This article was compiled by CIAPH based on the speech of AstraZeneca China Vice President Liu Qian at the "10th Medical and Health Industry Information Summit Forum and CIAPH Alliance 10th Anniversary Celebration"
In many people's impression, the IT department is like a logistics department, working in the business of repairing computers, installing software, and opening up system permissions. Nowadays, with the development of 's digital transformation to , the IT department not only needs to maintain the company's operation, but also is the executor of 's implementation of 's strategy and the improvement of production efficiency. In some enterprises with sufficient digital business development, IT departments lead the development of the enterprise. In response, AstraZeneca China Vice President Liu Qian said that the pharmaceutical industry is now facing increasingly fierce competition and involuntary competition. "New drug expansion and channel expansion" are necessary solutions for pharmaceutical companies to respond to challenges. In the process, the IT department should provide enterprises with a strong technical foundation, rely on data to provide support for corporate decision-making, play a leading role, and help enterprises achieve better development. The following text is his main speech for reference by readers.
Hello everyone, I am Liu Qian. Since I personally have been responsible for the marketing sector for a long time in my career, today's sharing will explain to you the needs of pharmaceutical companies for IT and some past practical experiences in the digital era from the perspective of marketing. I hope it can bring some help to you.
01
Be prepared for
01
Market side changes
For the majority of pharmaceutical companies, they must follow the general trend of my country's medical development in order to gain a foothold. Therefore, let’s take a look at the current development status of the pharmaceutical industry. The industry market can be roughly divided into three parts, namely public medical terminals, private third terminals, and retail pharmacy terminals. With the implementation of national centralized procurement and the implementation of medical insurance cost control, the growth rate of public hospitals will become lower and lower, and it is predicted that it may drop to 2-3% in the next five years, but its scale is still the largest; the growth rate of private terminals will be about 3-5% in the next five years; the relatively fast growth rate is off-hospital markets, retail, and e-commerce, with a growth rate of about 4-6% in the next five years. Under such a situation, if pharmaceutical companies still stick to the public hospital market, their future development space will definitely gradually shrink.
02
Supply side changes
Objectively speaking, China's pharmaceutical market has two unchanging themes. One is innovative drugs. In the past five years, innovative drugs have shown explosive growth; the other is centralized procurement. In the past centralized procurement drugs, the average decline was basically 50%, and the highest decline reached more than 90%. There are currently 298 varieties of centralized procurement in the pharmaceutical market, and it may reach about 500 varieties in 2025. Commonly used drugs will be included in the scope of centralized procurement. Centralized procurement is an irreversible major trend.
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Pharmaceutical companies respond and think about
Under such a severe situation, the entire pharmaceutical market has not grown significantly from 2020 to 2021. Overall, domestic pharmaceutical companies performed slightly better than foreign pharmaceutical companies. The reason is that many foreign pharmaceutical companies' products have been purchased collectively, and domestic pharmaceutical companies have developed many innovative drugs. As a result, the prices of mature products in the entire pharmaceutical industry have declined and sales have declined, and the industry is extremely serious. It can be foreseeable that this situation will continue in the next two years. How to deal with intra-volume, "expanding new drugs and expanding channels" may be two reliable ways.
expansion of new drugs means that enterprises must have a sufficient number of innovative drugs. If there are no innovative drugs, no matter how strong the foundation was before, they may be affected by the price, so they must have enough innovative drugs; another solution to this is to expand the channel, that is, in addition to laying out the market of grade hospitals, enterprises should try to lay out the out-of-hospital markets, e-commerce and grassroots markets. It is no exaggeration to say that if you get one of the two, the company can survive, and if you get the other, the company can survive better.Under such a severe market structure, if neither of the above two solutions are available, the company will definitely go downhill.
02
The value of digitalization and IT construction in future business
Due to the impact of the epidemic, digitalization and the Internet also play a more important role. The country has a supportive attitude towards online medical consultations, Internet hospitals, medical e-commerce, etc. In addition, it is relatively relaxed for long-term prescriptions, medical insurance payments, and e-commerce prescription drugs. This is a trend that cannot be ignored. Therefore, we can see that the digitalization of the pharmaceutical industry today mainly shows four major manifestations:
- First is doctor education online , the past offline meetings became online meetings;
- Second is patient management online , Internet follow-up has become more Universal;
- The third is online marketing activities , including communication, case sharing, remote consultation, etc.;
- The fourth is online clinical research . Developing new products is a huge cost point for enterprises and is also one of the key points that IT needs to focus on.
The pharmaceutical industry is a very conservative and traditional industry. It is worth believing that most IT people are ahead of colleagues at the same level of marketing and management. At this stage, many companies are in a period of confusion of change, and the past practices are difficult to work. The older generation of managers are not very familiar with some emerging marketing methods and new ways of playing, which has caused extremely difficult communication. For some companies with fewer contact points with doctors, they will choose to cooperate with external platforms, but the information data will remain on external platforms, making it difficult for them to obtain data precipitation. In addition, most companies continue to wait and see mobile medical and internet celebrity doctors, and it is difficult to form their own user and private domain traffic, and it is even more difficult to open up all channels. Therefore, in the context of these challenges, IT departments should not only ensure the normal operation of the enterprise's system, but also an important task is to educate and guide the outdated managers in the enterprise and provide new ideas and solutions.
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Upgrade process of digital chronic disease management platform
Next I would like to share some experiences about chronic disease management platform, as well as some reflections and experiences in it.
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Thinking about taking the diabetes chronic disease management platform as an example
Relatively speaking, chronic disease management is the most common area in the patient-centered digital action. Taking diabetes as an example, since there are many patients with diabetes and strong compliance, many related management platforms have been produced.
In 2014, a company built a corresponding platform. Patients need to download the App and enter their own blood sugar. Then the patient will receive relevant pushes, and patients can communicate with each other, record exercise data, etc. However, the functions of this platform are one-way and require patients to manually enter data, which is very inconvenient and is quickly eliminated.
Around 2016, with the rise of AI, the platform produced, in addition to the functions mentioned above, can also automatically record patients' blood sugar through Bluetooth, and can provide some dietary exercise suggestions based on artificial intelligence based on the patient's blood sugar value. It has a certain degree of interaction. However, the platform has an important shortcoming that there is no doctor, and the AI functions are not intelligent enough, so the content pushed is not highly targeted, which becomes machine push later, and patients gradually abandon the platform. Compared with the previous two generations of platforms, the third-generation platform has made a qualitative leap. The platform includes doctors, service platforms, and patients. Doctors can communicate and manage daily diabetes with patients and answer some questions, which can also be seen by the patient's family. If the patient controls well, there is no need for the doctor's intervention. If the patient controls poorly, the doctor can provide reasonable guidance based on changes in blood sugar.In addition, if the patient uses it frequently, he can get rewards such as blood glucose meter , test strips, points, etc. The entire platform is operated and managed by Internet companies, with large pharmaceutical companies providing technical support. At the same time, doctors promote the platform and the patient education of education specialists are implemented simultaneously. Overall, the platform has done a very good job in medicine, convenience of doctors and patients, and fluency of the process.
Although the third-generation platform is doing well, it still lacks some. A real chronic disease management platform must be connected with insurance companies like WellDoc, and the insurance company will pay for the fees. The entire app is like digital therapy and prescription drugs. Patients can get medical insurance payments based on the use of the app, and doctors can also get sunny income. Through the use of digital therapy, patients' blood sugar will be better controlled. If my country's relevant platforms want to take a step forward, they must have the intervention of insurance companies and medical insurance, otherwise the enthusiasm of doctors will become worse and worse, and the platform's user experience will be greatly reduced. The construction of the chronic disease management platform of
generally goes through the above four steps. Many companies are building similar platforms, but most companies are still in the first and second stages, and there are very few companies that have reached the third stage. The reason is that this type of platform not only requires huge cost investment in the third stage, but also does not see clear returns. Not to mention the intervention of medical insurance and commercial insurance in the fourth stage. Therefore, if you want to manage chronic diseases for digital patients, you must clarify how much resources you have and what stage you can invest in.
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Online meeting live broadcast
Online meeting live broadcast, many companies are using it. For my company, first of all, the internal platforms are integrated, and only one platform is used internally, and broadcast it through different services. After authentication, doctors can log in with one click. At the same time, the platform includes both event warm-up, execution, and push after meeting. Finally, through statistical analysis of various data, it is pushed to relevant departments to optimize the effect of enterprise live broadcasts. This is also a way for IT to empower business.
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Patient-centered medical digital marketing model
Our Digital marketing makes efforts in the following five aspects:
First is Disease premature screening , and the disease is accurately detected by introducing digital tools; It is diagnostic innovation , mainly AI film reading, 5G remote consultation, etc.; the third is integrated in-hospital diagnosis and treatment . For example, many patients have three highs, so they need to register in different departments. By establishing a metabolic disease diagnosis and treatment center with the hospital, patients can complete all examinations in this department and formulate corresponding treatment plans; the fourth is digital patient disease management outside the hospital ; the last is digital disease management for the entire course of the disease .
The above five aspects are a core of AstraZeneca's patient-centered model.
Overall, the digitalization we have done is three aspects: the first is the digitalization of business tools and training , the second is the digitalization of academic dissemination , and the third is the digitalization of patient services. In digital marketing, we have a wide coverage, both top experts and grassroots customers. For example, the digital visit platform we have built uses a combination of online and offline methods. The customer feedback received by online representatives can be given to offline representatives. After the offline representatives visit, the information can also be fed back to the online representatives and followed up through virtual representatives. In addition, we have also built a county-level digital education platform to work with relevant deans to form a medical community.
In addition, we have also made innovations in retail, which is an digital management model we have created in the community field.The project jointly creates a smart community management platform with Shanghai Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is mainly aimed at cardiovascular, diabetes, COPD, etc. There are portable terminals in community hospitals, all of which are intelligent devices. After the patient is measured, the patient is directly connected to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention -based platform. If the community hospital and family are connected, the off-hospital follow-up and tracking can be carried out to carry out intelligent chronic disease management.
And in Wuxi we have a smart pharmacy, which has more than a dozen detection equipment set up in the store. After measurement, patients can not only record data, but also detect patients' early diseases, remind patients to go to the hospital for regular review. In addition, what is more popular is that we have made a drug purchase map, which allows patients to clarify where to buy what medicine, and at the same time, patients can know whether the pharmacy has medical insurance and commercial insurance. There are also some consultations, patient education, etc.
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IT team empowers and leads digital transformation
IT team empowers the digital transformation of enterprises, and we mainly do it from three aspects: the first is ht The application and big data analysis of ml4AI , the second is RWE data system platform . Large enterprises on this platform should build their own, with data analysis and data processing capabilities, and the third is patient management digital platform . If it is a large enterprise or a company with specialized diseases, it should also be built. For example, for the application of AI, we have identified adverse reactions. After receiving adverse reactions, we use AI to capture keywords and follow up in a timely manner. Through insight into data, we can optimize strategies. In the past, decision making has become history, and using artificial intelligence to assist decision-making has greatly improved efficiency.
To sum up, I think digital and IT teams should not become a simple empowering team, but should lead the entire industry, explore and inspire more people through technology, and thus lead the changes in the entire industry. The above is my sharing, thank you everyone!
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"CIO Development Center" was advocated and initiated by a group of CIOs who are passionate about the development of China's CIO career, and aims to "aggregate the strength of China's CIOs and promote the commercial value of CIOs". It aims to promote the promotion of professional norms, the improvement of the growth environment and the improvement of team quality through academic and experience exchanges, knowledge and concept publicity, and thus promote the improvement of information application level and promote the establishment and improvement of CIO mechanisms.
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