Four Challenges Facing the Life Sciences Industry in 2020
Blog: Appian Insight
New breakthroughs in drug development are leading to groundbreaking results that could change lives in 2020 and beyond. However, at the dawn of a new decade, there are major challenges facing the industry that could prevent this innovation revolution. With the rising costs and increasing complexities involved in bringing products to market, life sciences organizations are re-examining their business operations and technology adoption.
- Siloed and Broken Legacy Systems
- The Need For Operational Excellence
- Ensuring Compliance Across the Global Enterprise
Siloed legacy systems are currently hindering efficiency and productivity in life sciences. A portfolio of disconnected processes makes execution slow and collaboration difficult, ultimately bringing forth unsatisfactory results. Therefore, life sciences organizations are looking to integrate their various legacy systems into a more unified environment to afford one source of truth.
Appian’s integration capabilities can drive innovation, bringing together siloed systems and processes, and opening communication and collaboration channels across regional divides, throughout the entire product lifecycle.
Two forces are driving the need to accelerate time-to-market. One is the time-sensitive patent period of 20 years, and the need to capture the value of exclusivity in order to support the economic incentive for further innovation. The other is the simple need to place life altering and possibly life saving cures in the hands of caregivers and patients.
With these two drivers there’s no time to waste from conception to development to commercialization. Gaining operational efficiencies and excellence is crucial.
“The innovation and speed-to-market demonstrated by digitally enabled companies have exposed shortcomings in the R&D practices of more conventional businesses” – McKinsey
Appian’s low-code functionality helps organizations speed time from idea to implementation and provide effective solutions more efficiently. Appian’s automation capabilities can reduce errors and bottlenecks, accelerating high-quality results and securing operational excellence.
Throughout all aspects of business, across regions, life sciences organizations must comply with numerous regulations. Ensuring compliance across this complex regulatory landscape is extremely challenging, especially since failure to comply comes with financial impact on the organization, and added risk on patients’ safety.
“Obtaining an enterprise-wide view of compliance risk or a single view of overall ‘compliance health’ is often a challenge” – Deloitte
As confidence grows in the security and dependability of cloud implementations, life sciences organizations will increasingly turn to the cloud to help standardize the compliance process, making global adherence much easier. Cloud will help organizations with:
- Faster implementation with integration across multiple sources of truth
- The ability to run regional applications across the globe
- Portable and accessible data, making compliance easier
- The option to make compliance an operational expense rather than a capital one
In 2020, organizations will seek proven agile technology approaches—like the Appian low-code application platform—that can deliver a faster, more cost-effective development process that also promotes innovation in the field. Looking forward, this will greatly impact the industry and provide cost benefits to developers, distributors, and patients alike. Take a look at Appian’s wide variety of life sciences solutions and see how they could help your organization combat these challenges and more in 2020.
Evi Cohen
Vice President of Global Life Sciences and Healthcare
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