Accenture Life SciencesRethink Reshape Restructure... for better patient outcomes

A new era in life sciences

Cloud computing changes the game

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ContentsA call to first movers 3

Scanning the landscape 5New channels for developing relationships with physicians 5

Case study: Communicating with sales reps in life sciences 6

Cloud vendors target life sciences R&D 7

Innovative applications and platforms foster global collaboration 7

Cloud computing: A quick primer 9

How cloud computing will transform the life sciences industry 10Trend 1 Life sciences companies will rely on collaborative, social ecosystems to pursue personalized medicine and improve patient outcomes 11

Trend 2 New medicines and services will be developed using an entirely new paradigm, drawing on external innovation and data from multiple sources. 13

Trend 3 Convergence of technologies, enabled and driven by the cloud, will enhance and expand the way life sciences companies act on a global basis, and it will open the door to new partnerships and expanded markets. 17

Visualizing the journey ahead 19

Next steps 21

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Companies are trying to quickly and cost effectively bring to market new products with proven patient outcomes targeted at specific disease areas—and, at the same time, to balance the global expansion demands in emerging markets. The net result is pressure to:

1. Innovate in a more open, collaborative, cost effective and timely manner

2. Demonstrate efficacy and outcomes for patients, with the goal of achieving appropriate pricing of and reimbursement from governments and payers for their products

3. Promote products by leveraging multiple channels and the digital world

4. Run global supply chains and global operations

The convergence of mobility, big data, advanced analytics, and social media, all underpinned by the cloud, presents a very attractive opportunity for life sciences companies to operate in a more nimble, collaborative, customer-centric and cost-effective manner than in the past.

The life sciences industry is entering a new stage of “normal,” defined by the parameters of health-care cost reduction constraints in mature economies and the demand in emerging economies, coupled with a 10-year cycle of reduced output from the Research & Development (R&D) pipeline.

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A call to first movers We believe that to prosper in the new normal, life sciences companies will leverage cloud computing to:

Reshape their relationships with physiciansThe cost effectiveness of the direct sales force with physicians has waned in many parts of this industry. In addition, there are increasingly strict regulations controlling interactions between drug company representatives and clinicians.

Move beyond proprietary homegrown IT solutions and seize the opportunity to create enterprise-wide agility. Until now, major pharmaceutical companies have built, operated, and maintained core clinical-trial systems. System maintenance alone drains millions of dollars from these organizations annually, with little or no competitive advantage to show for the investment. For long-established companies to become technologically agile using the cloud, radical change is necessary. Pharmaceutical companies can look to other industries for guidance: there are many “flavors” of cloud from which to pick.

Transition to collaborative, multichannel, on-demand operating models focused on improving patient outcomes. Encouraged by the success of cloud customer-relationship-management (CRM) solutions, life sciences companies will change how they work, as well as what and how they sell. The benefits of the cloud—“pay as you go” charges, capital-light investment, maintenance and run costs that can be 40 percent lower than legacy systems, and data-crunching agility—will drive a new wave of more personalized products and bundled services to the market.1

Here we take a broad view of life sciences and life sciences solutions, defining them as the therapies used on disease states. We see three trends in life sciences, and they are being driven forward by the cloud as well as technologies enabled by the cloud.

Trend 1Life sciences companies will engage with other members of the value chain (for example, patients and clinicians) to improve patient outcomes.

Trend 2As data from multiple external sources including payers, providers, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, and patients themselves are aggregated and analyzed, life sciences innovation and the development of new offerings will move from “within our own walls” to a highly collaborative model through which information is shared to help improve patient outcomes.

Trend 3The continued convergence of technologies, enabled by the cloud, will enhance and expand life sciences companies’ capability to act globally and bring their life-enhancing products and services to more people around the world in mature and emerging markets.

Before we delve into these trends in greater detail, let us set the stage by looking at the levels of adoption of cloud computing in different functional areas of the life sciences.

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Scanning the landscape

One reason life sciences companies’ remain in the early adoption phase is that adoption rates vary widely across functions, with R&D in particular lagging on the overall trajectory.

New channels for developing relationships with physicians Many life-science companies are green-lighting cloud CRM, analytics, sales force automation, and post-marketing surveillance applications (for monitoring the safety of a therapy after its release). As a result, more experimentation occurs with the converging technologies in these functions than in other parts of the organization.4

The typical life-science company’s sales model was a burning platform requiring immediate attention: shrinking sales, costly older CRM systems, and stricter regulations limiting the ways sales reps could interact with clinicians. By some estimates, given the restrictions on the sales force’s freedom to act, slicing its size would likely have little effect on revenues.

Regulatory controls (related to data privacy) also apply to the data aggregated in and communicated through pharmaceutical sales and marketing applications. However, life sciences companies have made good progress in finding solutions to these challenges for their mobile-sales applications. (See “Case Study: Communicating with sales reps in life sciences.”)

Cloud providers (e.g., Veeva Systems, Oracle CRM On Demand, and Cegedim) offer full suites of CRM tools for building relationships with physicians and enabling

multichannel touch points.5 These tools, often delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), are changing the tenor and immediacy of the interactions between pharmaceutical companies and physicians.

Sales representatives as trainers and coaches Instead of asking for an occasional lunch date to share information, for example, sales personnel are giving physicians control over how and when they want to receive content—using digital self-service on the Web, with a mobile app, through the call center, or an in-person sales call. And companies are using aids such as Veeva’s closed-loop marketing tool, iRep, to channel physician feedback directly to marketing.6

This is an example of how mobile CRM platforms are incorporating contextual information from the sales visit to assist in follow-up actions, reduce the burden of updating call notes, and capture valuable information that can be used by the company’s multiple data consumers.

As sales reps navigate their changing roles, they are asking about physicians’ practice goals so that they can connect these clients with resources targeted to help (for example, communities of similar physicians or information about a particular product). In the field, the sales force has mobile access to key data, communicates in real time, and can perform increasingly advanced analytics, with data feeds coming in from activity data, external sales, and internal sales. The exchange of value broadens the opportunities to draw on physicians’ expertise in the development of new products and services.

Cloud cuts CRM costsThe business case for cloud computing to reduce fixed costs in life sciences CRM has been made clearly and repeatedly. Here are sample measures from several global pharmaceutical companies:

•ForCompanyA,applicationupdatesweremade in minutes rather than months. Real-time performance dashboards supported improved performance.

•WithcloudsolutionsinplaceatCompanyB, CRM staff was reduced by 50 percent and departmental CRM costs cut by more than 50 percent.

•AtCompanyC,thenewCRMsystemoffers free, automatic upgrades, enabling users to always be on the latest version and benefit from the latest compliance changes and system enhancements.

Life sciences companies have erred on the side of caution when it comes to adopting cloud solutions. We estimate that the life sciences market is one to three years away from widespread use of cloud computing, though momentum is building.

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Case study: Communicating with sales reps in life sciences

One of our clients, a large global pharmaceutical company, recently deployed iPads to its U.S. field sales reps. As part of that deployment, the company retired its sales-rep portal and e-mail, which had become increasingly costly to maintain and update.

Sales reps were repeatedly expressing discontent regarding the volume, format, and timing of communications to them. To make matters worse, these communications were produced and distributed manually, thereby increasing the administrative burden and reducing productivity.

The solution the client selected was a new employee portal on the Salesforce Force.com platform, which incorporates Chatter, Salesforce.com’s social-collaboration tool (similar to Facebook and customized for use in a regulated environment). This portal was designed to be a one-stop shop for information. For example:

•Chatterisnowbeingusedtoinformsalesrepsofkeycommercialandlegalannouncements.7

•Inonedivision,thehomeofficepostskeyinformation,andsalesrepscanrespondwith questions, as well as share that knowledge with the rest of the sales force.

•Communicationsarenowpushedoutinrealtime(versusonceaweek).

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Cloud vendors target life sciences R&DThe rapid increase in processing volumes and the need to globalize R&D are strong drivers for the adoption of cloud computing. Even so, life sciences R&D has not yet reached the tipping point: companies are holding back owing to regulatory compliance concerns (regarding, for example, how data can be handled and by whom), as well as their concern about protection of intellectual property (IP).

In big pharma R&D, cloud computing has been restricted primarily to a few pilot projects. We believe that will change in the next year or two as cloud vendors begin to offer cloud models for R&D applications such as bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, molecular imaging, and high-content analysis. Applications such as these share characteristics that make them prime candidates for cloud computing, including:

•Extremelylargedatasets

•Complexcalculations

•Real-timeaccesstodata

•Remoteaccessandvirtualcollaboration,allowing teams to cross-feed and leverage each other’s insights in ways that are not available with current infrastructure

To address concerns that life sciences companies have about IP protection and current regulatory restrictions, some vendors are offering vertical cloud services specifically targeted at the life sciences industry. Similar to cloud solutions in the financial-services sector, vertical vendors build dedicated service centers that typically offer more stringent physical and virtual security measures than life sciences companies have in-house (for example, full-time security professionals and dedicated 24-7 monitoring).

Innovative applications and platforms foster global collaboration A wealth of new platforms that have been enabled by the cloud have been launched for collaboration in the life sciences industry. As an example, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBI-EBI) has moved its genome browser tool, Ensembl, to the cloud to reduce latency in accessing information.9

Another instance: BT launched BT for Life Sciences R&D, which is designed as a secure and segregated cloud platform that life sciences companies can use for identifying new pharmaceutical targets.10 Using this platform, scientists can form global project groups and collaborate using social-media tools.11 The 2012 launch of TransCelerate BioPharma Inc. (TBI) by 10 large biopharmaceutical companies to drive precompetitive industry solutions highlights the thirst for new models of collaboration.12 TBI’s goal is to “substantially increase the number and quality of innovative new medicines, while eliminating inefficiencies that drive up R&D costs.”

In another example, Merck & Co. is partnering with InterKnowlogy to produce an application for manipulating and annotating high-resolution images in real time across geographic locations.14 InterKnowlogy also has created a collaboration application for the Scripts Research Institute that allows researchers to select atoms in 3-D molecules and to drag and drop their documents onto the chosen atoms to store the information in context for the next researcher.

Such platforms, which support collaboration, also support the outsourcing of R&D tasks and the concomitant reduction of fixed costs. The virtual-laboratory platform created by AstraZeneca and its partners, accessible from any device with an Internet connection, illustrates another platform that supports collaboration and other benefits.15 The laboratory is supported by virtual staff from thousands of contract research organizations (CROs). Familiar features from online markets, such as ratings and reviews, guide scientists looking for help in running their experiments.16

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Cloud computing: A quick primer

Cloud computing is a model, not a specific technology. Cloud computing, by Accenture’s definition, allows companies to access IT-based services through the Internet. Cloud services are highly configurable, adaptable and scalable. With variable pricing tied directly to use, these services require less up-front investment and ongoing operating expenditure than do traditional IT models.

In general, a cloud can take one of four forms or some combination of the four forms. The main forms are:

Private cloudsPrivate clouds are dedicated to a single company for private use and can be built within a company’s own data center or located off the premises and owned and provided by an external third party. These clouds deliver virtualized application, infrastructure, and communications services for internal business users.

Public cloudsPublic clouds are owned and provided over a network by external third parties.

Hybrid cloudsHybrid clouds blend the benefits of public and private clouds by enabling companies to retain confidential information in a private cloud while providing access to the wider choice of applications available in public clouds. A hybrid cloud may use local infrastructure owned by the insurance company, as well as infrastructure owned by a public-cloud provider (even though the operation of the cloud is handled by the insurance company).

Community cloudsCommunity clouds are collaborative resources shared by a number of organizations, perhaps in the same industry, with common interests. The costs are spread among the users. Community clouds can be hosted internally or by external third parties.

Each of these cloud forms can provide on-demand computing at one or more of the following four levels. The various types of service are described as being in a stack. Each builds on the one below it.

•Attheinfrastructure level, companies use infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings to source raw computing resources, processing power, network bandwidth and storage on an on-demand basis.

•Attheplatform level, cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings provide an environment that supports rapid evolution for key business-application development that needs continuous change. PaaS fosters on-going business innovation by enabling developers, and maintains control of costs and operations.

•Atthe application level, cloud-based applications—generally known as software-as-a-service (SaaS) are available through standard browsers, supporting device independence and anywhere access.

•Atthebusiness process level, cloud-based solutions—known as business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS)—offer Internet-enabled, externally provisioned services for managing an entire business process. These solutions differ from application clouds because they provide end-to-end process support, covering people-related processes associated with contact centers as well as software.

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How cloud computing will transform the life sciences industry

Furthermore, these services will be grounded in cloud analysis of big data from multiple sources (for example, petabytes of data on treatment outcomes from payers, social-media conversations with patients, gene-sequencing, location data, and sensor data).

In our view, there will be three key trends in the life sciences use of cloud computing:

We believe that, over the next few years, as R&D accelerates into the cloud, life sciences companies will layer service components onto their products. These services will provide value and build loyalty along the entire value chain, from patients to payers.

Trend 1Life sciences companies will engage with clinicians, payers, and patients in social ecosystems, resulting in greater exchanges of value as well as services to improve patient outcomes.

Trend 2New medicines and services will be developed using an entirely new paradigm, drawing on external innovation and data from multiple sources.

Trend 3Convergence of technologies, enabled and driven by the cloud, will further enable life sciences companies to act globally and open the door to new partnerships and expanded markets.

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Trend 1Life sciences companies will rely on collaborative, social ecosystems to pursue personalized medicine and improve patient outcomes

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In some cases, the channels already existed, and life sciences companies have simply been extending their reach into them.

The ability to launch channels fast—as well as to harvest information from these channels—is a differentiator. Any company that, for example, uses a cloud solution to launch an inside selling initiative in a manner of weeks, has an advantage over companies that require months to launch by traditional means.

Spread of social media solutionsLife sciences companies have lagged behind consumer product companies in developing social-media strategies owing, in large part, to regulatory concerns. As a result, many companies have defaulted to using social media simply as a marketing tool.17 We believe that this situation will change soon, as life sciences companies find increasingly sophisticated uses for social-media solutions. Social media will move beyond a bolt-on marketing channel to being an integral enabler of the next generation of collaboration for life sciences companies, in both their own organizations and the broader ecosystem.18

We expect medical-device companies to lag behind pharmaceutical companies in the creation of social communities of practice, joining sales teams, clinicians, and other entities in the value chain. One barrier for medical-device companies is the nature of the devices: the kits provide significant ranges of options, and the sales reps work through them with the surgeons, selecting the subset of parts that is suited to a particular patient. Indeed, in many cases, medical-device sales reps are in operating rooms with surgeons providing real-time advice.

We do see an uptick in the adoption of social-media solutions, however, in this arena. Zimmer, a leading orthopedic-device supplier, engages with patients and their health-care providers.19 Using Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud platform,

Zimmer monitors Facebook and Twitter conversations and contributes when a customer mentions joint pain or a patient tweets about recent surgery.20

As social media on cloud-based platforms grow more important, we expect to see life-science SaaS solutions trending toward unstructured content (in contrast to the structured content associated with tracking sales functions). Digital-content growth from social media and the Internet, generated by physicians, consumers, and other members of the ecosystem is a wave that will soon hit the shore. As service-based offerings mature in the cloud, greater distribution and reuse of data (structured and unstructured) will occur.

Customer insights from the voice of the customerCloud computing and the technologies it enables provide unique opportunities to generate customer insight from the voice of the consumer. Analytics engines allow life sciences companies to affiliate disparate types of data (from, for example, social media and medical records) to determine key drivers of patient behavior.

Stakeholder collaborationWe believe that life sciences companies will collaborate with other stakeholders, such as payers and accountable care organizations, to create services that can drive awareness and promote treatment awareness. Here is a possibility: as a service to physicians, life sciences companies might provide report cards on patient compliance and progress. Doing this at scale would require establishing modes of collaboration among payers, life sciences companies, diagnostic companies, physicians and patients.

Payers and life sciences companies will also collaborate in examining the life cycle of engagement with a customer. The goal of these initiatives will be to identify less expensive and more sustainable ways to treat an illness. This is not about

personalized medicine; it is about segments and how much it costs to support them—particularly those involving chronic illness.

Closed-loop marketing and multichannel management grow in importanceSales reps will use cloud-based solutions to tag marketing content that resonates with different audiences. This is one way that life sciences companies will develop a better understanding, in a shorter length of time, of how providers and customers respond to messages.

Multichannel management covers the proliferating numbers and types of routes (channels) used to reach providers and patients. The purpose of this discipline is to optimize the use of touch points on the basis of the value created from them. Such management has become critical as life sciences companies attempt to deliver a seamless message across multiple channels to a broadening set of customers—all at a significantly reduced cost base. Patient education, for example, is one way for life sciences companies to communicate directly with patients to understand why prescriptions are not filled or used.

With direct sales shrinking as a result of cost, other routes to providers are springing to life. One approach uses representatives who are not trained in the medicine but still deliver samples and help office administrators file claims. This is simply a different tactic, or route, but its purpose is increasing reach to providers.

Multichannel cloud solutions also help life sciences companies handle the regulated-content production process. Unlike past practice, production and creative work are now being handled by different teams, identified on the basis of cost-effectiveness. Regulatory controls could be breached and files lost if there were no cloud business-process layer to manage the flow.

In the past, life sciences companies had a single sales channel (direct to the provider) and a single set of tools. As the importance of the direct channel waned, a plethora of different channels (for example, inside selling) have sprung up, each of which must be managed (gathering provider input, providing consistent content, etc.).

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Trend 2New medicines and services will be developed using an entirely new paradigm, drawing on external innovation and data from multiple sources.

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Currently, cloud collaboration plays a critical role in the research aspect of R&D, while hosted applications (e.g., safety reporting and clinical data) are integral parts of development. For the supply chain, the business case for the cloud is based in cost reduction and driving market share.

Decoupling data from silosTo transition to this paradigm, life sciences companies will decouple data from their current applications and functional silos. By treating data as assets, R&D units will be on their way to collating, correlating, and reusing data from contract research organizations (CROs), partnering academic institutions, research labs, public-health institutes, electronic medical records and other sources.

For example, pharmaceutical companies will be able to aggregate and reuse clinical trial data in trial simulations, which can yield findings at lower cost. Furthermore, in sales and marketing, physician data provided as a service may be used to simplify compliance reporting.

Data standardsLack of standardization in clinical trial data has long impeded the review and approval process for new pharmaceutical products, as well as pharmaceutical companies’ ability to reuse data and integrate results from numerous CROs. Now, spurred on by regulatory agency demands for standardized data, pharmaceutical companies are beginning to integrate standards from organizations such as the nonprofit Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) throughout the clinical-trial life cycle.

These standards will help life sciences companies run clinical trials more cost effectively. Instead of having different information structures at every hospital, there will be a single conformant information architecture that all investigators use.

Data feeds and signal detectionWith cloud-computing solutions, pharmaceutical companies have the capacity to combine terabytes of data for external feeds (for example, from social sites, mobile traffic, government reports, partners, and academia) with data feeds from internal departments (for example, sales data). As a result, their capacity to detect signals in their environment is far more finely tuned than in the past, when data feeds were sourced primarily from the company’s internal data warehouse only.

Cloud platforms for clinical data analysis and content managementWe are seeing increasing numbers of pharmaceutical companies outsourcing clinical-trial execution. One major pharmaceutical company has instituted a new operating model, with the help of data aggregation services developed by Accenture and based on the Oracle Life Sciences Data Hub.11

Data from clinical trials stored in the different systems operated by the various external trial partners (CROs, academic institutions, and teaching hospitals) are aggregated in the cloud and used to provide insights, visualizations and trends that inform more intelligent study execution. In addition, the company integrates and analyzes clinical-trial subject (patient) data across studies and programs to support precision medicine, real-world analytics, product defense, and regulatory inquiries. As a result of changing the operating model, this pharmaceutical company is now able to focus its resources on timely analysis of the data, monitoring progress to increase productivity, and strategic management of its relationships with regulators.

We see aggregated life-science data increasingly stored on cloud content-management platforms with master data-management schemas (for example, Veeva Vault) in place. We also see a shift to service-based offerings—for example, hardware, data warehouse in the cloud, and maintenance and support “in a box.”

Pharmaceutical companies themselves are beginning to create and support cloud-based development platforms that are industry utilities. These platforms, which will be available as services, promote collaboration across the industry. Without the standardization of business processes and IT platforms, such platforms could never gain traction.

Socializing clinical trialsSocial media, mobile applications, and the cloud will also change how clinical trials are run. For example, in the past, a phase III clinical trial would be characterized by masses of people in different trial locations around the globe sending data to an outsourcing center, which would analyze the data and feed the results to the appropriate regulatory agency.

Now clinical teams in various parts of the world can connect through social media to compare results and potentially reach agreement on changing treatment regiments. And all of these communications can be monitored by the parent company.

Likewise, patient groups can now communicate regarding possible adverse side effects of drugs. The publicity and the visibility of these patient communications may influence pharmaceutical companies to take remedial action they might never have considered in the past. For example, companies will need to recognize that patient groups in Botswana may communicate with patient groups in London or New York about side effects.

Life sciences companies are recognizing that future innovation—rather than bubbling up within their walls—will, in many cases, emerge from the aggregation and analysis of data from multiple external sources.

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Patient services wrapped around products to improve outcomesDigital channels will facilitate direct communication between life sciences companies and the consumers of their products. This direct channel can be used to gather data, as well as to deliver services wrapped around a product offering, with the intent of improving adherence to regimens and promoting health. Such services are likely to represent an increasingly large percentage of the revenue stream for life sciences.

Take Comfort Zone™, the first comprehensive location-management system designed specifically for Alzheimer’s patients and caregivers.21 This custom-designed monitoring solution integrates electronic patient-tracking devices with advanced location-tracking platforms to help improve home care and reduce the overall cost of care.

Personal devices (for example, tablets and smartphones with Bluetooth 4.0) can sync with intelligent medical devices such as heart or glucose monitors to unobtrusively collect information on patients’ health.22

Boehringer Ingelheim is piloting a scheme to modify behaviors in Type II diabetes patients by providing them with information, incentives, and, where necessary, intervention. Adherence is monitored through biometric feedback from a wireless glucose meter.23

In addition, scientists at General Electric are developing a new generation of wireless medical body-area network (MBAN) sensors that can be attached to the body like a small adhesive bandage. The sensors draw power from tiny integrated batteries and use radio waves to communicate with receivers. Such sensors will not only improve patient outcomes but also help life sciences companies bring products to market more quickly through “in-life trials.”24

Gartner points out: “Payers, already very influential in Europe, are gaining even more influence in the U.S., driving greater attention to contracting, revenue management, and price-rebate decisions. This will drive more attention to managed market channels, change the selling and contracting approaches, and align clinical

and marketing messages to a business case.”25 To collaborate well with payers, life sciences companies need to be able to generate real-world evidence through data and analysis—and we see this happening now.26

Identifying the right therapies (personalized medicine)Real-world analytics takes advantage of big data to enable new business services and reimbursement models. We will see patient-specific longitudinal electronic-medical-record (EMR) data aggregated with data from molecular diagnostics and genomic and genetic research, diagnostic imaging solutions in the cloud, clinical trials, pharmaceutical companion diagnostics, payer information and electronically reported patient information.

Molecular diagnostics, imaging, and EMRs provide their own essential perspective when linked together digitally to perform analytics on a patient’s data. Medical diagnostics, for example, give providers a window into a patient’s disease at the molecular and genetic levels, while imaging provides a snapshot at a specific time. Mining the data will influence both providers’ and patients’ choices about appropriate therapies—and this is a far more effective approach than relying on product benefits and risks that are based on the response of a population of people.

Analysis conducted utilizing cloud technologies, followed by distribution and sharing among partners in the ecosystem, helps produce insights on improving care and selecting the therapies with the highest overall value to patients and health-care systems. Cloud computing helps enable personalized medicine through the scalable computing “muscle” required to aggregate and analyze extensive amounts of data (e.g., data produced by assays).

Having a patient’s data in the cloud is essential for easy access and collaboration among the many different individuals involved in providing therapies to that patient, determining whether the therapies are effective and paying for them—as well as in looking for trends across anonymized data. Until a personalized database for each patient can be managed, health outcomes may not be appreciably different.

Is telemedicine the next “killer” app?In the early 1990s, the information superhighway was a hot topic, but there were barriers to making it effective at scale. Telemedicine is at the same position now. The appeal of telemedicine is obvious, but its point-to-point nature, the incongruous information standards, the bandwidth requirements, and the long-term need for the data have all presented huge barriers.

The growing adoption of cloud technologies could be the tipping point for telemedicine. The cloud allows location-independent storage and analysis of data. It supports real-time interaction by multiple parties. Mobile apps allow individuals in remote locations to be shown how to complete diagnostic tests. And, if connectivity is built into products, as is becoming the case, the cloud can enable the aggregation of key data streams produced by a patient’s care.

When this foundation is laid, life sciences companies may choose to change their business models to develop an array of services while looking for adjacencies in the marketplace that are enabled by telemedicine.

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Scale and pay-as-you-go analysisIn terms of both IT and opportunity, the cloud will make analysis far less costly. As Gartner points out: “The potential to deal with wide swings in compute requirements or short-term projects, using a cloud provider to deliver a reasonable cost structure, is the main reason cloud-based grid computing will soar along the Hype Cycle, as solutions for less expensive and faster analysis tools become more available.”27

New cloud technologies (for example, the Apache Hadoop) make it possible to store, aggregate, and work with massive amounts of data in entirely new ways. These technologies will be used widely for data-intensive processes such as next-generation rapid gene sequencing that will produce an ever-enlarging stream of data when personalized medicine based on genetic information enables targeted treatments.

The human genome is evolving from being a biology problem to a data problem. By some estimates, more than 20 percent of the genome provides pharmaceutical targets—and of those, only about 5 percent have been covered. As life sciences companies set their sights on additional promising areas of the genome, a new wave of products is expected to result.

Predictive analyticsAs in any other industry, predictive analytics is a competitive differentiator for life sciences companies. Those with powerful analytics engines are the most likely to be able to employ the massive volumes of structured and unstructured data to improve health outcomes, manage regulatory and supply vicissitudes, and sense new opportunities. With the cloud, sophisticated analytics capability and tools can be rented, but the coherent data strategy needs to be a core in-house capability. Given the costs and time required to build these capabilities, companies attempting to build proprietary solutions for this purpose will likely miss the opportunity.

Finding commonalities across national markets will become more urgent as regional markets expand.

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Trend 3Convergence of technologies, enabled and driven by the cloud, will enhance and expand the way life sciences companies act on a global basis, and it will open the door to new partnerships and expanded markets.

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Content is kingWe believe that the companies that own the management of that content, its analysis, and the processes surrounding it will dominate the market and that all the services associated with the gathering and consumption of the data will be channeled through the cloud. Leaders in the market will create a ubiquitous content environment for building relationships with patients and providers using the channel of their choice. Seamless presentation of content across channels will be expected—a provider will expect to receive the same information from a call center representative as from a literature search on the company’s site.

Global systemsThe global flow of data to and from life sciences companies will transform how pharmaceutical companies go to market. Instead of tailoring different drugs for different regions, they will approach the global market as a single entity.

They will evolve from regional business units focused on localized business to a single global system supported by cloud platforms accessible from anywhere in the world. Such an evolution has many implications for the business, including the challenge of harmonizing as many processes as possible (a 70-30 split of global-local, for example). One important benefit: cloud-based systems will unify the user experience, making it more consistent across countries.

Efficient global systems will be essential as growth becomes increasingly dependent on market share in emerging markets. In 2005, China and Brazil constituted just 5 percent of the total pharmaceutical market of the top ten nations; by 2016, however, according to IMS Health predictions, the four BRIC nations—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—will all be among the top ten global pharmaceutical markets and will constitute 30 percent of the top-ten

market.28 It will be essential for companies to create a single coherent strategy instead of trying to coordinate separate supply chain and commercial strategies.

The BRIC markets are maturing quickly, and they need infrastructure quickly. Cloud computing is the only realistic option that meshes with both of those requirements —particularly given the pervasiveness and low cost of mobile devices.

Supply chains: Uneven maturitySupply chains cover a wide swath of functions: developing and launching, planning, sourcing, making, delivering, and helping customers. The ability of life sciences companies to move the supply chain into the cloud depends not only on their own readiness but also the availability of cloud solutions (which are currently uneven) and the willingness of cloud service suppliers.

Manufacturing was one of the early cloud-pioneering functions—and planning is likely to be next on the frontier. Right now, however, companies are building a track record for cloud-driven delivery. Witness Pfizer’s supply chain, which must meet the dramatically different delivery requirements of the patented and generic drug markets. Through a recent supply-chain initiative, the pharmaceutical company required its 500 suppliers to implement a cloud-based common-information-exchange framework on which each supplier was represented as a node on a virtual supply chain.

Pfizer’s vice president of supply network services, Jim Cafone, traced the progress over a year and a half—from “‘zero shipment traceability’ to a device-independent platform that has already handled more than 40,000 shipments.”29

This new visibility is essential to expanding global markets. Cafone pointed out that the virtualized infrastructure has made it possible for Pfizer “to land products into portions of the world where before we and

the rest of the industry were flying blind. For example, we know when a product lands in Kenya or anywhere else in the world, because we have that traceability.”30

Expanded markets for life sciencesThe convergence of technologies, enabled and driven forward by cloud computing, will expand new markets for life sciences. An example is the cluster of nanobiotechnologies, which focus on understanding and then employing the physical, chemical, and biological properties of nanoparticles. Nanobioelectronics, for example, will produce new treatments for neurological disease through the integration of nanotechnology, stem cell research, biomedical engineering, and brain and spinal cord imaging.

Alignment on sourcing modelLife sciences companies are evolving toward a new model for sourcing that pushes to the middle of the outsourcing and partnering spectrum. This new sourcing model relies on strategic partners to handle the operational load, processes, and technology so that life sciences companies can focus on the science of drug development and safety. There has been a concomitant boom in mergers and acquisitions among service providers as they rush to meet these new demands.

On the basis of what we see in our work within the industry, we believe that biopharmaceutical companies will realize value as drug development costs drop 20 to 40 percent, the length of time to reach approval for new compounds is cut by 10 percent, and life sciences companies gain access to external data for advanced analytics.

The convergence of social media, advanced analytics, digital media, mobility, and the cloud will be highly disruptive to the life sciences industry. Content—the massive amounts of data gathered from patients, physicians, payers, R&D, and academia—will be king.

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Visualizing the journey ahead

As they move from early-stage adoption (phase 1) to global R&D focused on patient outcomes, life sciences companies will reap benefits that will speed their progress. For example, they will benefit from economies of scale, thereby reducing total cost of ownership. They will gain the flexibility and agility they need in order to experiment without massive “sunk” investments. They will find it easier to work with other stakeholders, such as payers, and to

support service provider, joint venture, and alliance arrangements.

Furthermore, they will be able to handle volatile levels of demand and to access the latest technological innovations, including methods for managing and analyzing big data. For example, the Encode project sponsored by the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute has already generated more than 15 terabytes of

data and has used 300 years of computer processing time. This study—which delves into the role of “dark matter,” the DNA surrounding genes, on genetic expression—is one of many computing-intensive studies that may result in new targets for the pharmaceutical industry.31

It is our belief that in order to lead rather than follow the evolution of the life sciences industry, companies will have to make sure that their R&D functions catch up with (if not surpass) their sales and marketing functions in cloud adoption.

Leading life sciences companies will be able to leverage the cloud as a source of competitive advantage. Examples• Outcome based, payment by results

• Integrated diagnostics and services

• Accelerated product development

• Point solutions for R&D, Manufacturing & Supply and sales and service

• Internal and external collaboration

• Storage and compute

• Email

• Collaboration tools

Leading life sciences companies will be:• Realizing the available value from level 1

• Proactively and systematically exploring opportunities at level 2

• Preparing for level 3 as the cloud matures – depth and scope of cloud market increases

Product centric Customer centric

Core business applications

Functional applications

Commodity IT

Scop

e

Extent to which cloud is a source of competitive advantage

Reduce IT TCO and capex

Ad hoc strategic enabler

Integral part of strategy development and execution

Value lever

1

2

3

Uncertain and riven with change

Health outcomes and service focused

Collaborative and analytics enabled

Reduced capital costs and variable cost profile

Figure 1: Cloud maturity model for life sciences

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Next stepsWe believe that to better prepare for the cloud-enabled future, life sciences companies should consider these five steps:

1. Run cloud test-and-learn cycles. The barrier to entry is smaller than most think. A company can maintain its traditional channels and subscribe to, say, 50 licenses on a CRM cloud provider for two months. Companies should try this out and explore how to calculate ROI in the cloud.

Consider merging cloud solutions with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies, which enable organizations to launch and learn from quick low-cost experiments and to react quickly to market shifts. PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software or provisioning hosting capabilities. Force.com, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google App Engine, and Windows Azure are examples.32

2. Redefine what is core and noncore.New entrants have an advantage because they have no legacy infrastructure. If they are resizing, it is by hiring. Well-established companies need to set aside assumptions and biases about what makes their companies great and to redraw the circle around the core.

It is also important to identify the parts of the business that have the right characteristics for the cloud (for example, large data volumes and experimental). In addition, companies need to assess the changes it will be necessary to make to the internal organization. Many departments (for example, IT and R&D informatics) will become cloud service brokers. Life-science operating models will need to change to enable hybrid models, and companies will need to build the capabilities to contract, ramp up and run cloud-based services.

3. Encourage use of social technologies across the organization.Companies need to create a vision and a roadmap for social collaboration. They have to look for ways to increase adoption by prioritizing and embedding social-media technologies into processes; providing support; and incentivizing behaviors, leadership sponsorship and measurement. At the same time, they should address the compliance issues around the use of these technologies.

4. Define the data that is valuable to the enterprise. It is important to identify the life cycle as well as the security and compliance attributes associated with the data. Companies should use this information map to prioritize the data services that will be important for the business and to establish a roadmap for data services.

In the old way of doing things, data were fragmented in different silos and there were multiple versions of the “truth.” Development delays and costs piled up because scientists were not able to access data in a timely fashion or leverage each other’s work at scale. These limitations created compliance risks for companies as well.

In the new way of doing things, life sciences companies must find a way to integrate internal data and aggregate external data from its alliance partners. Then scientists will no longer ask, “Where’s my data?” They will have access to the data and the analytics they need to reach actionable insights more quickly.

5. Map out a plan to create an agile technology foundation for the company.So far, few companies have determined how to build an agile platform that underpins the R&D, commercial, and manufacturing segments of their business. The goal should be to use cloud computing to leapfrog from the company’s current position to one of multichannel seamlessness. Cloud computing lays the foundation for an agile business, enabling the organization to expand and change its capabilities quickly through incremental steps.

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References1 Accenture, Life Sciences Cloud Point of

View, 2012.2 Iain Dey, “Barclays snubs tech titans to

save billions,” The Sunday Times (UK), January 6, 2013.

3 Charles Arthur, “Barclays iPad order could open door to wider bank use,” The Guardian, November 26, 2012.

4 Accenture Research, “Life Sciences Trends in Cloud Computing,” February 2012.

5 www.veevasystems.com; http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/crmondemand/index.html; and www.cegedim.com/.

6 http://www.veevasystems.com/crm/irep/.7 Ovum. “Chatter turbocharges online

communities for pharma,” October 2012.8 Gareth Cook, “How crowdsourcing is

changing science,” The Boston Globe, November 11, 2011.

9 Matt Wood, “Cloud computing drives faster innovation in the life sciences,” February 1, 2012, http://clouduser.de/meinungen/cloud-computing-drives-faster-innovation-in-life-sciences-6777.

10 www.btplc.com.11 “BT for Life Sciences R&D: the cloud

for accelerated discovery,” BT Group press release, April 25, 2012, www.btplc.com/news/Articles/Showarticle.cfm?ArticleID=EA6EF700-9B3E-499C-8AC1-AF16182F3B48.

12 Abbott, Astra-Zeneca, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Roche and Sanofi.

13 Accenture, TransCelerate BioPharma FAQs, September 2012.

14 www.merck.com/index.html; www.interknowlogy.com/projects.html.

15 www.astrazeneca.com.

16 “AstraZeneca and partner Assay Depot have launched a virtual research laboratory aimed at helping its scientists create R&D collaborations,” Pharmafile, July 31, 2012, http://www.inpharm.com/news/173688/astrazeneca-launches-virtual-research-laboratory.

17 Accenture, “Seizing a world of opportunity: Leveraging technology to enable high performance in the life sciences industry,” 2011.

18 Accenture, Technology Vision 2012: What it means for Life Sciences, 2012.

19 www.zimmer.com.20 http://www.salesforce.com/

socialmarketing/.21 www.alz.org/comfortzone/; Accenture,

Technology Vision 2012: What it means for Life Sciences, 2012.

22 Accenture, Technology Vision 2012: What it means for Life Sciences, 2012, referencing http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57394350-94/new-ipad-first-tablet-with-bluetooth-4.0-should-you-care/

23 “Boehringer collaborates for online ‘beyond pill’ plan,” http://www.inpharm.com/news/173408/boehringer-collaborates-online-beyond-pill-plan.

24 www.gereports.com/facebook-for-the-body; Accenture, Technology Vision 2012: What it means for Life Sciences, 2012.

25 Steven Lefebure, “Hype Cycle for Life Sciences, 2012,” Gartner, July 30, 2012.

26 Accenture, Technology Vision 2012: What it means for Life Sciences, 2012.

27 Steven Lefebure, “Hype Cycle for Life Sciences, 2012, Gartner, July 30, 2012.

28 IMS Health report, May 2012, in Accenture, Winning in Emerging Markets to Drive Growth in the Life Sciences Industry, 2013.

29 Paul Taylor, “Pfizer moves supply chain to cloud,” September 11, 2012.

30 Paul Taylor, “Pfizer moves supply chain to cloud,” September 11, 2012.

31 Ovum, “‘Dark matter’ shows Big Data is not a fad for pharma,” 2012.

32 www.force.com/; http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/; https://developers.google.com/appengine/; www.windowsazure.com/en-us.

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Raj Bhasin leads development of Accenture’s Life Sciences Technology Vision and Technology Architecture Blueprints. Raj has worked for over 16 years in the Life Sciences Industry working with global biopharma and consumer health companies in developing their IT strategies, implementing new technology and driving strategic cost reduction programmes. Raj co-authored our Life Sciences Technology vision for 2012 and he is based in our offices in London, UK. rajesh.bhasin@accenture.com

Hussain Mooraj brings more than 20 years of experience in manufacturing, supply chain, technology, sales and marketing and strategy, consulting to his role. He works closely with senior executives from global companies across the healthcare value chain (manufacturers, wholesalers, pharmacies, payers, and providers), advising them on business strategy and technology best practices. In 2009 he was voted by Pharma Voice as one of the 100 most influential and inspiring individuals in Life Sciences. hussain.mooraj@accenture.com

Anne O’Riordan is the Global Industry Managing Director for Accenture’s Life Sciences Practice. In this role she leads the practice serving Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology, Consumer Health and Medical Products clients across the globe. Anne is also currently leading the Europe and Latin America Life Sciences practice for Accenture in addition to her global role. She has been with Accenture for 23 years. Throughout this time she has dedicated her career to working with Life Sciences companies around the world in the US, Europe and Asia. Anne has been on the board of the Products Operating Group of Accenture since 2006. Anne has published numerous articles on the Life Sciences industry over the past 20 years. anne.oriordan@accenture.com

Geoffrey D. Schmidt is a senior executive in Accenture’s Life Sciences R&D practice and is the global leader of its R&D Technology organization. Geoff has 17 years of technology consulting experience working with leading health and life sciences companies, with a focus on IT transformation, system delivery, and outsourcing. He is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. geoffrey.d.schmidt@accenture.com

Rajive Wickramasing is a managing director in Accenture’s Emerging Technology practice. His responsibilities include leading Accenture’s Software as a Service (SaaS) practice for life sciences and leading Accenture’s multichannel offerings for life sciences. Mr. Wickramasinghe has built several industry-leading assets and is a thought leader in SaaS and mobility. He is a subject advisor to several pharmaceutical client teams. rajive.wickramasing@accenture.com About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 261,000 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$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About Life SciencesAccenture’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 consulting, outsourcing and technology projects around the globe in 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.

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