Episode #11:  How can AI play a critical role in the Biopharma commercial model?

 

 

Speakers

	Karen Taylor Research Director, UK Centre for Health Solutions Deloitte Karen is the Research Director of the Centre for Health Solutions. She supports the Healthcare and Life Sciences practice by driving independent and objective business research and analysis into key industry challenges and associated solutions; generating evidence based insights and points of view on issues from pharmaceuticals and technology innovation to healthcare management and reform. Read more
	Thomas Croisier Partner, Consulting Deloitte France Thomas is responsible for the Strategy activity for Deloitte Consulting in France, and specialises in Life Sciences. He supports pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies on their issues: strategic and digital, product launches, and price / market access. Read more
	Deborshi Dutt Partner, Consulting Deloitte UK Deborshi has extensive experience with complex transformation projects for Life Sciences Companies for their Commercial and R&D business functions. Read more
	Kristina Schapiro Director, Consulting Deloitte UK Kristina is a Director in the Monitor Deloitte Strategy practice and has over a decade of global life sciences strategy consulting experience working with pharma, biotech and medtech companies as well as leading health charities. Read more

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• The role of AI in biopharma drug launches
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Transcript

Karen Taylor (00.00.00): Welcome to Life Science connect: Deloitte’s podcast for the Life Sciences industry. This series features conversations with the leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem sharing their insights on the critical issues facing the industry today.

Hi, my name is Karen Taylor and I lead Deloitte’s Centre for Health Solutions, an independent research hub that supports Deloitte’s healthcare and life sciences industry teams in their work. Today we are discussing the impact of digital transformation across launch and commercial functions and the role that AI can play, including our proposition that the adoption of AI technology is becoming a critical commercial imperative. I am delighted to be joined today by three of our industry leaders to discuss their views on the challenges that they see facing the industry and explore potential solutions to these challenges. Before we start our discussion, I would like my colleagues Thomas Croisier, Kristina Schapiro, and Deborshi Dutt to take a moment and introduce themselves.

Thomas Croisier (00:01:04): Thomas Croisier, I am a life science partner based out of Paris, and I am responsible for Deloitte for Healthcare and Life Sciences sector in France. Much more importantly for today, I have about 20 years of experience in supporting clients and supporting the industry, launching drugs, launching solutions for patients’ problems, and therefore with some experience on how important it is for life sciences clients. How challenging and special it is, as an experience and as a journey for these organisations and how different it’s become or similar in some cases it’s become over the past 20 years and look forward to discussing this together today.

Karen Taylor (00.01.51): Thank you Thomas, Kristina?

Kristina Schapiro (00.01.55): Thank you Karen, and hello everyone, I am a Director in our Life Science strategy practice in the UK, and similar to Thomas, I focus most of my time on commercial strategy and help work with our life sciences clients in terms of launches over the last 10 plus years, really to bring innovative medicines to patients faster. Increasingly, we are also thinking through on how do we adapt the go to market model, given the changes we are seeing in the landscape and getting more data and better digital technology and starting to think through on how can a more digital go to market approach look like. When is it appropriate and how can companies will engage with better with their customers, where, when and how they want? Looking forward to the discussion.

Karen Taylor (00.02.41): Deborshi.

Deborshi Dutt (00.02.42): Thank you Karen. Deborshi Dutt, Partner in Life Sciences practice based out of UK. Focused on everything around data analytics and AI. More so AI, with a last 2-3 years as it started taking shape and helping our clients in the commercial area as well as R&D think through as to how data – AI come together and drive a level of digital transformation. That we are seeing in this current world in the middle of COVID and even sometimes pre COVID. Glad to be part of this discussion.

Karen Taylor (00:03:14): So, the background of our discussion today is our report “Intelligent drug launch and commercial: optimising value through AI”. This is the fifth and penultimate report in our Intelligent biopharma series, focused on how companies can implement AI to radically change and improve, in this case, drug launches and their commercial models. And to move away from the traditional one size fit’s all go to market strategy. Our report reflects on the challenges and disruptions caused by the COVID 19 pandemic and the response of commercial teams, including accelerates use of digital platforms. In the Biopharma value chain, launch and commercial activities enable patients to get access to new therapies in a timely manner. However, companies are facing increasing challenges in achieving a successful launch, including the escalating cost of drug development, growing competition and mounting pressure to reduce the time to market, new models of care, and an ability to pay for new innovative models from the healthcare systems. Our research highlights key areas where the adoption of AI technologies will enable companies to achieve commercial success by using AI to develop strategic insights and support decision making, including predictive pricing. AI driven market segmentation is another area that can be improved as well as omnichannel marketing and scenario planning, alongside intelligent forecasting. Looking to the future, we expect the companies to align their thinking around launch excellence, while continuing the rapid acceleration of digital transformation, through cross-functional collaboration and early engagement with stakeholders in order to optimise the value of their products. Let’s just kick off with question for you all, in a few words, how would you describe the current Biopharma landscape that faces companies who are planning a drug launch. Maybe if we could start with Thomas.

Thomas Croisier (00:05:04): I would use three words, one is challenging, and I would argue increasingly challenging. Two, it’s very competitive, or even hyper competitive even in some areas and countries in which competition was less of a topic, and also unbelievingly exciting because of what we are see coming from an R&D and pipeline perspective, and honestly, even if we make huge progresses across different conditions, there are still massive unmet medical needs that we need to address.

Kristina Schapiro (00:05:41): I absolutely agree, your point about competition, it’s a tough landscape. For the benefit of patients, I would say we have never seen EU or FDA approve 40-50+ new medicines per year, increasingly also from biotech’s and MedTech’s, it’s a different kind of competition that our pharma clients need to face. And whilst we see a lot of different indications coming through, we also see gene cell therapy that really have a disease modifying and curative potential coming through the market and that’s very exciting. And also in the context of COVID we have seen that the partnership between the industry, the healthcare system, healthcare professionals, patients, government can be better and more collaborative and I am excited for what can come from this for other medicines beyond the COVID vaccine. Finally , I would say, Data- digital is here to stay, very much we are collecting more data have higher expectations, using it to define better treatments for patients and most effective interactions and actually understanding the value for money the healthcare system gets.

Deborshi Dutt (00:06:55): Karen I would just chip into what Kristina and Thomas said, maybe one is overall, life changing due to COVID, how you sort of engage interact and play as you’re trying to launch new drugs. People must rethink it and to again rethink as you start coming out of COVID. And in addition you start looking at the new types of therapies that are coming out, it is sort of the channelization and consumerism of the patient has made it somewhat difficult as in what message do you want to give, where and to whom and how to channelise it to do the launch to get the best impact.

Thomas Croisier (00:07:31): And may be just to wrap it up, if we take a slightly different lens, I think what hasn’t change but has increased in intensity is the level of expectations both internally and from the streets on the value that should come from the product launches. And I think it’s important to have this in mind because these are life changing events for companies, for teams, for individuals. You can’t fail a launch of a priority asset and having this in mind in an increasingly competitive, challenging and complex environment makes the whole launch kind of ecosystem and event and journey probably even more important than it used to be.

Karen Taylor (00:08: 23): Thank you. Thomas, in your opinion, we are focusing here on AI, but what are the main use cases for advanced technologies particularly with AI capabilities and how can they improve successful launch and commercialisation.

Thomas Croisier (00:07:31): Karen, it’s a very broad topic, because you know, I could argue that digital is everywhere, right. Like for a lot of, I have been exposed and I have been learning more about digital technology than I ever thought I would. And it’s a good thing, because digital, AI., whatever the name we want to use, is dramatically transforming everything that we do, and it’s the same even in case of launch. So, if we think about it in kind of two different categories maybe for the sake of it. One, digital, AI, big data, analytics is really helping pharma organisations, do the core of what they were doing, but just much better. So examples of this for instance is data generation, right, everything that we see in terms of digital development is allowing us to generate data both RCT and RWE in a much more efficient in a much more specific way than what we have done in the past. Another example is it also allows us to be much more efficient in the way we monitor and track our performance, by linking different datasets and making sense of all the different data and analytics that we can run and finally still speaking about the core, it allows our clients from our organisations to much better work together as a team and we all know that launch is a collective journey amongst many different individuals and functions, and it really allows them to work more, much more efficiently, in a much more fluid way both internally and also with partners. So that that's kind of the core I would argue of what life sciences companies do. The other thing that it is completely disrupting an I'm sure we're going to get to it, including in the context of COVID, is the way pharmaceutical companies interact with their environment. So, it's really reconfiguring the experience and the interaction that they have with health care professionals, that they have with patients, hopefully for the better, for a better experience, more impactful experience and eventually greater outcomes for patients.

Deborshi Dutt (00:11:11): Maybe Thomas, if we can add, what we first seeing AI do right now is sentiment analysis. As launch happens the chatter that's happening on the web, sort of using crawlers to crawl in pull it together but generally crawlers only pull the text out now what you need is a context based interpretation of the data and that's where sort of the AI piece comes in to help these companies do it at a much faster scale. The nuance and the catches is that a lot of these startups who are doing that so you at least need to be sure of who you're playing with and how do you just do it just because the technology evolves at lightspeed and you sort of have to be constantly up to speed on what the players out doing that piece. The second one, where Thomas went was around, if you think about that launch happening and sort of the data coming into play the amount of data you're looking at is sort of saying is the launch going as per my strategy, what should I be looking at, can I first simulate another version of this strategy so it can play out in real time. That's what you are sort of looking at, these AI companies building out simulations to create the feel of, think about like a Formula One track as the race is happening, but could build out all your what-if scenarios and making the call. Thankfully it's not just the second decisions you have some time, but you can simulate those scenarios out using AI and the data that you're capturing from real world. And then the last one comes around throughout the targeting strategy of how you looking at who to target, where to target, and how to change some of those, and then using some of this machine learning coming in putting in feedback back real time in to the reps, to the Home Office, to the marketing channel, and giving different directions.

Kristina Schapiro (00:12:48): And a couple of things I would say are important to keep in mind for doing all of this is that it's not digital for digitals’ sake, and really being able to couple this up with the experience of the people and their judgment and really using this data to drive commercial decisions. And then also, companies are becoming more comfortable with this and being willing to try things quickly and see how it goes and learn and adapt and be OK with it but sometimes that sometimes it doesn't work out.

Karen Taylor (00:13: 21): Kristina, what have you seen that's been successful in this space? What has impressed you about how digital transformation has really improved these relationships and user experience?

Kristina Shapiro (00:13:33): I mean, it has happened in a lot of different areas but one that's being accelerated probably the most in the last year is really around the marketing and digital engagement with you with your customers with HCP's with patients. And we don’t know a single client that wouldn't double down on this probably if you didn’t engage digitally in the last year, you didn’t engage at all. And many companies had some of the foundation in place, but have really pushed it further to get a better segmentation of the customers and sort of want to give to be able to personalize the communication building in some of the certain next best action type recommendations are really starting to understand what's the ROI here and where do we are need to focus and here's some of the types of results that that this delivers is also if you have you have really truly personalised email content being sent for example by the reps’, the click through rate are going to be 5-6 times higher than on average, and you know, looking ahead now obviously you need to have more hybrid models. In this instance for example as well as working out how do we recreate that that individualised, you know, experience and in this digital engagement stage rapidly companies are more dipping the toe in around the social media aspect and analytics. We are seeing a little bit more of the listening maybe a list of the engaging directly but there are examples of companies we have worked with using their sensing tools to really understand what are some of the trends, sentiment on how is our brand perceived and how can we actually manage the reputation but it can also be used to going forward to better understand patient journeys and a need to engage with them differently.

Karen Taylor (00:15: 26): Thanks, Deborshi, you have mentioned real-world data and you mentioned some of the different sources of data but in fact this so much data out there how do companies really make best use of all this in commercial strategies.

Deborshi Dutt (00:15: 43): The thing over here, that we noticed happening is, there is the internal data that the company collects through their CRM solution through the rep channel, coming in through the call centers when they when the patient under the ATP is calling, in addition there is all the sales data that then they tend to sort of collect as part of their tie-ups with other data providers. What we are noticing as of late is most companies tend to do is as they looking at launch some of these all sort of rare disease products and others is companies building out their own digital health strategies where they sort of going after creating hubs where they're driving it through patient connected devices and stuff it's collecting information but what most of these companies are now doing is it is mining for information through variety of channels, not only to start saying the traditional one we chatted about but patient channels, EMRs, using startup companies like Seekster, Citizen, and others to get access to a variety of data that they would never have, and the volume of data and sort of what becomes daunting as to how do you now structure and gather it and truly find the signals that you're looking for on exactly how is the drug doing, what is the preference of the drug in the marketplace, what are they hearing from a set of doctors in let’s say, San Francisco versus London versus Paris, and how are they reacting to it and some of the evidences from that and how do you then reapply. Maybe I will ask Thomas to talk here because it's sort of a place that he stays very closely in an interesting insights from there.

Thomas Croisier (00:17:16): I think there are two major challenges but opportunities that we see on this front but, the first one is the one that you just highlighted Deborshi, which is this opportunity to be much more broad and holistic and wade you gather interpret and analyse data, and we need to look for multi sources approach to data gathering and inside gathering with this challenge which is how do I make sense of all of it not only from a digital perspective to get it all together but then to translate this into something that can actually inform business decisions. But, there is this question of press I think that the second element and Kristina was briefly touching upon it is we're also really moving from one paradigm to the other which has historically, the pharma industry when speaking about the commercial model had a paradigm which was easier organised around six months i.e. sales cycle, or maybe around monthly sales perspective, but certainly not what we can do right now with the kind of data that Deborshi was alluding to which is pretty much continuous perspective, continuous learning and continuous decision-making and I think we've seen this already in a lot of different sectors starting with CPG and pharma and life sciences is getting to it and it's much more than just the digital transformation question, it’s also a real management decision making it an organisational journey for people to just change the way they make decisions, experiment more learn much more quickly, accept to fail more quickly which is realistically not the way this industry has been configured and used to working in the past.

Karen Taylor (00:19: 12): What you're talking about is a culture transformation and I think, Kristina mentioned that it's not really about this about the technology itself, but it is about transformation, about about real change management. Kristina, have you got anything to add to what you've just heard here on this cultural aspect?

Kristina Schapiro (00:19:32): I do think this is really important as digital transformation as much as people journey as a technology journey and companies that are doing well on this and have been also ready for some change in the last year probably some already than others have already worked on the mindset as well not only upskilling their people to be more digital savvy but it's actually seeing digital and data as part of the arsenal but that they have and also individuals themselves not feeling threatened by some of the changes but actually seeing it as an opportunity to have the time to focus on what's really important. So, for example with field teams seeing themselves as much more of an orchestrator of the experience for the customer, using the data that they get around their preferences and their needs to really zoom in on what are the issues that they can speak to them about you know in the next interaction, be that digital or face to face. One of the things that we've seen is scientific education content, has become quite a differentiator over the last year and you know companies were able to spot that and bring that in an engaging digestible format into their interactions have done quite well.

Thomas Croisier (00:20:57): And I think what's also important is not to think about this in a vacuum, but what I mean by this is life sciences companies are on that transformation journey, but we're all in that journey together. What I mean by this is and when we think about rethinking the experience with health care professionals or with patients, these same health care professionals and these same patients are on that digital transformation journey. The way they consume digital information, the way they use digital information to make decisions, and therefore you know everybody is moving in that space and I think that that's both a challenge because you want to meet some of the stakeholders where they are on that journey, but also a fantastic opportunity to evolve extremely quickly for the better, the way everybody interacts and works together.

Karen Taylor (00:22: 02): Thanks Thomas, We've mentioned COVID a few times and clearly the pandemic is affected almost every aspect of both our personal lives and our business lives. When it comes to launch and commercial activities what struck you most about the impact that COVID has had, you know what the standout for you in the in the way it's affected ways of doing business.

Thomas Croisier (00:22:24): I mean, I think Deborshi mentioned using AI and digital as a way to stimulate, with the pandemic that this simulation became reality in the case of a few weeks, right, which is most of the life science companies were thinking about going more digital on all the different elements that we discussed across the value chain from R&D to manufacturing, through their commercial model and suddenly all of us everybody got forced to be digital not only them but also their ecosystem and the stakeholders with whom they are interacting. So, suddenly we got depending upon how we're thinking about this projected 5-10-15 years out and the way to think about the virtualization of a lot of the different interactions that constitute this value change, including on the commercial side, and I think you know that the learnings there is that nobody was truly ready. The life science companies were not truly ready, the stakeholders were not truly ready, but the reality is everybody did her or his best and managed to keep it working actually in a very efficient way through the past 15 months. And there are lot a lot of learnings that are and will be unbelievably helpful to accelerate that digital transformation across the board, that's learning number one. Learning number two, and I think we're all victims in some ways of this is that the whole or 100% virtual is not the solution, and therefore you know once the different lockdowns and restrictions will go away it's quite clear that we're not going to go back to where we were at the beginning of 2020 and there are a lot of really-really good reasons to evolve the models but we're going to go somewhere in between and hopefully learning from all the different things that went well things that were a little bit more challenging that got forced onto us by the pandemic.

Deborshi Dutt (00:24:50): It was interesting when you said the impact, it was funny like even we were impacted because when our clients came up and said, “Hey, my rep can’t go talk to a doctor, what's your point of view on that”, we were behind the wall too we were trying to figure out what's the best method of actually even solving for this problem. So what Karen, what Thomas was getting at was when COVID hit, things that change drastically was the rep not talking to the doctor, the doctor not having time to even talk to Rep just because they're trying to solve for all these COVID cases, and the information that they wanted because the disease they were truly treating was their own primary disease and but they were pulled into COVID is to be the extra hands and legs because everyone was fighting the same battle so they wanted to consume information and stay relevant on their own therapy area but they were not sure how to even get that information because that person to person contact totally got removed, and they don't have time so they started reaching out saying how can I be best kept educated and all the channels through which I can get information and more so just-in-time information and the specific one I want and help us as a pharma company be very direct that way. So, there was some of those interesting discussion and questions came up where people thought they had time but it was very interesting to see how do we even we as Deloitte with the breadth of information and manpower we have, to even help educate our clients of saying these are the three different patterns you should start thinking about and opt into; and these are some of the companies should start working with; and I remember one of discussions came up with this company saying you don't you don't want to use the red but you want to use this other companies who specialize in this to submit that medical advice and much faster pace than the rep come and make these as more spot. So there were these interesting paradigms that started coming through when COVID hit just because you were looking at impact to the left channel impacting the Doctor who wants to talk to you you're looking at the impact of the marketing channels because of the flood of information coming in what he could do couldn't do. And, it was just a learning even for us in that way and it's a good observation you're looking at only saying like yeah even we were also impacted in the same thing trying to help respond to it.

Kristina Schapiro (00:26:58): Very true, and beyond what you described, there’s a changing relationship between the health care professionals and the pharma companies in their reps the relationship between the doctors and the patients change fundamentally they suddenly they also couldn't interact, and a lot of the non-urgent processes have stopped, and I think we have seen more digital health care coming more into its’ own, more digital therapeutics wrapping around that help collect data directly in the patients home you know through wearables and the companion apps. But you know I think interesting innovations in terms of how HCPs can communicate with their patients and there's a lot more you know speak to your GP on your phone, have that kind of conversation takes photos what's wrong and send it in and have that discussion and so that kind of triage before being able to see them and I think that was much more sporadic before and there was more hesitancy around how to make that work and I think now it's here to stay and pharma companies also have a role in being part of that system integrity beyond providing medicines and actually helping to make that work.

Thomas Croisier (00:28:15): Yeah and I think that that's raising two fundamental questions that we're discussing a lot these days which is including post pandemic how do you create trust in a digital environment you know and that's trust between the pharma company and the health care professionals that's trust between the pharma companies and the regulators that’s trust between the HCP's and the patient how do you actually do this on zoom or teams or whatever is the right means, that's one. The second one which is going to be one of the critical topics moving forward is how do you compete in an increasingly digital environment because the rules quote unquote of competition have been disrupted quite dramatically during the pandemic and depending upon exactly where we land, which will be dynamic in nature by definition post pandemic these same kind of rules and levers of competition are likely to change quite a lot and how do you make sure that you're ready to compete in this new world is going to be critical.

Karen Taylor (00:29: 28): One of the observations that we made in our recent predictions report rather than the AI report was about the importance during COVID of the increased collaborations of partnerships that we see admittedly around trying to find solutions treatments for COVID-19 both vaccines and other treatments. But also, just more generally in accessing all the other technologies that are needed not from PPE right the way through to ventilators. For launch and commercial how important have compared partnerships and collaborations been?

Thomas Croisier (00:30:01): There are a couple of transformation that the industry is going through one of the transformation that started sometime back is for instance the transformation of the r&d with the recognition that not everything could be invented here and we see now is very significant portion of the r&d being through partnerships or acquisitions in a very healthy way including public private I think what we're seeing with the pandemic and some of what Deborshi described because of digital, is creating, is raising the question of will we see the same from a commercial standpoint knowing that historically that part of the value chain was probably the most insourced if you compare this to either the r&d or the manufacturing and frankly the jury is out, right, including back to what we’re discussing around you know what it will take to compete it's quite likely that in order to deliver the kind of digital experience that we're talking about, in order to gather and process the data that will be available, it's very likely that pharma companies will not be able to do it only internally and that therefore they're going to have to structure an ecosystem quite a dynamic actually ecosystem of partners in order to do so much more efficiently both from a cost and from an impact perspective. We're seeing a lot of this taking place in the US to start with because of scale and it's quite likely that it's going to continue and accelerate moving forward. It was always this question which capability should I own internally because this helps me differentiate versus you know what I can do with an ecosystem of partners.

Kristina Schapiro (00:32:00): Thinking through partnerships I feel the most important partnership in a way is with the healthcare system as well for pharma companies, one of the things that we are seeing is a shift from product thinking and engagement more to a pathway based model and engagement for pharma companies, so how do you think about who are the patients for your production potential also help identify them help find them, which means looking through, partnering together to look through some of the data to spot patients who might be falling through the cracks in primary or secondary care as well and understanding which ones are most appropriate for what kind of treatments or interventions you know and then also following up and actually understanding you know what is the impact, what is the outcomes and adapting treatment interventions based on that and I think that's where a lot of the data comes in and that’s where partnership on a more equal basis with healthcare system, but will also require bringing in other partners with some of these skill sets where both of those players would not have them. I think you know to your point Thomas, seeing a lot more of these partnerships, one of the issues that you know I've noticed with many of our clients is that almost now have this complex universe of vendors and partners but are focused on how do we help you on this specific issue in this area but actually you know what's needed is to move to probably more strategic and holistic approach of how that ecosystem integrates and really works together and I'm not sure we've quite solved that one yet.

Deborshi Dutt (00:33:46): The only thing I would like to pick on Kristina and I like the word ecosystem because it's become more of an ecosystem than a partnership because it's become a survivability discussion and you survive and the ecosystem works together and in conjunction and what we are noticing happen Karen is the discussion of the ecosystem does not start with launch but starts even when the drugs are in phase three or phase four. Because you're looking at sort of the ecosystem coming together and you're looking for some of these, if I look at it purely from an AI lens of companies that they are partnering with to get not only access to the data but also to start building algorithms around disease progression disease propensity, patient longitudinal journeys and others and so that when launch happens you sort of using them as toolkit’s for acceleration and getting a larger share of the pie then you could and it has now just become how they tend to operate.

Karen Taylor (00:34: 40): Kristina, you mentioned skills and talent, does this digital world need a different set of skills and talent within our pharma clients or how will they go get the right skills and talent?

Kristina Schapiro (00:34:53): It does, I think you need quite diverse pool of talent, you know you need the let's say more traditional commercial people and teams but you also need more data scientists, software developers, technological skill sets and actually you know I'd say here it’s hard for pharma companies as well because you are then competing with other players for that scarce talent, you know the Google, Apple and others of this world and you know the other point that's important is actually getting that team to work together. And you said this earlier, Thomas, launch is a team effort and you want to have effective multidisciplinary teams not people sitting in silos. I’d say its part of you know also, retaining and attracting talent, which is becoming increasingly important for any company is what’s the kind of employee experience that you are creating. And that really can be a differentiator for companies because people are increasingly looking for you know for autonomy, meaningful work, supportive flexible environment more so after the experience we've all had you know last year and being able to do that effectively for people with quite different situations and demands, they will be the future of work opportunity.

Deborshi Dutt (00:36:23): I would just add one more to Kristina's thing Karen is this talent is critical right now because like Kristina said the talent you’re fighting for is not only just with other pharma companies but it is now with the tech giants it is now with every other person so this talent is super scarce and are truly unicorns. The adoption of technology has shifted and I sort of see it even like in my parents and others a generation which wasn't technology savvy because of COVID has been made to become technology savvy so then that aversion of technology and change is sort of somewhat become less of a hindrance it’s become day-to-day life. But the talent upskilling, hiring talent, getting the right talent and we started looking at the job profiles and we as Deloitte started actually creating a database and we should share it at some point with the audience, it’s actually interesting to see who's hiring for what and what sort of the top 30% of talent and really start looking at that across like not just within pharma but across the industries all hiring for the same set.

Karen Taylor (00:37: 30): Yeah maybe that's something we will need to come back to you in a future podcast because we're coming to the end of this one and I'm sure we could talk about the subject for a long time but we don't have a long time. So what I just like is as we draw to a close if you could each give me the one piece of advice you'd like to give to your clients and to our listeners to take away in order to succeed in a digitally commercial function and I'm going to start with Kristina.

Kristina Schapiro (00:38:01): Thank you Karen, I would re-emphasize the point I raised earlier which is that data digital tools, analytics are really there to serve the people and the business and so we need to ask ourselves what data do I need or how can I use digital tools to really make better informed commercial decisions and meet my customers where they want to be met.

Deborshi Dutt (00:38:22): My take would be is as you're playing in this ecosystem the players keep changing and innovation is happening now at lightspeed. Just create some level of a sensing arm so you can keep sensing as to what’s shifting and how do you plug and play new companies new datasets or whatever just thinking of like in the sense of, if you remember those old video games you're putting a floppy disk in and out or a cartridge in and out how do you make this more the cartridge game for yourself so you're ahead of the curve.

Karen Taylor (00:38: 52): Last word to Thomas.

Thomas Croisier (00:38:54): I want to link this to one of our themes which is launch. Which for me launch is the perfect reason or the perfect excuse, I would say to transform. Because launching a priority asset is disruptive by nature for an organisation so why not us that disruption to accelerate and potentialise the digital transformation opportunity that lies ahead of you.

Karen Taylor (00:39: 25): I think that’s an excellent place to stop this. I'd like to thank you I'd like to thank the guests Thomas, Deborshi and Kristina, I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us today and I hope you'll join us again in our next episode in the Life Sciences Connect podcast. Thank you and goodbye.