- Improved Compliance
- Real Consumer Engagement
- Enable Digital Reorder
& Replenish
Beyond the Pill: An Exploration of the Biggest Challenges
As we explored in our other blog post, “Beyond the Pill Overview,” the pharmaceutical industry has begun huge shifts into a more customer-centric and outcome based focus and goal. It is no longer about just providing patients and customers with medications and pills to help treat their illnesses and ailments – it’s about helping patients achieve long-term health and improving overall wellbeing.
Patients expect their pharmaceutical companies to do more for them and to help in ways beyond just providing medications and pill to fix or help their ailments. With these shifts in our society, the pharmaceutical industry has no choice but to move into this new territory and adapt and evolve with our ever-growing world.
In order to achieve these large sweeping goals, the help of technology, IoT-based devices, Big Data, and the like, play a critical role in this transition. These elements are what will transition Pharma into to new world of ingestible tech pills, health-based wearables, and smartphone apps.
However, these kinds of systems are often challenging to develop and get just right – for both the company and the patient. Additionally, there are a host of other challenges to consider throughout this transition phase.
In this post, we will take a look at two of the most common challenges the pharmaceutical industry faces by going Beyond the Pill.
Proper Leadership
Many different pharmaceutical companies have attempted to create beyond the pill strategies and outcomes, but most have not been able to fully follow through. This is because these companies fail to meet specific objectives and their efforts have been forcibly stopped and pulled. These failures are often caused by proper leadership issues and generally knowledge about what exactly needs to be done to achieve a specific end goal.
Since this is uncharted water, people placed in positions to lead these new efforts are generally people already within the company. These individuals typically do not have specific experience and training within this new technology centered and digital world. This makes creating and developing beyond the pill technologies and solutions challenging, if not completely impossible.
Regulation Issues
We also see many issues with proper regulations as well. If we take a look at new start-up companies not directly connected to Pharma, specifically digital health start-ups, these companies are not required to follow or comply with any regulations hat the pharmaceutical industry currently has. This places Pharma at a substantial disadvantage and presents some unknown consequences. If we want to see ultimate success in the meshing of these to complex and high beneficial worlds, we must seek an industry that not just complies with regulations in all aspects, but also aims to work together as one so the end goal can be as successful as possible.