovation and reinvention. 

Let’s take a deeper dive into the top five reasons every pharmaceutical company should embrace and prioritize digital transformation:

1. Digital Transformation Improves Work Processes

   To thrive, every company needs to streamline and optimize its work processes. Manual, siloed tasks must be automated and integrated. Institutional knowledge that lives in employees’ heads should be captured and utilized consistently. The chance of human error eliminated whenever possible. Systems and processes rapidly scaled to match need and demand. For all of these challenges, pharmaceutical companies turn to digital transformation to create the frameworks, systems, and quality-control processes necessary for an optimized working environment. And they reimagine every aspect of how work gets done—both day-to-day tasks and long-term, strategic planning initiatives.

2. Digital Transformation Creates Transparency and Visibility

   In most pharmaceutical companies, critical information and data can be hard to come by. Instead of being accessible at employees’ fingertips, data tends to be siloed in inaccessible and hard-to-find places where it’s not synced or shared across systems and applications. Digital transformation empowers pharmaceutical companies to improve visibility and transparency without sacrificing control or security. Using easy-to-use, cloud-based technology solutions, pharmaceutical companies build digital workflows that logically connect information and systems together. Meanwhile, automation and AI allows teams to share and find key data sets, gain instant access to relevant analyses, insights, and feedback, and develop apps and other digital workflows—with little to no coding experience required.

3. Digital Transformation Improves Service and Care Standards

   Pharmaceutical companies exist to provide consistently top-notch service and care to patients and providers. Whether it’s managing a clinical trial, communicating key care information to providers, or going through a compliance audit to ensure standards are being maintained, digital transformation provides the systems and processes necessary for pharmaceutical companies to elevate service and care standards. Not only do these efforts improve communication, coordination, and information sharing, they also change perceptions about the quality of the service and care patients and providers receive.

4. Digital Transformation Reduces Time to Market

   Pharmaceutical companies are under intense pressure to contain and reduce costs without sacrificing quality or lengthening time to market. Often, pharmaceutical companies compete in markets filled with regulatory hurdles, complex patents and intellectual property and multiple versions of medications. Digital transformation uses automation, AI and redesigned workflows to help pharmaceutical companies get more work done in the same amount of time by fewer people. These workflows optimize communication, collaboration and information sharing. Pharmaceutical companies can accelerate R&D processes, streamline clinical trials, and interact more rapidly, efficiently and meaningfully with patients and providers. Consequently, pharmaceutical companies introduce breakthroughs and new products faster and with less friction.

5. Digital Transformation Enhances Compliance and Risk Management

   Pharmaceutical companies operate under some of the strictest, most wide-ranging compliance requirements of any industry. They manage risks of all kinds—from cyberattacks and patient data breaches to personnel challenges. Most pharmaceutical companies use disconnected, manual processes and systems for managing compliance and risk issues on a piecemeal basis. Visibility is poor, and these issues aren’t managed in consistent, standardized ways. Digital transformation empowers pharmaceutical companies to unify and centralize all of their compliance and risk management activities. Digital transformation also allows security teams to conduct this work in more comprehensive, systematic, consistent ways. Equally important, pharmaceutical companies gain scalable solutions that can adapt as the business grows and needs change over time.

Pharmaceutical companies must move faster and more nimbly than ever before to remain competitive and provide world-class experiences to patients and providers. Although pharmaceutical companies are not known for leading the way with digital transformation, digital innovation is possible with existing technology. Pharmaceutical companies investing in these technologies will see optimized work processes, increased transparency and visibility into all areas of their operations, improved service and care standards, reduced time to market and enhanced ability to manage compliance and risks.

Crossfuze Can Help

Crossfuze understands the importance of digital transformation for the pharmaceutical industry and has deep experience using the ServiceNow platform to rapidly modernize and streamline operations. To learn more about Crossfuze’s approach to building more resilient, efficient business ecosystems with ServiceNow, please reach out to Crossfuze today. We will be happy to share more with you about the importance of investing in digital transformation to achieve all of your long-term goals.