Revolutionizing Biopharma: Gregg Fisher Explores AI’s Impact in PharmaLive’s Latest Feature

Gregg Fisher, founder and managing partner of The Stem, shares his expert insights on the pivotal role of artificial intelligence (AI) in revolutionizing healthcare communication and patient care to PharmaLive’s “Agenda 2024: Now What?” feature.  

Fisher highlights, “NBx (or next best) is fast becoming a standard approach for improving biopharma field force productivity,” reflecting on the transformative potential of AI and machine learning algorithms to improve the quality of customer insights, the relevance of sales force targeting and the impact of omni-channel customer interactions.

Fisher shares several best practices for successfully deploying NBx solutions, including:

Organize and Plan

• Vision: Define clear rationale of NBX value to drive brand objectives. Clarify NBX is the “Intelligence Engine” that provides a continuous, dynamic approach to customer engagement.
• Governance: Define roles across functions to support decision making and collaboration. Assign sponsors and core team responsible for delivering the NBX program.
• Program management: Use agile, “sprint” focused, management for quick builds, learning, and experiments from proof of concept to soft launch to builds. Drive alignment with cross-functional teams for clear scope of work, due date expectations, and regular communications for awareness and agreement to project deliverables.
• Vendor selection: Select for expertise in data science with predictive and generative AI/ML to allow for  growth in complex use cases and data. Assess strategic guidance from real-world experiences with data sources, agile design approach, reuse of system connectors, KPIs, and experimentation process for new and refined use cases.
• Field engagement: Drive early and consistent field engagement for buy-in and continued learnings for ongoing NBX value. Use peer-based communications, training, and case studies to build trust in “real-world” field usage.

Design and Build

• Use case planning: Start with “User Story’ real-world design as input to use case requirements. Triangulate multiple, real-time data signals to increase the value of customer intelligence.
• Data and systems architecture: Define an architecture that is flexible with modular, configurable and adaptable features. Prioritize reuse of data connectors for similar data objects to minimize implementation complexities.
• Omnichannel integration: Optimize pre-Launch learning from HCP activity (i.e., channel preference, content affinity and knowledge level) to leverage during launch phase to personalize engagements. Design an activity scoring system across “data signals” to assess HCP targets and digital utilization value to reduce “noise” to field.
• Field interface: Reduce admin and simplify NBX response for field users. Plan for efficient view and access for NBX across Territory, Customer, and First-Line-Manager dashboards.

Measure and Optimize

• Success metrics: Differentiate between response KPIs and quality KPIs. Take an “ROI” approach to each Use Case to verify the value based on outcome intended.
• Operating model: Design an operating model to establish processes to evolve and refine use cases. Educate internal stakeholders and field end-users on the update process and schedule for expectation setting and refinement validation.

Fisher’s commentary sheds light on the urgency for the industry to transition from experimentation with AI to its full-scale deployment, aiming to leverage its capabilities for more personalized and efficient healthcare solutions.