Is Big Data Analytics Taking the Pharma Industry by Storm?

December 6, 2018

Reading time about 3 minutes

Every company in the pharmaceuticals industry is overwhelming with data that are not easily capable of leveraging. Pharma manufacturers, research departments, hospitals, etc. generate a humungous amount of data from patients & retailers, putting them in a constant struggle with a low success rate in their R&D activities. Big Data Analytics can be extremely beneficial, as it can harness this data and gain timely insights for improved healthcare, patient safety and improved collaboration between pharma companies.

Listed below are the leading ways that show how big data can transform the functionality of pharma industry-

  • Lower Drug Discovery Cost

    Research for the drug discovery take lots of efforts, time and resources, which eventually leads to higher expenses of many drugs tested. With Big Data, we can lower the cost by moving the experiment from clinical departments to a combination of AI & complex processes by reducing the time needed for trials. This decrease the research effort and the costs too.

  • Better Clinical Trials

    As the pharma industry needs several clinical trials, patients must be verified to check whether they meet the prerequisites before doing the trials. Big Data makes this task easy as it can merge databases from different sources to filter the suitable patients meeting the requirements. It enables the research team to monitor patients on a real-time basis & predict side effects if any.

  • Early Detection of Toxicity

    Using predictive analysis, the pharma industry can detect drug toxicity and survival chances of the patient, giving a clear picture if the drug will suit the patient considering information like genetics, lifestyle or current diseases if any. This helps in keeping track of the patient’s health data and ensures the delivery of personalized care.

  • Improved Collaboration

    As many firms like pharma, healthcare, insurance, etc. are inter-related, creating a common platform to bring all such industries together is the best option for cross-industry collaboration. Through this, information sharing will be easy and pharma industry can widen their databases for better clinical trials in future.

  • Targeted Sales & Marketing

    Pharma industry can use data analytics to build strategy keeping focus on geographical locations and promote their medications.  This will help in achieving better marketing as well as improved sales, saving time and effort.

Closing Statement

We can see that the use of analytics is no longer limited to companies that focus only on delivering customized customer experiences like sales/marketing. The evolving data in pharma industry cannot ignore the need for big data and its immense benefits like decreased drug discovery cost, the high success rate in drug trials and more accurate medicines for timely cure. Leverage AI and Machine Learning to process higher volumes of data in the pharma industry and empower researchers with actionable insights, leading to greater applications in the medicine line.