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Given rising competition, higher customer expectations, and growing regulatory challenges, these investments are crucial. But to maximize their value, leaders must carefully consider how to balance the key factors of scope, scale, speed, and human-AI collaboration.
The early promise of connecting data
The common refrain from data leaders across all industries—but specifically from those within data-rich life sciences organizations—is “I have vast amounts of data all over my organization, but the people who need it can’t find it.” says Dan Sheeran, general manager of health care and life sciences for AWS. And in a complex healthcare ecosystem, data can come from multiple sources including hospitals, pharmacies, insurers, and patients.
“Addressing this challenge,” says Sheeran, “means applying metadata to all existing data and then creating tools to find it, mimicking the ease of a search engine. Until generative AI came along, though, creating that metadata was extremely time consuming.”
ZS’s global head of the digital and technology practice, Mahmood Majeed notes that his teams regularly work on connected data programs, because “connecting data to enable connected decisions across the enterprise gives you the ability to create differentiated experiences.”
Majeed points to Sanofi’s well-publicized example of connecting data with its analytics app, plai, which streamlines research and automates time-consuming data tasks. With this investment, Sanofi reports reducing research processes from weeks to hours and the potential to improve target identification in therapeutic areas like immunology, oncology, or neurology by 20% to 30%.
Achieving the payoff of personalization
Connected data also allows companies to focus on personalized last-mile experiences. This involves tailoring interactions with healthcare providers and understanding patients’ individual motivations, needs, and behaviors.
Early efforts around personalization have relied on “next best action” or “next best engagement” models to do this. These traditional machine learning (ML) models suggest the most appropriate information for field teams to share with healthcare providers, based on predetermined guidelines.
When compared with generative AI models, more traditional machine learning models can be inflexible, unable to adapt to individual provider needs, and they often struggle to connect with other data sources that could provide meaningful context. Therefore, the insights can be helpful but limited.