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1rem

 interview, Steve Silvestro, president of OptimizeRx, a digital communications platform, details:

The benefits to integrating direct-to-consumer (DTC) and healthcare provider (HCP) marketing strategies with technology, especially for patients and providers

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) toward the pharma marketing stage of commercialization

Ways that pharma marketers can navigate the rapidly changing landscape of state-level consumer privacy legislation

Recommendations for pharma brands as they start to think about 2025 planning

Steve Silvestro explains the value of artificial intelligence in launch plans, benefits to integrating DTC and HCP marketing strategies, and more. 

Incorporating AI into Commercialization Plans

When it comes to navigating the complex clinical and commercial landscape for specialty drugs—including hurdles in access to these critical but costly therapies—today’s specialty pharmacies are bringing more skills and services to the table.

Specialty Pharmacy: The Trends Shaping Best Practices

Various forms of technology—including in the serialization and refrigeration spaces—are necessary in order to keep goods flowing smoothly through the supply chain. 

Three Key Pharmaceutical Logistics Challenges to Monitor 

The session details how these teachings span the entire pharma supply chain.

LogiPharma USA 2024: Lessons Learned from Risk Mitigation 

The provider’s partnership with AI innovator Odaia offers deeper, broader insights to HCP activity.

Veeva Ready to Go with AI-Generated Customer Insights in its CRM

It’s essential for commercial success, but presents its share of obstacles.

Beyond the Finish Line: Why Post-Approval Regulatory Strategy Matters

The Future of Supply Chain Visibility

In the coming years, Jain outlines, the future of supply chain visibility is predicted to undergo a major transformation. Similar to how manufacturing companies currently utilize ERP and HRMS systems within individual departments, he believes that they will increasingly adopt comprehensive cross-border visibility platforms. These systems will facilitate collaboration not only in the logistics department but across finance, production, and warehouse teams. 

The objective at the end of the day is to design a unified platform that allows all stakeholders in the supply chain to access and analyze data seamlessly. This shift is anticipated to impact over 90% of the market, which will lead to enhanced efficiency and transparency in supply chain operations. By integrating these systems, companies will improve decision-making processes and better respond to global supply chain complexities.

How do you envision the future of supply chain visibility shaping up over the next few years?

Just like every manufacturing company uses an ERP and HRMS system, they have systems for the departments, but no one was using a cross-border PMS [periodic monthly statement] earlier. We believe in the next few years—even in the next five years—all the large manufacturing companies would have a system which is ubiquitous and used across different departments, for not just logistics management. It's also for their finance teams and their end customer, production teams, and warehouses. All of them are connected in the supply chain, so they will have a cross-border visibility platform which helps all of them see the data in one single place, and this transformation will happen for more than 90% of the market.

In the final part of his interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Gautam Prem Jain, GoComet’s Co-founder and CEO, predicts how the future of data accessibility will unfold.

Creating a Digitized Supply Chain

Why is end-to-end (E2E) visibility and digitization across the supply chain so valuable?

Companies were also realizing that they were facing a lot of issues, lots of losses when they were not actually ensuring that the correct procedures were followed or they were not ensuring proper automation. Automation is the future—lot of companies have started and worked on that. It's only that this technology did not exist a few years ago, so a lot of companies are looking at it now. The ERP started in 1980s, the CRMs in 2000, and now we have, all kinds of systems for every department, such as HRMS systems. We also have the support ticketing systems. However, no system existed for cross border shipment management, so companies did not realize this. We are finding that a lot more companies are adopting such technologies because they are realizing that it's not possible to just manually keep scaling the team members. Even after having more team members, the process does not get solved easily, because sometimes, if everything is sitting on emails and spreadsheets, there is a lack of coordination. If someone has to go and leave, then it sits on their emails. No one else knows what to do. It is just there. When the person comes back, there is a penalty on it, even if more team members are there. 

Secondly, having more team members causes the issue that they are doing repetitive work, which should be automated. Instead, if companies are able to focus their energy on ensuring that the people are doing strategic work, building the correct relations with the carriers, finding better routes, doing better planning, this is where the time is better used, as compared to tracking every shipment and going to different carriers again and again—10 times a day—for hundreds of shipments. That cannot happen.

These can be solved with technology. People are realizing there is a lot of potential of saving costs, as the freight rates have increased in the past. They are about eight times what they were pre-COVID levels, and they are three times from the past few months now as well. Companies are seeing that it is having impact on the bottom line directly. There is extra cost, just like it's, money which is going out of their pockets. This is one of the big issues, and companies are solving it by automating systems. They are saving time. and they are having their teams put their minds on better strategic work, as compared to doing manual, repetitive work. These are the benefits that companies are realizing.

In the third part of his interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Gautam Prem Jain, GoComet’s Co-founder and CEO, details the importance of E2E visibility. 

financial benefits technology

Given the technological capabilities that currently exist, how long does it take to see a reduction in annualized drug spend?

 I was talking to a health system last week, and they had sitting in current state, $1.6 million worth of savings. So just out of the gate, their perspective was, our pricing is wrong. Let's correct the pricing. That's $1.6 million savings. Then, once you get some of that low-hanging fruit of the prices that are set wrong, then you layer on.

Now the prices are changing. Do I want to make decisions about it that will change my behavior? Do I want to make some strategic changes from one drug to another? I would say that what you're typically seeing is some large fraction of a percentage savings out of the gate, and it might take you a little while to filter that through— with rebates from your wholesalers and your manufacturers—but you get to a world where you can be saving 2, 3, 4% of your drug spend in the first year, and then that continues year-over-year.

We just had one health system pass the $10 million saved mark. It’s very frequent that you're getting million-plus dollar savings in a mid-sized system within 6-12 months. It's pretty remarkable, so I'd say instantly, but you also then see that ramp up over time, and you may see different types of plays in different time horizons.

In a final part of his interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Kevin MacDonald, Bluesight’s Co-founder and CEO, explains the amount of time it takes to see a reduction in annualized drug spend, and offers estimates in terms of percent savings. 

The Financial Benefits of Technology

Streamlining Pharmacy Purchasing and Procurement 

According to the latest “Hospital Pharmacy Operations Report” (HPOR) by Bluesight, 71% of hospital pharmacy participants noted that streamlining pharmacy purchasing and procurement was a priority for them this year. Why is mitigating the effect of rising costs a priority for the healthcare/pharma industry right now, and what other topics are on the docket?

 The hospital pharmacy has always been managed by drug budget, and when you zoom out to the entire health system, the drug budget has always been the second largest operational spend. It’s something to take a look at. You combine that with the rise of specialty medications and the inflation of the price of specialty medications, and it's becoming a huge part of any health system budget. Being able to understand that, control that, and understand your margin profile and cost profile is super important. I think what we're seeing is just the natural extension of as the budget goes, you put more and more focus on it. But I also think what's happening is that you're seeing consolidation in the industry—where health systems are buying other health systems—they want to be able to control that spend and understand where it's going and make decisions that are going to move the needle. The drug budget is a place where they can do that.

When it comes to giving pharmacy buyers full control over their procurement landscape, what opportunities are advanced analytics tools able to provide?

 I think we've seen a step change in the past 24 months. There're still legacy products that are out there via your wholesalers and your GPOs that provide the basics of what it is offering me as the contracted best price, but in terms of the next generation of tools, we have one called CostCheck, and it provides a whole other level of analytics that allows for things like active price monitoring. If you think about the average health system, there's 50,000 NDCs where the prices change on a daily basis. And if you're a mid-size health system—if you have seven or eight sites—you're probably purchasing on 100 to 200 different accounts. And if you layer in your GPO, 340B pricing, what you’re doing with WAC purchasing—it's really complicated, and oftentimes, what's happening is a price changes on one account and not another account, and that can cost in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions of dollars. 

Having the ability to monitor what's going on, not just on an account-by-account basis, but system wide, is a big step change. Beyond that, just being able to understand not just I'm going to buy Brand X versus Brand Y, but what do those decisions actually mean for me? Some changes are easy. For example, buying a five-pack versus a 25-pack, if the thing that's in the pack is cheaper. There's a lot of clinician-driven changes, where you might have to go through your P&T committee or something to approve it, and understanding how easy or how difficult the changes are is an important piece. Just looking not just in the acute space, but non-acute. you know,

What are we doing for contracts? A lot of hospitals have got their GPOs that they're working with that are driving best pricing. Some hospitals additionally do things like Civica, or they'll do one-off contracts with a handful of manufacturers, so how do I know that my people, first of all, even know that I have that contract, second of all, that it's loaded properly in my systems, and third, that I'm actually purchasing and complying with all of those contracts, because it can be incredibly difficult to understand that they're there, and when you start to stack requirements on requirements, making sure that you're actually hitting your compliance metrics can also be tricky.

In an interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Kevin MacDonald, Bluesight’s Co-founder and CEO, discusses why mitigating the impact of rising costs is imperative, while explaining the benefit of advanced analytics tools.

digital solution trends

Pertaining to the implementation of digital solutions in the marketplace, what kinds of successes have you seen?

We've seen some great success with implementing these solutions in the marketplace. One example I can share is a manufacturer who decided up front to build a really robust roadmap. They decided to map out exactly what they were looking to achieve and how they were going to achieve it. They allowed for enough time, and they made sure that they had all the right financial investments in place. They had the right players and stakeholders involved, and that was really crucial as well. They brought industry experts to the table, and they made sure they had the right teams of operational expertise, IT expertise, business process expertise. They were able to bring everyone together, and they focused first on building their platform and their core infrastructure. They were really thoughtful around how they did that, and then from there, they were able to evolve their roadmap, and they've continued to build off of that solid foundation that they built, and they've continued to enhance and evolve that along the way. Ultimately, they have a package where it’s a solid foundation, they're able to meet patients and customers where they are, and their technology is really supporting the patient journey. So that's been really successful. 

Another thing that I've seen several manufacturers do that I am in favor of—and I think works really well—is the pilot approach. Traditionally, you see a manufacturer go through an RFP process, select a vendor, and then implement their solutions into their patient support program, but they're fully invested at that point. I think what works better are some of these manufacturers who have engaged in a pilot first, so they still go through that RFP process, but when they select their vendor, they develop a short-term pilot so that they can fully vet that solution on a smaller scale and in a narrower focus, and that enables them to gather some data to determine: are the outputs of what they expected? Are they getting accuracy results that they were told they were going to get? Are those solutions being utilized in the way they thought they were going to be utilized?

I've seen some manufacturers come out of that pilot with much lower accuracy rates than they were expecting. I've also seen some come out of the pilot phase with the same or higher accuracy results that they were expecting, but ultimately, they have the data that then they can decide, is this investment truly worth it, and are we going to get what we were expecting to get without having to fully invest? So that's been a really smart approach as well.

Heading into 2025, what trends in the space are you envisioning?

Digital solutions aren't going anywhere. I think you're going to hear about more manufacturers who are interested in implementing these solutions or expanding on what they already have in place today. I think we'll see more service providers pop up, new service providers we hadn't heard about before, and maybe new service offerings we hadn't heard of before. I just think there's going to continue to be an expansion in this space. Perhaps we'll hear of more well-rounded packages of solutions being offered, but the other thing I think we're going to hear a lot more about—and I'm excited to see where this conversation goes—is around AI. It’s the buzzword of late, so I think we're going to hear a lot more about AI and how that is integrated in some of these solutions. I'm curious to see where that conversation goes.

In the final part of her interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Meghan Mullooly, Archbow Consulting’s Vice President, shares implementation success stories, and provides an outlook on future of the space. 

Digital Solution Trends Heading into 2025

Matt Hawkins mitigating security risks

How can data, privacy, and security risks in the pharma sector be mitigated?

 From a security and privacy perspective, AI has obviously brought a lot of focus into that area, and it's brought a lot of challenges—both from a communication perspective—to businesses and individuals on how their data is being used. And I think a lot of the same principles apply in terms of the way that we've been storing data securely in our environments for a very long time, and we all do our industry certifications every year—whether that be SOC 2, whether that's HITRUST—those principles still apply in the way that we store and provide access to data, to third parties, and to customers, suppliers, partners, etc. 

I think what AI brings to the table is an extra layer of transparency and accountability that we haven't seen before. Let's touch on a couple of those. With transparency, I think it's super important that we, as organizations, are transparent on how data is being used in an AI scenario. Making patients aware of how their data will be used and what it will be used for, and giving them the choice to opt in or opt out of those scenarios. That's something that we do. Everything that we provide to patients—we're very transparent about how we do that, and what we try and do as much as possible is detach the data from the individual. We don't need to know personal identifiable information to look at things like medical history, to look at things like your fill history; that is a separate piece of information from what identifies you as a person. I think being very transparent with how we communicate on what we're doing with data, and also making sure that we're auditing ourselves both internally and providing ways for external organizations to audit us as well. We look at anything that we're doing with AI. We're aware and continually monitor for things like bias. Are we showing bias in the way that we're dealing with individuals or customers? Are we producing unfavorable results? We constantly monitor internally how our data analytics and how our AI is performing, and we also subscribe to external organizations in the way that they put forward guidelines and recommendations.

I think it's important to be part of the conversation there, and not just waiting to have legislation put on top of you, but instead, being part of the conversation shaping how AI can be used safely and ethically moving forward in order to enhance the patient's experience, all through that kind of supply chain. Because if we go back to the logistics and the operational efficiency, that at the end of the day is still having an impact on the patient, because the pharmacy itself is more efficient internally. For me, it's transparency, it's ethics, and it's consistently providing a feedback loop internally and externally to both internal and external audits.

In the final part of his Pharma Commerce video interview, Matt Hawkins, CaryHealth’s Chief Technology Officer, comments on the importance of mitigating security risks, along with ways to take action. 

An Extra Layer of Transparency and Accountability

Matt Hawkins digital pharmacy

What capabilities are needed from a digital pharmacy in order to provide patients with the various services that they may need?

From a digital pharmacy perspective, in a broader sense, stepping back from AI, a digital pharmacy needs to be agile and have the capability to be able to tailor a service either in a B2B or a B2C scenario. Working with a partner, every partner is different, and everybody has different requirements for their specific medication that they need a digital pharmacy partner for. They may have a different demographic of patients, so having a digital pharmacy that's able to be agile and modular in a way that it can leverage the right services for that partner easily, quickly, and cost efficiently is incredibly important, and that's where the strength in digital pharmacy lies.

There's a plethora of healthcare services out there—from telehealth to specific patient adherence services, to data analytics companies—so having a digital pharmacy that's able to leverage the right solution at the right time is very important, and that applies both from the patient care perspective as well as from the logistics perspective.

Choosing the right delivery partner for your scenario, choosing the right communication method for your patient demographic, and being able to iterate over that very quickly, while also being able to have the necessary digital tools in place—like having mobile apps, web portals, having both customer and partner-facing tools that gives them the transparency to be able to look at the lifecycle of their experience—is critical. Is adherence going up? What are the factors affecting adherence? Having this digital suite of components together in a single platform that they can leverage is paramount to providing a digital pharmacy service.

In this part of his Pharma Commerce video interview, Matt Hawkins, CaryHealth’s Chief Technology Officer, outlines the necessary qualities of a digital pharmacy that will allow it to be of greatest value to patients.


Why Agility Is Paramount

Matt Hawkins artificial intelligence pharmacy

What role does AI play in the pharmacy setting?

You've got two areas in a pharmacy environment where AI can have a big impact. We can look at it from the logistics and the operations of the pharmacy, and we can also look at it from the interaction with the patient. Let's start with the logistics of the pharmacy. We can start simple and talk about automating routine tasks, which take a long time in the pharmacy and slow down operational efficiency. This could be things such as control interaction checking. When a prescription arrives at the pharmacy, you punch the prescription in, you see if that patient is taking any other medications that would cause that would cause a conflict or a problem. And that's something that happens with every prescription fill—an operational blocker. We can start to automate those kinds of tasks with prescription verification. We can reduce errors on data input by having AI living within the operational center of the pharmacy, and you can build out from there into things like logistics, into things like stock management, into things like predicting seasonal trends to ensure that you always have the correct supply on hand. There's a logistics impact inside the pharmacy to increasing the bandwidth of teams and being more accurate in the way that you are managing the efficacy of the business.

Then, if we move over to the patient side, we have the opportunity to customize and tailor patient messaging and patient care in a way that we've never been able to before and be able to do that at scale. We can talk about how communicate with patients in a way that they want to be communicated with, looking at having the bandwidth to give—every patient—a personalized touch in the way that you communicate.

Some interesting things that are happening right now are things like AI voice calls, for example. AI voice calls are very close right now to being indistinguishable between human calls, and it gives a way for a call to happen to a patient. Let's take someone, for example, who works during the day when the pharmacy is open. There's nobody around outside of hours to make that call. Maybe that person works shifts. You want to have a touchpoint with them that's at midnight. There's nobody around to work at midnight. An AI call can get through to that person. It has access to their medical profile, it can answer questions, and it can give an experience that was previously not able to be delivered, and you can do that at scale.

You're no longer constrained by how many people you've got available to make that call. I think patient care can be more personalized. You can deliver it at a much bigger scale, and you can deliver it in a way that's appropriate for that patient. You can look at things like age demographics, how this person wants to be communicated with, and apply it very specifically to them.

In this part of his Pharma Commerce video interview, Matt Hawkins, CaryHealth’s Chief Technology Officer, explains the value of AI in the pharmacy environment. 

Utilizing Artificial Intelligence Behind the Counter

Leveraging AI Matt Hawkins

How can AI accurately diagnose patients and provide reliable medical advice?

I think the benefit of AI—especially in 2024 as we've seen the proliferation of generative AI over the last three to four years—is its capability to be able to look at a huge amount of data. I would look at that data in context, and that's typically an operation that would that for an individual would take a long time to do, so reading through medical history, looking through medical images, looking through things like lab results. Bringing all of that information together takes a lot of concentration. It takes a lot of time from a human in that situation. AI provides the ability for it to look at this full data corpus very quickly and to find the patterns in that data and give the human on the other end a very quick answer that’s very much in context to the question that has been asked, and to do that at a scale which has not previously been possible before.

When you talk about the reliability as well, I think we all know that data can be analyzed in such a vast capability right now. How do we know that that's reliable? I think it's very important when we're presenting things like medical information, is that we're able to back up the decisions that we've made with referenceable answers, so that when you're getting a response—whether in a patient context or in a healthcare provider context—you get instant feedback on why you're getting that answer. Where's the reference, where's the clinical guidelines, where's this piece of information come from? How does that relate to the specifics within the patient profile? That serves a couple of purposes.

One is that it's giving you confidence that you're getting an answer that is based within truth. And two, it's giving you that ability to instantly verify that information as well. Context on the way in, and context on the way out. I think from that point, there's several places that you can go. We can talk about personalized treatment plans. We can talk about simulating medical scenarios. There's such a broad application of this that we could about lots of different applications.

In an interview with Pharma Commerce Editor Nicholas Saraceno, Matt Hawkins, CaryHealth’s Chief Technology Officer, describes how artificial intelligence can not only diagnose patients, but also deliver accurate medical advice.

Leveraging AI for the Benefit of Patients

Michael Rowe Serialized Data

 What is the current state of affairs of DSCSA?

In order to set the context for where things are today, you have to look back over the past couple years of where we've been. The DSCSA has these series of milestones. In 2015, the industry went to lot level tracing, where we were tracking quantities and lots, and how those products were being moved through the supply chain. In 2017 and 2018 is when products started to become serialized by the manufacturer. A lot of packaging changes were happening, and the manufacturers were storing a lot of data, but that data really wasn't leaving or moving with the product.

Since 2018/2019, the industry has been working toward getting through fully interoperable data exchange. The enhanced distribution requirements—as laid out in the law—were set to kick in in Nov. 27, 2023. Up until this time, almost last year, the industry really was sharing that the amount of data that was supposed to be flowing with the product was not where it needed to be. The FDA introduced this “stabilization period,” this one additional year for companies to continue to improve the ability to transmit the serialized data with the product. I like to say that there's a breadcrumb of serialized data that moves with the product as it moves, as it changes hands, and as a way for companies to have their own database to use in a suspect drug investigation to help identify counterfeits. That’s the background of where we are and where we got to.

The current state of affairs is the amount of data that's being moved and the amount of connections that are happening has really improved significantly over this time last year, where the industry at whole was reporting that maybe they were getting 20% of all of the products coming with good data. Right now, wholesalers are generally reporting that it's in that 70% range of where we've moved the needle about another 50%, so that's really where we are today in terms of data exchange, and that's been improving.

 Where do you see opportunities for improvement?

Where I see the opportunities for improvement and where things are still needing to improve is around what I call exception handling. This is a big buzzword in the industry right now.

What happens if product arrives but there's no data? What happens when the file is late and the product shows up before the file? While there's been a lot of good work theorizing on how to solve those exceptions, there are types of exception scenarios—including the ability to test and pilot in order figure out how to fix those issues and build those standard operating procedures— that aren’t really where they need to be in the industry.

I'll give you an example with a client of ours. There was a file that was inadvertently transmitted, so wrong serial numbers were sent to their customer. We spent months trying to figure out, how do you correct a file that's already been sent out? It's those types of interoperable data challenges that the industry really is still not prepared to handle.

In this part of his Pharma Commerce video interview, Michael Rowe, Two Labs’  Senior Director of DSCSA/Serialization Compliance Services, discusses the state of affairs surrounding the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, along with opportunities for improvement. 

Data and Technology

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