The digital transformation of healthcare is on the way. For years there has been a growing interest from technology companies to understand this sector, the Covid-19 pandemic helped them to better locate the challenges, and they are in the phase of finding solutions.
The idea is that automation, artificial intelligence with learning machines, telemedicine and the use of so much accumulated information (big data), among other innovations, will take health systems to a new level.
The main technology companies in the world, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft or Amazon have their health areas with increasingly important projects, and it is interesting that they become a factor of competition, for example, among the pharmaceutical industry.
Take the industrialized Machine Learning platform that AstraZeneca built with Amazon Machine Learning (ML) to accelerate and optimize drug discovery, clinical trials, and patient safety for hundreds of scientists. Or the Philips HealthSuite (HSP) platform that together with the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and with technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS), seeks to give doctors a unified vision of treatments and clinical trials in combination with genomic markers that help them to make an informed treatment decision. Or the cases of Moderna -pioneer in a new class of messenger RNA medicines (mRNA from the success with its anticovid vaccine)- and the Japanese Takeda, another of the main biopharmaceuticals, which has adopted AWS tools in its strategies to accelerate drug research using information from the real world (Real Data World, RWD).
There is no doubt that progress in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are generating disruptive changes in all areas and in health they would have much to contribute.
At its own speed, in Latin America this technological revolution is also taking place in the health sector and there are integrating companies that are helping to understand it, generating specialized technological services and looking for how to land it. This is the case of Nubiral, a company of Argentine origin that arrived in Mexico in 2019, which already operates in Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and is entering the United States. In his report “Technology and Health, Healing Pain in the Industry”, Nubiral assures that new technologies will help improve the interaction between the three main players in this story: the institution that provides health care (be it the clinic, the work social, laboratory or hospital), the medical professional and the patient. But he warns that before moving forward with digital transformation, healthcare companies in the region must face challenges that have been entrenched for decades:
- Shift culturally towards the user experience.
- Sustain the advances that the pandemic accelerated.
- Upgrade and modernize legacy systems.
- Moving towards preventive medicine harnessing the power of data.
- Upgrade and modernize legacy systems.
Among its active clients that are looking at how to take advantage of technology, find solutions and digitize their processes are Farmacias Similares, the drug distributor Nadro, as well as the pharmaceutical companies Sanofi and Pfizer. Where technological application actions are being focused is on inventory management, due to the fact that medicines are perishable and delicate to handle; in optimization of suppliers, in improvement of their distribution channels and in analyzing and forecasting purchasing behaviour.
Within this framework, Jorge Linares, director of Nubiral, estimates that the information technology (ICT) market in the region amounts to some 25,000 million dollars (mdd), and of this, about 4,000 million are spent on digitizing the database. dollars, 12-13% of the total; but the concept of license purchase is dwindling. On the other hand, the concept of payment for the use of databases in public clouds is growing at a rate of 50-60% and is the one that is driving this segment. Technology moving towards cloud services grows at an annual rate between 10 and 12%, decreasing all that is spent on hardware. Today, he tells us, there are companies that have virtually no hardware at all. Hence, the business of companies like HP and Lenovo is reinventing itself, but not everything will go to the cloud and it will most likely be a hybrid world.
