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Smart Contracts Can Disrupt and revolutionize the Healthcare Ecosystem
As on today healthcare systems are bloated with cost, bureaucracy, and middlemen. It’s absolutely at the brink of having a disruption. Already there has been a lot of talk about Amazon to soon enter the prescription drug market. This would bring in a big-time disruption to traditional brick-and-mortar retail pharmacies. It also will threaten the present overall healthcare ecosystem which consist of the following: Consumers, who pay monthly premiums to health payers and also pay co-pays to providers and pharmacies. Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), who hold enormous leverage in negotiating prices with drug manufacturers and places drugs on a health plan’s formulary. They also receive rebates from drug manufacturers and share some percentage of this rebate with health payers. They are also responsible for reimbursing pharmacies for drug prescriptions. Health Payers; they receive claims from healthcare providers. They reimburse providers for care and PBMs for drug prescriptions. Pharmacies; who are mostly part of the PBMs network. Thus the PBMs end up being more incentivized through their own pharmacies. This ends up resulting in to higher drug prices paid by the consumers. Thus the presence of the middlemen in the present pharma eco system ends up adding a lot of cost as well as complexity. This brings in a significant need for transparency between PBMs, pharmacies, hospitals, physicians, health plans, and the healthcare ecosystem at large. Now the question is how can blockchain help in with disrupting the present healthcare eco system? The answer is very simple; blockchain model has the capability to significantly cut costs for the end customer. Blockchain being a distributed ledger at its core, is the best technology for the exchanging of values and ownership. With the potential to simplify, secure and facilitate trade, Blockchain can offer major benefits to business and consumers. One of the most useful concept that blockchain offers is the “smart contract”. What is a Smart Contract? Smart contract is a digital contract that self-executes when a predetermined condition is met. These code-based contracts enable agreed upon actions (such as payments) to occur automatically, immediately and without intermediaries, upon the satisfaction of the terms of the contract. The smart contract is an agreement between parties involved in a transaction that holds each party responsible for their role in the transaction. Smart contracts define the rules and penalties around a transaction akin to a traditional contract, but also ensure that the contract is enforced. In simple terms smart contracts are pre-written computer code that are deployed, replicated, and then executed on a distributed network of computers / ledgers. The direct and indirect benefits of conducting Smart Contracts in the Pharma Eco System. Currently, miscommunication and mistrust among all stakeholders makes it very difficult to transition to value-based care. Smart contracts has the potential to make process seamless. Reduce the occurrence of health payers ending up paying for inaccurate claims. Moreover cut down upon the amount of time and money in reconciling over- and under-payments. It can provide complete transparency to all parties, allowing payers and providers to negotiate complex claims that are tied to bigger stakes and values. It can significantly reduce inefficiency and waste of lifesaving resources due to several malpractices in the healthcare ecosystem. Smart contracts can ensure that all contracts amongst the stakeholders are encrypted, thus it will allow only authenticated and authorized users can access these entries. The reimbursement processes can get triggered by the smart contract only when certain conditions are met. A smart contract between the consumer and the drug manufacturer can directly ensure a certain amount of co-pay to be transferred from the consumer to the drug manufacturer. Smart contract between health care providers and payers will ensure that every time a patient receives care an authenticated entry will be registered as in the distributed ledger. This authenticated entry will help executes transparent and accurate claims of reimbursements from the payer to the provider, and also transfers a certain amount of co-pay from the patient to the provider.
How blockchain can contribute to drug discovery and development?
In recent times, the drug discovery and development has become a very laborious, time-consuming process and is not often particularly effective. Businesses are facing challenges in developing new drugs like the long-term high risk involved and the process is expensive with no guarantees. But most of the time the drug development companies are struggling with failures, setbacks, the involvement of third-parties, malpractices, and more. Many pharmaceutical companies dealing in drug discovery and development are always hedging their bets with the latest technologies to solve these challenges. With the new technologies like blockchain making their way into the pharma and healthcare sector, the companies might find faster and more cost-effective routes to the new discovery of medicines. How can Blockchain help with the discovery of new medicines? The drug discovery and development industry are looking towards blockchain as a potential solution that can help in the following ways: Patents and Intellectual property (IP): Finding any new drug is a very long, time-consuming as well as an expensive process. If the findings are stolen, a drug maker may lose investments worth billions. This is where blockchain also known as the distributed ledger technology can help. Below image can explain how it will work: IP (intellectual property) is considered as one of the most vital concepts in a drug discovery process which supports the most critical part of the patent – Composition of matter. Proving a patent for any particular medicine requires four aspects: Proof of the maker When and how was it created Ingredients included in the making Proof that the content was not altered Blockchain helps in proving the above aspects by uploading the IP document through a dedicated interface. It will encrypt the data and upload it to a secured enterprise storage system to create a record. This process will generate an encryption key which is shared on the blockchain system, and then a certificate is issued and allocated to all the researchers. IP significantly helps in maintaining the confidentiality of the data, and trust, timestamp, proof of origin, and acceptance of the legal record can be achieved all at once. The blockchain also helps in documenting the process in a great way, thus ensuring there are no disputes about the ownership. Royalties and Licensing Due to a constant depletion in the patient lifecycle, the drug development ecosystem is under a continuous pressure to bring new medicines to the market on a regular basis. But this is delayed by the volatile market dynamics, the time taken for development, large expenses, multiple teams, consumer pressure, and frequent acquisitions and mergers. The only solution to this is a collaboration among various stakeholders. Partnerships may even take place inter-departmentally within the same organization and this can help them share the research cost. But sometimes due to lack of trust, splitting of the royalty or licensing fees for the new drug can become complex due to the tracking issues. Blockchain in combination with ‘Smart Contract’ functionality can provide transparency in keeping accurate records of partnerships and royalties. Research Referencing and Authenticity: While researching for the creation of any new medicine, the researchers have to carefully evaluate all their sources. When citing the data, they go through various literature, research papers, and make sure that they access the right data sets. But the authenticity and trustworthiness of the source for research is always a questionable aspect of any referencing done for drug research. In such cases, Blockchain-based data collaboration and sharing makes it easier to authenticate the research document. There are very fewer chances of any unauthenticated content getting into the pipeline. Clinical Trials: Prior to getting approvals for the clinical trials of any drug, it is critical for pharmaceutical companies to provide the validity of the data collected during the trials. Being based on a distributed ledger, blockchain technology enables drug manufacturers to provide transparency to their clinical trials and provide proof to the process of collection of data in appropriate ways that are acceptable as per the industry norms. Takeaway: As on today, blockchain seems to be the most reliable technology that can help enhance the drug discovery and development ecosystem. Creating a new drug is expensive as well as a business that involves a lot of concern for the protection of intellectual property rights. Blockchain can help in addressing such concerns while ensuring the reputation of the industry in the long run. With the rising cost of the medicines, many pharma companies are on the verge of adopting this new age technology to curb malpractices and counterfeiting of drugs. Blockchain technology has immense potential to help increase profitability, provide sustainability by becoming a platform for a smoother supply chain management process.
Big Data Analytics: Unlocking the future of Pharma Marketing & Sales
Nowadays, people are greatly dependent on technology to carry out their everyday activities. In this technology studded world, the role of Big Data Analytics is growing bigger and more important in the pharmaceutical industry. The urge for social media and the internet is rising every new day. The digital wave and big data have extensively transformed each and every market around the world. The pharma industry is rapidly moving towards digital transformation but embracing digital marketing skills and tools. Big data is becoming a vital tool to reduce the expenses of the pharma industry. Pharmaceutical industry is adopting big data analytics and other analytics tools at a much slower rate as compared to that of major industries like manufacturing, retail, and automotive. Traditional pharmaceutical companies gained higher profit margins without even investing in marketing activities. But in today’s scenario, due to the rising competition, the pharma market has started utilizing extensive informatics & highly advanced data analytics tools to accelerate market shares and build powerful commercial value in the market. Big Data Analytics Renders Excellent Data & Insights With increasing regulatory frameworks and market competition, the major pharmaceutical companies are adopting big data analytics and highly-advanced data analytics solutions like market analytics and big data analytics. This is how Big Data Analytics contributes to Pharma Marketing: Plan effective promotional activities and enhance marketing strategies with impactful insights derived from marketing analytics tools and techniques. Elevate the performance if existing product lines. With big data analytics, in-depth pharma market analysis can be done and niche customer market segments can be easily targeted. Predictive analytics can help pharma companies to accelerate their influence of marketing activities and simply measure their marketing ROI. Produce effective materials and communication messages to target right patients and to ensure it reaches them at the right time through the right medium; thereby optimally utilizing resources. Enhancing Pharmaceutical Sales Pharma companies can integrate and interpret myriad data while receiving a 360-degree overview of the customers without the need of the laborious manual process that proves to be an obstacle in the progress of the company. Pharma companies have a staggering amount of data in its arsenal and the goal of the marketing department is to optimally use data in order to deliver better results. Predictive marketing utilizes machine learning to provide accurate insights to encourage sales from the already existing as well as new customers. Pharma Sales largely depends upon the customer funnel – from customer behavior to insights, the effectiveness of ads/ campaigns, enhancing customer lifetime values and customer retention. Companies can easily reach these goals with predictive analysis. It derives patterns within the data that are gained from the customer touch points. Predictive technology gains predictions from data for each individual for driving powerful decisions. This helps in utilizing data science which identifies common characteristics of the accounts that were won by sales and it also predicts the likelihood of closing each prospect. Let us summarize the impacts of Predictive Analytics on Pharma Sales: Predictive Analytics has a positive impact on leads and accelerates conversation rates. It supports sales efficiency by rendering sophisticated machine-learning techniques for sales users. It works more effectively and renders best results with myriad datasets, thus highly benefits the pharma companies.