Healthcare is constantly evolving based upon technological advances, available data, and social trends. The primary goal of biopharma leaders is to ensure that life-changing medical treatments are developed and manufactured, with a sharpened focus on reducing the time and cost associated with bringing new drugs to the market.
However, as the industry shifts, biopharma companies must find ways to balance their goals while simultaneously shifting patient needs to stay relevant and afloat. The evolution of patient needs in today’s world involves prioritizing value-based care and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and digital health into clinical research. Other trends relate directly to the biopharma industry’s own needs, including navigating new regulations and internal costs while generating the revenue needed for ongoing medical innovation.
In this article, we share some of the top healthcare trends biopharma leaders should consider in 2023 and examine how the Veradigm® Network is positioned to support your success.
Prioritizing Value-Based Care
Value-based care (delivering improvements in the quality of care while reducing cost), has become a top priority in healthcare. The market shift toward value-based care requires biopharma leaders to prioritize value-based research. One way of doing so is through health economics and outcomes research (HEOR). This type of research helps ensure that the cost associated with the development of new therapies is justified by the value patients receive.
HEOR involves the use of real-world data (RWD) collected by monitoring a therapy’s performance in the real world, in addition to the data collected in clinical trials. As we move toward a more value-based healthcare system, HEOR is going to continue to be an important tool for life science researchers to demonstrate the value derived by therapies in a real-world setting.
Digital Health and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Support Clinical Research
Digital health and medical technology, such as mobile health, diagnostics, and wearables, are contributing to a significant increase in the amount of RWD that may be useful to life science researchers. While these technologies are contributing vast amounts of data, the data are only useful if they can be mined and analyzed by real-world evidence professionals.
Machine learning, natural language processing, and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to become important in clinical research and can provide the advanced data analysis needed to conduct value-based research using a variety of RWD sources.
Pandemic-Fueled Innovations in Clinical Research
The COVID-19 pandemic contributed to several unprecedented challenges in healthcare, while also fostering innovations in clinical research. Perhaps one of the most impactful transformations is the evolution of the utility of RWD to supplement clinical trial data. Throughout the pandemic, we witnessed competing companies working together, decreased timelines for vaccine and drug development, rapid digitization for increased access to data, the rise of the importance of health equity, the need for supply chain improvements, and the prioritization of data security while scaling cloud platforms.
In 2023, we expect that biopharma will continue to leverage these positive industry shifts to improve operational practices and benefit patients.
Changes in Regulatory Guidance around RWD
As the use of RWD expands, the framework for how it is used in pre- and post-marketing decisions will evolve and fortify. This is in part thanks to the 21st Century Cures Act, whose goal is to reduce drug development timelines and provide patients with faster and increased access to medical innovations.
Over the last few years, the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued guidance around the use of RWD, including those data sourced from medical claims and electronic health records (EHRs). Additional FDA guidance has stated that companies must address RWD use in regulatory filings when seeking approval of new drugs and to ensure research design elements related to RWD satisfy post-approval research requirements.
The need for careful stewardship of high-quality RWD will only increase, as it becomes a more ubiquitous source of data for clinical research.
Setting Biopharma Leaders Up for Success
At Veradigm, we understand the needs that biopharma leaders have in today’s value-driven market. Through the Veradigm Network, biopharma and other life science companies have access to point of patient care data and insights. The Veradigm Network represents over 330,000 physicians, including more than 1,700 SaaS clients in 73 specialties, in all 50 states. The Veradigm Provider network contains over 174 million distinct patients with clinical activity and more than 1 million lab and radiology results per month.
Veradigm clients can tap into the Veradigm Network by leveraging both our comprehensive healthcare provider footprint for ambulatory practice data insights, our ability to connect seamlessly with health plans and payers to secure administrative claims data, and by leveraging our relationships and integration with Veradigm Network partners to gain insight from our open network.
Because the Veradigm Network is the source of the data itself, we can help our clients uncover insights typically found in unstructured notes via machine learning and natural language processing. These insights are only accessible via our team of data scientists.
Visit veradigm.com to learn more about how the Veradigm Network is helping biopharma leaders succeed in today’s connected healthcare ecosystem