Technology Trends in the Pharma Industry
With today’s growing arena of technologies like AI, Big Data and AWS, there has been a great shift in the way the technologies are evolving. The trends have changed.
The way we look at some of the niche technical areas have changed. I would in this article be highlighting some of the areas where we are evolving with great speed and the processing it is done.
1. Hadoop and Big Data
In layman’s terms Hadoop is a framework which performs storage and processing by using a collection of computers interconnected to each other in a way what is called as a Cluster. This way the processing time is greatly reduced compared to traditional systems as any process and storage are divided across multiple systems. This way the storage is enhanced as well as processing is much faster. It is a process where the work is sliced and divided into multiple apps.
Use-case for Pharma Industry
This way the healthcare and Pharma industry can progress in a huge way by employing distributed storage and computing for data like claims, health care , patients and clinical trials. This data set keep growing exponentially.
Healthcare data sets like claims, EHR records, clinical trials data grow exponentially with time. Hence processing and analyzing these data sets becomes difficult as the data size increases. Application of Hadoop can immensely reduce the processing time and provide faster actionable insights.
2. Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is the process of making a system do something similar to a human intelligence. Let us look at this in terms of examples. A very common example I can think of is Speech Recognition and systems to responding to voice commands. In today’s world this has evolved to a great extent. We have even gone to the extent to giving voice commands to switch on the lights, or even as far as autonomous driving which is a very successful implementation.
Use case for Pharma Industry
We can employ AI in many ways in the Pharma industry , but a very easy example I can think of is to give a voice command to pull up the largest selling drug or for example, identify the trends in diseases by going through a pattern in a matter of a few seconds.
Watson is an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a “question answering” machine. Watson is believed to diagnose cancer with over 90% accuracy. Watson for Oncology also helps physicians quickly identify key information in a patient’s medical record, surface relevant evidence and explore treatment option
3. Mobile Apps
With the technology and demand to have everything on mobile, the trend is shifting to have platforms on mobile. Though multiple mobile platforms are available, the main focus is on the iOS and Android. Whenever there is a technological solution, the providers also come up with a design as to how should we have this platform in a mobile application. And Customers want to technologies to serve them in mobile, as the Customer base for mobile platforms are much higher. For example, in a family each member has a mobile.
Use case In Pharma Industry
The World of mobile applications has unlimited use cases, but a very good use cases is what the PharmaACE team has developed is the ability to analyze trends though a Business Intelligence app for iOS devices. This gives analysts he ability to do their work on the go even when they are not in office.
4. Cloud Computing
This is a trend where more and more companies do not want to spend money and processing power on the Cloud. This way the Organizations do not have to spend money on infrastructure, backup and hardware. Cloud computing is leading to all processing and storage being moved onto the Cloud infrastructure. The advantages are
- Infrastructure Savings
- Zero Maintenance
- Pay as you use
Amazon is one of the prime leaders in Cloud computing. More and more bigger customers are moving to a secure Cloud environment
Use case for Pharma Industry
With the data like claims growing to Terabytes of data for a single provider, many organizations are opting for storage on cloud to be able to accommodate the data. The kind of up scaling becomes very expensive and more and more biggies are opting to move their data and the processing to cloud platforms like AWS or Azure.
