Safety can generate immense value for any life sciences organization. As organizations strive to bring more products to market faster and ensure better patient outcomes, it becomes critical to break away from the traditional view of safety as a required compliance function.
The key to successfully transforming safety from a reactive cost center to a proactive profit driver is for organizations to provide safety teams with proper tools and resources to focus on actionable insights. Freeing teams to focus on value-adding activities empowers them to better identify and apply insights that inform patient safety and bottom-line performance.
The strategic value of safety can be realized when life sciences organizations create conditions for team members to work at the top of their licenses, build unified end-to-end processes, invest in enabling technology stacks, and prepare themselves for future growth.
So, what should firms keep in mind to take their safety operations to the next level?
Embracing the Cloud
One major strategic pillar that leading firms are prioritizing is the rise of cloud-based, multi-tenant platforms to reduce total cost of ownership and streamline and standardize global operations.
Historically, firms relied heavily on on-premises implementations for their enterprise solutions, including safety systems. Reliance on physical hardware made it difficult for teams to remain current with the latest system updates and ever-evolving compliance requirements. Maintaining on-premises systems become even more costly as teams scale operations globally or introduce new data sources.
The growing shift to the cloud is creating an optimal avenue for life sciences organizations to digitally transform from on-prem to cloud-based architectures. Not all safety platforms support cloud-based implementations, but those that do are providing a new way for organizations to streamline their workflows, bring together global teams, and reduce total cost of ownership.
Pivoting from on-premises to cloud-based, multitenant implementations allows organizations to no longer worry about falling behind on the latest best practices and regulations. Even more, removing silos and reducing disjointed safety operations can help teams reduce their bottom line and create opportunities to reinvest in value-adding activities.
Investing in Automation
Investing in automation is another strategic pillar that leading firms are prioritizing to drive more efficient operations, unlock more precise insights, and free resources for value-adding activities.
Artificial intelligence in the drug discovery market is projected to expand at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.1% over the next ten years, as life sciences organizations eliminate manual, complex, and expensive processes to give way to novel innovations, advanced personalized therapies and accelerated access of safe treatments to patients.
Not all safety platforms offer proven, pre-validated automation in production. However, those that do offer established models trained on industry-relevant data give organizations from the smallest startup to the largest enterprise the power to take advantage of automation — from rule-based and structured to natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Automation has become a critical part of the business strategy for enterprise life sciences organizations. With a strategic approach, the value it can provide is immense.
Unlocking Safety Intelligence
Finally, one of the most critical strategic pillars reshaping safety is the expanding role of data and analytics in proactively driving better patient, business, and operational outcomes.
Life sciences firms have access to more data than ever across internal and external data sources—80% of leading life sciences firms even plan to leverage real-world data.
It can be difficult and time-consuming, however, to gather healthcare data across unstructured formats and multiple data sources, standardize the data so it can be mined for insights, and empower users to draw actionable insights in real time. Firms need to overcome siloes, noise, and friction—and not all safety platforms can achieve this. Firms relying on legacy systems, complex IT stacks, and manual workflows particularly struggle to transform data into actionable intelligence.
Alternatively, firms that can seamlessly stitch together data, curate it for their needs, and enable the smooth flow of data into actionable intelligence can turn safety into a strategic value center. This includes enabling better patient outcomes, lowered risk, and reduced cost.
In the highly competitive life sciences space, yielding accurate insights and connecting to real-world data sources empower organizations to build more accurate models to enhance drug discovery, gain insights earlier on potential adverse events, and strengthen post-marketing potential.
By embracing these key safety pillars, life sciences organizations ultimately gain the power to move safety from an operational function to a strategic center, with the strategic impact only growing as technology continues to evolve.
Want to learn more? Check out our whitepaper to learn how leading organizations are leveraging the latest innovations in technology, automation, and data and analytics to generate on average up to 33% cost savings and up to 80% efficiency gains on key workflows.
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