Convergence of technology, pharma key to improve patient outcomes: Experts

Hyderabad: The first day of the 19th edition of BioAsia witnessed a panel discussion with deliberations on the significance of partnerships between IT and Pharma companies to digitise healthcare and to venture into the new paradigm of delivering healthcare for better patient outcomes. Industry experts emphasised that data analytics will help the healthcare fraternity understand […]

Hyderabad: The first day of the 19th edition of BioAsia witnessed a panel discussion with deliberations on the significance of partnerships between IT and Pharma companies to digitise healthcare and to venture into the new paradigm of delivering healthcare for better patient outcomes. Industry experts emphasised that data analytics will help the healthcare fraternity understand patient metrics better and provide value-based care.

Dr David Rhew, Global Chief Medical Officer & VP of Healthcare, Microsoft, USA, said, “One of the things we’ve seen throughout the transformation over the past couple years is that the way digital technologies and data are being managed is changing greatly. Data has been present through healthcare. But it was always difficult for us to analyse that because it was not interoperable. It is now becoming more interoperable; we are becoming much more aware on how these data sets can be brought together. That’s where AI and ML come in play.”

---

Jayesh Ranjan, principal secretary, Industries & Commerce Department, Government of Telangana commented on how Hyderabad allowed a greater accessibility, ease, and support for pharma companies to develop, manufacture and supply medicines even at the peak of the pandemic.

Davidek Herron, Global Head of Digital, Roche Group, Switzerland noted that Covid has pushed Roche to rethink some of their systems such as supply chains, connecting patients and commercialisation. He said, “For our Spinal muscular atrophy patients who were unable to go to the hospital, we had to figure out how to get our services and medicines to their doorstep. In fact, we collaborated with Microsoft in the Middle East to create a breast cancer AI tool to avoid misinterpretations of mammogram readings.”

Ashwini Mathur, Head Clinical Technology and Innovation, Novartis, Ireland, while explaining how data helped them in patient recruitment for trials said, “Since the regular patient visits were disrupted, and a lot of sites were facing trouble in recruiting patients for trials. Using data and digital technologies, we have created mechanisms where we were able to tell the clinical teams ahead of times, that certain sites will have trouble recruiting patients and it will be easier in certain sites based on Covid incident rates in those areas. We aligned publicly available data, our internally operational data and clinical trial data, all in a digital, smart way to decide where patients should be recruited.”

Hyderabad is a hub for a lot of data and digital data-science based startups. Close to 100 projects are in progress at Novartis Biome in Hyderabad, Mathur noted.

---

Now you can get handpicked stories from Telangana Today on Telegram everyday. Click the link to subscribe.

Click to follow Telangana Today Facebook page and Twitter .

---