Shawn Roman is a Managing Director in Accenture's Life Sciences business, and leads the North America Intelligent Patient Solutions practice. Shawn's work spans commercial strategy, consulting, digital, operations and technology—from developing and deploying global capabilities to running digital services for clients helping them navigate the shift from delivering products to delivering better patient and economic outcomes. ALM Intelligence recently spoke to Shawn about the impact of digital on pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and how Accenture is providing digital consulting capabilities to meet these companies' needs to improve their performance and impact on patient health.
ALM Intelligence: If you could, please describe your role at Accenture and how Life Sciences clients are pursuing digital consulting to help expand their business opportunities. Is this sector accelerating its investment in digital?
Roman: I lead our Intelligent Commercial Solutions business, focused on helping our clients rethink commercial strategies to improve patient experience, create high-impact customer interactions and drive better outcomes. Life Science clients continue to accelerate their digital investments, seeking new opportunities to identify and engage their customers in new manners, defining new experiences for their customers and employees and transforming their internal operations.
ALM Intelligence: As the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry shift to become more outcomes and value-focused with digital as a key enabler, what trends are you seeing that spur growth for consulting?
Roman: The Life Sciences industry is changing to become more outcomes and value-focused requiring the transformation of customer strategies, commercial operating models and capabilities. The proliferation of stakeholders (patients/consumers, payers, integrated delivery networks, health care providers, pharmacists), the expectations around omni-channel engagement to be personalized, relevant, digital as well as the technology disruption taking place (e.g., innovative applications, disruptive models, consumer orientation, data driven) are all trends spurring the need for clear strategies and end to end solutions. We see significant opportunities to help our clients achieve the 'quadruple aim' of improved patient care, improved population health, lower per capita health costs and improved financial performance.
ALM Intelligence: How would you describe the digital consulting needs of pharma and med device firms in their Commercial initiatives? Is there sector maturity on the horizon? Will the focus shift to digitally improving R&D (clinical trials, patient services)?
Roman: There has been a significant focus on digitizing the sales channel within our Life Science clients and there is a level of maturity in this area. However, there are still further opportunities to further digitize internal operations across the commercial function, further breaking down silos that exist across Marketing, Sales and Medical. More importantly, there are significant opportunities to digitize the customer experience and drive business model disruption by considering new approaches to customer engagement and services, according to a recent Accenture survey.
The opportunity to digitally improve R&D is significant and will benefit from the learnings of the journey so far in the commercial space. In fact new Accenture research reveals a gap in pharma R&D's digital journey to deliver better patient outcomes—despite R&D focused pharma execs recognizing digital as the primary driver to be more patient-outcome focused, only half of them are currently adopting digital.
More importantly, this digital journey will further help to bring the R&D and Commercial functions closer together, driving significant opportunities to improve internal clinical operations and deliver improved patient services, ultimately leading to improved patient outcomes.
ALM Intelligence: How do you envision digital helping to break down traditional siloes between Commercial and R&D?
Roman: I believe that the application of digital capabilities and design thinking can drive disruption in how we think about the R&D function. We've been working in these areas across the Commercial function, driving changes to customer engagement. Similar capabilities and expertise are relevant as we consider the opportunities to drive improved patient recruitment into clinical trials and streamline the "experience" of participating in clinical trials. Equally significant is the opportunity to transform the internal operations, methods of collaboration and employee experience across the diverse clinical stakeholders.
ALM Intelligence: In a changing healthcare ecosystem, what are the opportunities for Life Sciences companies? Who will the new stakeholders be, and how will the relationship between pharma and HCPs evolve, as an example?
Roman: The new value-based healthcare paradigm will come from digitally enabled patient services with value propositions focused on delivering outcomes-based health and therapy management services enabled through connected devices, sensors, services, social engagement. Accenture envisions a future world with providers bearing more risk as value-based agreements steadily increase. This will create opportunities for new types and forms of relationships between Life Science companies and providers, increasingly oriented around delivered shared patient-based outcomes.
Our research—"The Patient is IN: Pharma's Growing Opportunity in Patient Services"—indicates that patients still value their provider and seek information and services from them, creating an opportunity for Life Sciences clients to seek new relationships to share their unique assets and expertise in a manner that benefits both the provider and their patients.
ALM Intelligence: How does Accenture differentiate from other similar firms itself in the market?
Roman: We take an insight-driven approach to providing comprehensive, end-to-end, digitally-enabled services from strategy through to operations to help our clients achieve the 'quadruple aim.' We are differentiated by our ability to support the complex transformations of our clients by blending our industry and technology expertise on a global scale with clear alignment to our client's business outcomes.
We are excited about our collaboration with Boston Scientific. This represents a ground-breaking, analytics-driven digital health solution to help improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of treating chronic cardiovascular conditions. The solution, ADVANTiCS Care Pathway Transformation, is designed to enable providers to make better-informed decisions based on patient population insights.
It uses Accenture's Intelligent Patient Platform which provides actionable insights into care coordination and patient population health patterns, revealing opportunities to improve their consistency and efficiency of patient care.
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