Mobile Creates Bigger – Much Bigger – Borders for Pharma and Life Sciences

I have a pop quiz for you:

• Q1: What is the Proteus Chip?
• Answer: You’ll have to wait to find out…(but no, it isn’t a snack that Robbie the Robot cooks up in Forbidden Planet)
• Q2: We know that smartphone adoption continues to be huge. In fact, in 2011 we expect total smartphone sales to surpass total laptop sales for the first time, a trend that will continue forward and never look back (eventually leaving laptops completely in the dust). We also know that where smartphones haven’t been adopted, feature phones have – with billions of them now in the hands of huge populations in third world/emerging countries – which have adopted and delivered wireless networks in enormous numbers. Wireless access and connectivity is now a given, even at the farther reaches of emerging countries. Given this information, what then is the one key word here that summarizes the advantages of all this mobile device proliferation?
• Answer: Access

Access to the wireless network. Access to industry. Access to data. Access to people. These capabilities have become pervasive enough and easy enough that mobility is now a true dominant technological force.

That begs the question: How can – or more accurately, how will – this mobile technology tour de force impact the future of Life Sciences and the Pharmaceutical industry?

Wireless Access and Mobile Applications

Mobility now provides users – regardless of whether they are advanced smart phone users in established countries or new users who now finally have true and sophisticated Internet/Web access in emerging countries – with a new and wide array of capabilities right at their fingertips. Easy access to wireless networks and the mobile Web, however, only takes a user and an enterprise to the floodgates of opportunity and possibilities. What’s missing that will turn the locks and open those floodgates?

Mobile applications.

There is very little point in having one (easy mobile access) without the other (mobile applications).

Easy mobile access plus mobile applications allow for much more functional capability in the field. This is generally true across the board, but it will lead to a significant competitive advantage in the case of extremely competitive professions such as Life Sciences and pharmaceuticals. These devices will give reach to amazing numbers of new consumers.

Even more important, we need to take into account consideration that Life Sciences is a highly regulated industry and that regulatory compliance is both strict and required in order to do business. This regulatory environment makes an already challenging industry a much more difficult one within which to do business. I spoke at length in a previous post focusing on regulatory compliance about how mobility eases the regulatory pain for any company in this industry.

So, for Life Sciences and pharma, the requirements to successfully execute on business growth requires easy wireless access, the ability to meet all regulatory compliance issues, and the ability to create and deliver mobile applications out to the field.

 Where will pharma see the greatest business opportunities? For the Life Sciences workforce, this explosion is occurring in the developing regions of the world, and is being driven by both smartphones and tablets. Sure, mobile driven competitive advantages accrue in the established countries as well, but in established countries it is a matter of developing superior business processes that provide a competitive advantage.

This is certainly true of businesses in third world countries, but what makes the concept of expanding pharma’s borders truly compelling is the sheer size of raw new opportunities that are now emerging. In the third world, the pharma industry has a unique opportunity to tap into entirely new streams of revenue that simply didn’t exist before. It becomes a matter of using mobility not only to greatly expand borders, but to pull off business land grabs of major proportions.

Cost and Safety

The reasons for this are many, but two of the big drivers are cost and safety. There are still many regions in the world where a laptop is viewed as an expensive business or personal tool. Smartphones, on the other hand, are relatively inexpensive by comparison and allow for use at any time. Whereas as just a few short years ago even relatively sophisticated third world hospitals, doctors and medical clinics lacked laptops, and Internet/Web access, today the vast majority of them have full wireless access through sophisticated mobile devices – iPads and smartphones. Users outside of the pure business environment – such as patients, for example – also have access through feature phones.

The flip side of the cost coin also involves the cost of safely doing business. A client of mine in the Asia-Pacific region comes to mind here as an example. This client is particularly sensitive to the safety needs of its employees, and this safety issue is a key factor in the company heavily adopting smart phones and mobile apps. Mobile devices now allows individual to do most, if not all of their job remotely.

As a result many companies are making the shift to provide only smart phones and tablets to their field forces, eliminating the highly visible laptop which can make them a very real target for theft or violence. The key to success here is the raw power now available in these mobile devices – they easily challenge laptops in sophistication and capability.

Mobile Apps : The True Keys to Mobile Opportunity

Mobile applications built specifically to meet the deep demands created by a regulatory environment, and that are able to easily take advantage of all of today’s mobile devices – especially Blackberries, iPhones, iPads and Android-based hardware, are the keys that unlock the floodgates of opportunity.

Pharma sales forces have now begun mobile adoption in earnest, and those companies that get there first, with the best mobile apps, will get to participate in the land grab. Even as the size of the potential land grab becomes evident, pharma has reduced its sales forces the world over. At the same time the regulatory requirements have grown ever more onerous (and yes, they are necessary).

As I noted earlier, capturing business processes and insuring regulatory compliance are the central themes to building any mobile application. Imagine targeting the appropriate materials to the various regions of the world, automatically tracking what version of information or advertizing was sent, and dynamically recording feedback. This loop provides a company with a lot of power when it is done via handheld. It also allows for compliance and reduces the possible failures of recording that are common.

Mobility will enable health workers today to directly order medications and access inventories which can greatly reduce the time to get medicines in the hands of those that need them. Mobile applications will also bring the consumers – especially third world consumers – closer to their pharma providers. There is tremendous value in this – and we can easily extrapolate from the US market: look at pharmacy providers such as Medco and Express Scripts. From a consumer perspective, ease of ordering, prescription tracking, and drug interaction notification are all beneficial services. Just the simple speeding up of the ordering/supply process in the third world can affect an entire population profoundly.

Lives (Real Lives) are at Stake

But the land grab for medications in the third world also involves the need to insure that hospitals, doctors and patients all know about the medications that are becoming available. How can mobility impact sales from this perspective? Through consumer-facing mobile applications pharma vendors can provide a means to advertise directly to the public. This accomplishes two key things: mobile apps can and will bring the client closer to the drug providers and their products. Just as important, the industry will be able to pull together field usage data and information that has never been available to the pharma industry before – especially in the case of third world countries.

The ability for mobile devices and applications to gather point-of-presence field data and get it to a valuable endpoint quickly is nothing short of a quantum technology leap. More and more medical devices now provide interfaces that mobile devices can use to collect data from. If a patient opts in, information can be gathered that allows researchers or practitioners to tailor the care of that individual as well as build future models for care. This dynamic accumulation of data is an amazing enabler.

Think, for example, of a poorly controlled diabetic patient. With this dynamic mobile-based data collection and mobile control of, say, an insulin pump, a medical practitioner will help control the diabetes directly by regulating the actual use of insulin. The benefits of this are far reaching as it helps to manage disease and reduce the other issues that are side effects of poor disease control.

The promise that this brings in the forms of disease management and dosage regulation for all medications is enormous. There are companies out there today that have invented all forms of dermal patches that can monitor various body functions and notify a mobile device. The monitoring of the body in this case is facilitated by ingestible chips that send notifications to the skin patch. I know, it sounds far-fetched but it is today’s mobile reality.

While all of this is really exciting, particularly to the techies out there and for the business stakeholders who will have the primary responsibility for expanding pharma’s borders, the most dramatic effect of all of this will be healthier people at a true global level. And that is a very good thing indeed.

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Tags: Deep Dev, Enterprise Mobility, Ken Parmelee, Mobile Apps, Mobile Web, Mobility - General, Pharma