Improving Patient Outcomes: The AI Opportunity in Commercial Pharma

So the big excitement here is business process reinvention, business reengineering.

It almost feels like we're, I don't know, the early 90s or the mid 90s in terms of the transformation of moving from mainframe to client server and what that changed in the business.

But in this case, it reaches all the way to the consumer.

You mentioned the go to market innovation and change and Lily Direct.

So maybe many of our listeners don't understand how amazing this is.

But my understanding is that, let's just focus on Lilly Direct for a moment, is that Eli Lilly is now offering direct-to-consumer purchase of medicines with a mixture of insurance-supported and self-pay options, and then they partner for distribution mechanisms with other sort of e-commerce.

So it's pharmaceutical meets e-commerce within the regulatory framework, also collaborating within the health system It just seems like a really, in some ways, e-commerce meets pharma finally.

I don't know.

It's a very interesting evolution.

One component, and that's a very good summary, but one component that's absolutely critical in the process is a healthcare professional consultation.

So maybe a pharmacist, maybe a physician that's actually saying as part of that system that I as a patient can access this drug or I qualify to access this drug.

That is critical in the whole process and meets all the needs of the regulators in terms of how it can be done.

But the whole piece around these models as they're moving forward and changing, the key thing is if you look at the traditional functions in a pharma company such as medical, MSLs, market access, sales, commercial, and all in that commercialization section, AI has its applicability to each of those sub-business functions and I think the key thing is how far do we want to push the envelope in healthcare delivery and how far does the health system of any country want to go to adopt those new systems.

So the AI works on both sides of the equation from the industry side, and that's across pharma, it's across medtech, it's across biotech, but also it's across the industry side, the health systems.

Are they going to regulate and approve AI repurposed and discovered molecules? The answer is yes, that's the direction of travel.

And within this journey, what we're seeing is that there are some early innovators and there are some laggards and there's people in the middle as well.

As always.

But without getting into politics, as we record, there's a new prime minister in the UK who's been talking about devolution, more regional control, including for health services.

And so this is also chasing a moving target on that consumption side.

It's not just there are new models coming along every five minutes on the AI side, discovering potentially new molecules, etc.

But also the consumption side and the patterns of how those new products can get to market is also evolving equally rapidly.

I completely agree.

And what we're seeing on that side as well is you don't have one health system now.

You have the publicly funded health systems such in the UK, the NHS, but you also have the private markets that are both delivering health care to the population within each region, within each locality in the UK and other countries as well.

healthcare needs are different.