Shahid Akhtar, Editor, ETHhealthworldtalked with Sandra ForeroChief Operating Officer, ZS, to know more about the advances in digitization Patient care And how AI is impacting the healthcare ecosystem.
AI impacts the pharma industry
Artificial intelligence has had a huge impact on the pharma industry in the past few years. It started with this interesting new development that many pharma companies wanted to experiment with. They began experimenting with commercial tools and in the commercial space, thinking about how artificial intelligence applications could help improve decision-making, for example, how to bring a new brand to market. And it’s evolved from there to really impact the spectrum of every stage of the drug development process. Accelerating drug development, for example, and drug discovery is one of the key areas where pharmaceutical companies have invested to help bring more products to market faster, reducing costs by speeding this up. Patient care and overall Patient experience Another important area is where advances in AI are helping to improve outcomes for patients. At the end of the day, I think this needs to involve not only the pharma industry, but also other players in the ecosystem.
Digitalization of patient care
Players and providers are investing heavily to ensure they are leveraging the latest in technology and artificial intelligence to drive better patient experiences. The kind of things they’re doing is really to bring digitally connected health applications that get closer to patients using data from watches and other wearables where they have to make decisions. For a clinical trial, for example, and making the clinical trial experience much easier for the patient that involves not having to go through the office all the time, not having to go through the doctor’s office, but actually being able to do other. Things remotely through the use of digital wearables and applications. So data analytics though lots of opportunities and lots of pharmaceutical companies Life Sciences Companies are dealing with data and analytics, it’s not an easy road.Data Analytics Impacting the Pharma Industry
The biggest challenge is putting all the data in the right place to be able to use it. There’s a lot of data exploding everywhere, which is a good thing, but it’s not an easy process to get the data to the point where you can leverage it to drive insights to inform decisions. A lot of companies across the healthcare spectrum, over the past few years, have really invested some energy, effort, and money in laying the foundation to bring all the data together in one place so it can be used. And one of the challenges is that often in that process, they start thinking, “Is this really worth it? We’ve invested all this money to bring all this money together, and maybe they’re not seeing the results yet. To do that To be able to. It’s a big investment. And if they don’t act quickly on seeing applications and getting returns from doing that, they start to wonder, is it really worth this big investment because there’s so much they need to change to digitize? is, if you will, at the back end of all organization.
Data analytics: Latest Progress
There have been many advancements in data analytics and technology. All three of these things are coming together, and in fact, one of those advancements is the intersection of analytics and technology that I like to talk about a lot because it really helps bring results and outcomes to life for organizations. Especially science. So they are able to bring technology and analytics together to do things differently. We’ve seen examples of processes, for example, leveraging patient-level data and real-world data, processes that used to take six weeks to be able to get results from a question and solve an analysis can now be done in one. With the use of data and technology, time is getting shorter and shorter, and progress has to do with it. Technology advances help with speed; Analytics advancements help provide better answers and better results by learning from the past and having access to more historical data to be able to report or predict better outcomes, and that’s something we’re very focused on at ZS, advanced Staying on the cutting edge of those advancements so we can better support our customers in making those decisions.
ZS Transforming Healthcare
ZS is a management, consulting and technology firm focused on the healthcare industry. Our aim is to help transform healthcare by working across the ecosystem, working with life science companies, payers and providers so we can leverage the capabilities we have in analytics, data and technology to make better decisions for our customers. Ultimately leading to better outcomes for all our patients and healthy people globally.
We have been in the market for almost 40 years. Next year is going to be our 40th anniversary, and we’ve grown a lot as a firm in these 40 years. We started helping pharma companies in the commercial sector, and that was 40 years ago. We still do that a lot and it’s always been a core part of what we do. But we also work with clients in all areas of R&D, for example, supply chain and manufacturing and with other healthcare stakeholders in addition to pharma. We’ve been able to help many payers, for example, to provide better access to patients and functional medicines, and that’s something we want to continue to help our customers across the spectrum make progress on. So, as a firm, we’ve grown quite a bit over the last 40 years, and we have about 35 offices around the world. India is a really important part of our global presence. Out of the 40,000 people we have worldwide, about 8000 are in India.
ZS operations in India
India is a very important part of our people power and in the last few years we have been expanding quite a bit in India. We currently have five offices, with plans to add more over the next few years. An interesting aspect of ZS is that post covid or in this new field that we have many organizations working remotely from home. We are bringing People return to offices. We have a flexible and connected model that has helped us really attract and attract and retain the best people. We offer the flexibility to be in the office part of the time and work from home. But because of the way we work, it’s important for our teams to work together. We bring people together to work in teams to help solve our customers’ problems.
ZS expansion plans
We’re actually looking forward to having offices close to where all the talent is, which is part of our expansion strategy, which is actually a talent hub strategy. Where is the talent for specific fields? And India, for example, has a lot of talent in the areas of products and product engineering, which is an important program in the area of analytics that we’re talking about. Our expansion service is linked to finding talent hubs in India where we can find an example of software development and product engineering.
For instance, we have a very large hub in the Pune office. That’s where a large group of ZS focuses on product development today. But we are starting to see that to continue our growth, we need to expand into other Indian markets to attract that talent. And so we recently opened in Bangalore, and we’re looking for other expansion areas where we can attract that kind of talent.
ZS plans for the future
One of the things we’re focusing on, not just in India, but in India and globally, is how to be a great place for people to come to work. It’s no secret that there are also many companies looking for great talent, and for us, it’s really important to attract and retain the best talent at ZS in analytics and technology across all of these areas. And so we put a lot of energy into how we make sure that we have the right sports equipment and the right culture so that we can ultimately find and attract the best talent. We engage very early, for example, early on in universities to partner with talent sources, and we offer great career opportunities for people to join us. They find that having a direct impact on healthcare, on driving their experience for patients, on driving their access to medicine is something that gives purpose to people who engage with ZS in many ways.
