Convergence of Business & Research

Digital technology platforms enable increased collaboration between the business function of an organization and their research and development functions to enhance drug development, personalize healthcare, and meet newer standard requirements such as the DSCSA act and ‘track and trace’. The goal is to combine the data generated from R&D and combine that with supply chain data to gain insights and optimize the delivery of drugs.

After the webinar discussion, attendees had several questions. Most of them centered around how HCLS organizations stepping into digital technology platform transformation balance the multiple challenges they face with the need to drive revenue and cost savings for their core business. Here are the answers to the top, most asked questions:

1. How long does it take typically to build and mature a digital technology platform?

The timeline for building and deploying the platform depends on the organization and how quickly they are willing to take decisions. For large enterprises, we can deploy digital technology platforms in 8 to 10 weeks. We bring automation and accelerators to the table for customers, and the process is all about integrating with your existing systems (security or identity and access management). But if there are some already existing artifacts, depending on how those artifacts play around with the best practices, it might take a little bit longer.

2. What are the success criteria of a digital technology platform?

The success criteria we noticed while deploying the digital technology platforms for our customers are how quickly they adopt the platform, push their applications or workloads to the platform. We see how the consumption of the digital technology platform is increasing whether it’s month over month or quarter over quarter. We know that when users complain, they have applications that are not ready to get deployed to the platform because security and compliance let things down. We call it a success.

3. Could DTP apply to automotive or any other industry. Any specifics for pharma, healthcare & life sciences? Differences across business domains, go to market vs R&D or supply chain?

The process will not change when deployed across industries; minor differences might be there. For example, data privacy and regulations are slightly more stringent in the pharma, healthcare, and life sciences industries. We see a lot of capabilities can be enabled when there is integration between business functions, and digital technology platforms remain to ensure secure data sharing.

4. Regarding GxP, do we have to validate this kind of platform in a pharma context? (computerized system validation)

Yes, it has to be validated, mainly if the application or the deployed system is being used for drug development. With our industry-leading cloud DevOps best practices and solutions, we help companies deploy their application in an agile manner and offer a continuous HIPAA/GxP compliant and secure framework for their infrastructure.

5. What is the biggest hurdle in operating a digital platform optimally?

It’s about making decisions; we believe that one of the principles of digital transformation is agility. We see digital technology platforms being slowed down or deployments delayed when customers try to overthink and build the perfect platform where we see the most significant challenges.

Now it’s time to realize the full potential of digital technology platforms to push boundaries and transform your business process at scale.