Meet Pharma Innovation for Health Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Health Cloud solves pharma industry challenges.
- Describe how Health Cloud benefits pharma organizations.
- Identify major components of Health Cloud for Pharma.
Prerequisites
Before you start this module, consider the recommended prerequisites to best prepare you to learn.
Recommended
Completion of these modules:
Pharma Challenges
This is Olivia. She’s an executive and works in the pharmaceutical industry.
She loves working in pharma and is excited that as an executive, she can influence the development, manufacturing, and delivery of life-saving treatments and solutions for many health conditions.
Olivia has worked for several pharmaceutical companies. Through her hard work, she keeps climbing the corporate ladder. Recently, she scored a new job at Cumulus Pharma as its newly appointed chief information officer (CIO). Way to go, Olivia!
Cumulus Pharma is based out of Boston and is one of the most prestigious pharmaceutical companies in the US. They develop and produce medications for common conditions, like type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.
As an experienced pharma professional, Olivia is aware of the market disruptions in the pharma industry and the serious challenges they impose on companies like Cumulus. Some of the challenges are:
- The push for personalized healthcare: Personalized medicine matches individuals with the right therapy, at the right time. It changes the way healthcare providers diagnose and treat complex diseases and is revolutionizing patient care. Global sales for cell and gene therapies are growing fast. Cumulus Pharma and other pharma organizations must determine how to operationalize, scale, and deliver solutions in this growing market.
- Rising patient expectations: Patient expectations have changed, and they keep evolving. Today, patients take a more active role in their healthcare journeys and expect more from pharma organizations. Patients want holistic support programs, easier access to care, and transparency from healthcare providers—all based on their preferences. Cumulus must continue to find ways to meet new patient demands. This includes focusing on early detection of medical conditions and intervention with the best treatments.
- Accelerated pace of innovation: The pressure to bring innovations to market quickly is at an all-time high. The accelerated pace of innovation has set a new standard for time to market. Stakeholders no longer hope for faster timelines, but expect them from organizations, including Cumulus.
- New model of healthcare provider engagement: Over the past few years, Cumulus has seen an increase in remote engagement with healthcare providers. This means increased interactions over the phone, email, and portals, instead of in person. Providers want either all virtual or a hybrid model for their interactions with Cumulus. They expect easy, efficient meetings using their preferred channels, whether in person, digitally, or combination of both.
Olivia learns that Cumulus has been handling these challenges exceptionally well. Cumulus uses Salesforce solutions, including Health Cloud, to manage its business. Olivia has heard about Health Cloud, and she is intrigued. Doesn’t Salesforce create products primarily for sales and marketing? How can Health Cloud help solve challenges in the pharma industry? She decides to find out what makes Health Cloud such an attractive solution for pharma organizations like Cumulus.
Let’s follow Olivia as she discovers the power and benefits of Health Cloud.
The Health Cloud Platform
Health Cloud supports all key stakeholders through each stage of the life sciences product lifecycle. It’s built on the Salesforce platform and brings together clinical and nonclinical data into a single source of truth. With Health Cloud, organizations gain a 360-degree view of each customer to elevate the health experience, drive proactive engagement, and influence the best outcomes.
Pharma organizations use Health Cloud for several benefits.
- Streamlined patient-engagement processes: Organizations can scale therapeutic-specific support programs to reduce operational costs and get more patients into therapy faster.
- Patient service team collaboration: Health Cloud uses the power of MuleSoft, the Salesforce integration platform. MuleSoft provides prebuilt API connectors to join data from different sources. This breaks down data silos and drives team collaboration.
- Data-driven insights: The built-in analytics capabilities give pharma organizations insights into their patient and healthcare provider data, so they can create personalized experiences and deliver better program results.
Health Cloud Capabilities for Pharma
Health Cloud is a purpose-built solution with capabilities designed specifically for pharma organizations. It offers dozens of features and capabilities that power pharma business processes and provide a 360-degree view of their clients. If you look at the capabilities individually, you may not get a clear picture of what Health Cloud is all about. So instead, let’s look at these solutions for pharma organizations, all powered by Health Cloud.
- Patient Services
- Medical Affairs Call Center
- Clinical Trial Patient Engagement
- Advanced Therapy Management
Patient Services
Patient services are programs run by pharma organizations to help their patients on therapies manage their conditions and achieve better outcomes. These programs help patients with education and therapeutic support, financial assistance, benefits verification, and specialized nurses. With the Patient Services solution, Pharma organizations can:
- Streamline patient-engagement processes.
- Drive patient services team collaboration.
- Surface data-driven insights to help define proactive next steps.
Medical Affairs Call Center
Healthcare providers, pharmacists, nurses, and others send medical inquiry requests (MIRs) to pharma organizations when they want to know more about their products. For instance, they may have specific queries, such as questions about dosage or best-fit medications for their patients.
The Medical Affairs Call Center solution helps pharma organizations streamline communications to give the right response at the right time. Medical science liaisons are often responsible for dealing with these requests, and with Health Cloud, they get a 360-degree view of their clients.
Clinical Trial Patient Engagement
The Clinical Trial Patient Engagement solution enables research teams to identify, onboard, and engage with patients in clinical trials. With this Health Cloud solution, teams can find more candidate patients and ensure patient compliance through the course of the study.
Patients enrolled in the clinical trial also benefit from the solution. With Health Cloud and community portals, they can:
- Access product and therapy information.
- Use concierge services.
- Interact with their care team.
- Receive reminders about their appointments or tasks they need to complete as part of the clinical trial.
Advanced Therapy Management
Advanced therapies use genetic or other biomarker information to support treatment decisions about individual patients. This includes decisions about who should receive certain kinds of therapy or specific, recommended doses of a given therapy. The solution also gives insights on which patients to monitor more carefully, for example, if they’re predisposed to a particular safety issue.
Advanced therapies are considered a last resort of treatment for rare diseases, for example cancers that have not responded to other types of medicine.
The Advanced Therapy Management solution enables pharmaceutical companies to manage the complexities of developing and delivering advanced therapies to patients. It helps pharma organizations:
- Build processes to simplify working with their stakeholders, including providers, contract manufacturers, and logistics providers, to deliver therapies to patients.
- Engage with patients, such as to refer them to physicians and care coordinators during the therapeutic delivery process.
Keep in mind, these are just examples of solutions that Health Cloud powers. Pharma organizations can take advantage of Health Cloud in many other ways.
Now that you know about the challenges that Health Cloud for Pharma solves, let’s follow Olivia as she meets typical Health Cloud users and learns how they use the platform.
