Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
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LEARN MOREThe IQVIA Digital Enablement Team attended this year’s SXSW Conference in March, engaging in sessions covering a diverse range of topics on the cutting edge of healthcare and life sciences. Many sessions looked at ways to transform healthcare, and some of the most important takeaways from the event included AI’s role in decision-making, technological advancements for rare disease, and patients leading the way in the space.
Below we’ve spotlighted these key themes and the learnings and insights gleaned from the expert speakers at SXSW:
When used correctly, AI has the power to enable more human interactions between pharma organizations and their customers, increase efficiencies amongst rising healthcare costs, and even add another layer of empathy in messaging.
However, we know current AI technology may be limited when it is fed by historical healthcare datasets, particularly when they contain inherent biases, such as race and gender. Every organization using data to train models in the life sciences industry must recognize and address these biases when weighing the merits in applications of the suggestions made by those models. As Sinead Bovell said in the session, Keeping Prejudice Out of AI, Over the Past Decade, “Just because data is intangible doesn’t mean it’s not a product. With that, you must go through the same quality controls as with any other product.”
Sinead emphasized that when we use AI, we have an ethical responsibility to make sure the patient’s voice is reflected in innovation, test the data for biases, and challenge those biases before arriving at our decisions. This requires a blend of human and artificial intelligence; something that is not new in healthcare. Now that we’re at an inflection point where so much more open-source data is available, the opportunities are greater than ever.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 41% of Americans have medical debt1, causing many to delay or avoid care. And once patients do seek care, diagnosis for rare disease- as an example- can be a lengthy and expensive process: As Heidi Ross from the National Organization for Rare Disorders shared in the session, Rare Disease Revolution: Life Science's New Frontier, “Rare disease is not a patient journey, it’s an odyssey because of the challenges.” As our industry strives to reduce gaps in care by harnessing emerging technologies, one piece in the complex puzzle of improving health equity for these patients is to determine how best to use technology to reduce the barriers to diagnosis.
These advances in technology and utilization of innovative datasets are helping to identify many ways to make care more affordable. One tool is using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify the predictive early indicators of disease sooner- which would have benefits across disease states large and small. This would help reduce some of the cost burden by allowing for preventative care, which can often be more cost effective than traditional medical care. As noted above, human HCPs need to validate the technology’s conclusion by running tests, diagnosing, and selecting treatment.
AI also has the potential to unlock and accelerate drug development with the potential for substantial acceleration in rare disease, where historically it has been cost-prohibitive to develop new drugs. In fact, the administration has announced its plan to use AI to investigate what existing medicines might help treat rare diseases2.
Patient perspectives are vital to how we evolve care—these voices are rooted in direct experience, rather than reliance on clinical data and research alone. Patient perspectives help us make progress in the behavioral science required to treat the whole person, rather than simply focusing on their experiences as patients in clinical settings.
Organizations can use Real World Data as a tool to ensure they recruit diverse patients, who represent the patient population, to a clinical trial. They can also use education to make sure a wider range of HCPs and patients know about clinical trial opportunities and how to get involved. An ASCO study demonstrated that 80% of Black women surveyed would participate in a clinical research study, but only 40% had ever been offered the opportunity3.
The session Partnering with Patients to Develop Better Cancer Treatments highlighted the importance of the patient voice in the development of new cancer therapies. Too many patients currently are excluded from clinical trials because they have comorbidities, and the science requires a “clean” control group. Recent efforts by patient advocacy organizations, drug makers, and even the National Institute of Health are making impressive strides to ensure the necessary diversity in the early stages of drug development:
“There is no such thing as a hard-to-reach patient or community; the true issue is that communities are under-engaged because we are not going where these patients are.”
—Karriem Watson, DHSc, MS, MPH, Chief Engagement Officer, All of Us Research Program at The National Institutes of Health
Thanks to advancements in AI, the pace of change in healthcare has accelerated beyond what any of us have seen before, and it has the potential to help us advance equity, evolve our understanding of the patient’s personhood, and achieve better health outcomes for all.
As an industry, we have incredible power and influence that needs to be challenged to make sure we’re optimizing investments—throughout the whole lifecycle of a medicine—for the unmet medical needs of truly diverse patient populations. The SXSW conference is a powerful opportunity to bring healthcare innovators together and share research, ideas, and experiences that support our shared goals. In fact, our IQVIA @ SXSW event was a day dedicated to powering exceptional healthcare brand experiences – healthcare and life science marketing leaders from all sectors of the industry joined the stage to share their insights on using data and marketing technology to reach health equity, cookieless continuity, macro trends in healthcare media, and humanizing insights.
Learn more about how IQVIA’s Digital Enablement team can help you develop a personalized engagement strategy. And be sure to join us at IQVIA @ SXSW next year—let’s improve lives together.
1 https://www.kff.org/report-section/kff-health-care-debt-survey-main-findings/
2 https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2024/02/29/readout-of-white-house-rare-disease-forum/
3 https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/06/black-cancer-patients-not-offered-access-to-clinical-trials/
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