Stories of our impact

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Over recent years, the process by which new treatments are made available to patients has seen a steady increase in both duration and cost. Research shows that, today, a new product will on average cost $1.3 billion and 14 years to develop. When a typical scientist spends over 60 per cent of their time on non-core, administrative work, helping free up time to spend on scientific research is critical. Here’s how we helped people at Roche to dedicate their time to what really matters: developing life-saving medication.

Visualising how information flows

Our team worked with over 80 scientists and staff at Roche to understand how information flowed through the organisation. We found that valuable data detailing key medical characteristics of Roche products (for example, their indication, dosage, intended effect) was widely distributed, captured in a complex network of systems and documents.

Based on this analysis, we built a visualisation dashboard to highlight the life-cycle of this data and how it flowed (or didn’t) across the organisation. The experiment was an immediate hit: scientists could quickly see where information they needed to write scientific protocols was stored, and staff in headquarters could see that by recording drug formulation information in a system, it would be more readily available to their counterparts across the world.

Establishing a common language

Next, Deloitte practitioners across the UK, Switzerland and the US worked with Roche to establish a common set of data standards that would be universally applied across the global organisation – simply put, a common language to enable the right information to become available to the right people at the right time. For example, by capturing the intended use for a product in a consistent manner across the globe, this will allow Roche unprecedented insight into how its products are helping patients worldwide.

Together, we built a roadmap that will use this common language across key processes and systems, removing complexity and improving transparency across the company. The tool will reduce the amount of manual data entries by 50 per cent and create a five-fold increase in the number of automated information handovers. In so doing, Roche will be able to more quickly develop new products and demonstrate their value to regulators, ultimately making new treatments available to patients sooner.