This article is based on our recent webinar, 'Building the Business Case for Digital Health Solutions in Pharma', in which digital health leaders from S3 Connected Health, Takeda, and Ascendis Pharma demonstrated ways to shape digital health strategies across the brand’s commercial lifecycle that are grounded in commercial reality and clinical need.
“Every connected health solution needs to show a compelling business case and return on investment. To make sense inside a pharma company, it must positively impact pharma’s core business: selling medicines.”
With this opening statement, John Mulcahy of S3 Connected Health set the tone for the discussion.
Pharma’s largest revenue streams come from drugs that treat chronic, complex, and rare conditions. Despite ongoing pricing pressures and market headwinds, these revenues are still expected to grow in the coming years. Yet significant challenges remain: a tough competitive landscape, barriers to access and reimbursement, and patent expiry and loss of exclusivity.
To illustrate how digital health can help address these issues, we were presented with a sample timeline for integrating a digital health strategy into a new drug launch:
After outlining this approach, the panel returned to the question of challenges, asking the audience in a poll to identify which competitive pressures they saw as most critical to overcome. The results showed that the main challenges were high competition in established therapy areas, growing the market, and sub-optimal adherence and persistence.
In discussing the results, the panelists recognized that the challenges are clearly multifaceted. They emphasized the importance of identifying which challenges are most relevant to your specific drug or therapy area, where it is in the lifecycle, what the market looks like, and tailoring your approach to address those unique challenges effectively.
Rasmus Veel Haahr, Head of Combination Product Strategy & Connected Health, Ascendis said:
“There are many different therapy areas (TAs) in play here, and they have their unique challenges. Some TAs may have issues related to appropriate diagnostic solutions or under-diagnosis. Other TAs may have chronic care issues that are more closely tied to adherence and persistence. If we think about establishing a business case, it's probably important to focus specifically for that TA, that brand that you're working on, and where to focus efforts. And I think that's maybe one of the takeaway messages that those challenges are not the same across different tiers and different brands.”
John agreed adding:
“It's super critical to actually build a business case, which isn't just a me-too business case, but is tailored to the specifics of your brand.”
The conversation progressed to the levers involved in building a compelling business case. The audience were polled again, this time asking what they felt were the most important levers when building the financial business case. As can be seen from the results below, adherence and persistence, improved market access/pricing/reimbursement, and HCP prescription preference were the top three answers.
Discussing the results, none of the panelists were surprised to see adherence and persistence coming out on top. Max Kersting, Head of Digital Health Platform, at Takeda, remarked that it was also not surprising to see how the answers were spread across a number of factors; however, as he argued, this just shows how connected these factors are. For example, things like market access, pricing and reimbursement, they come about as a result of doing a good job of serving patients and HCPs and collecting relevant data. He went on to say:
“So it’s not either or. I think if we're serving the patients and if we're serving the HCPs by helping them on board, for example, or by helping them understand just how good a therapy is working, we automatically also learn something, which we can then use maybe to have arguments if we're talking about pricing or in general real-world evidence for whatever reason.
We learn a lot if we serve our patients and our HCPs best if things are set up the right way and if we're listening to those needs.”
Rasmus was then asked, since adherence and persistence are the top levers in the poll, how connected devices and digital health enable those adherence and patient preference levers?
He argued that the importance lies in seeing these digital health tools as an integral part of the product. If we can connect different digital health tools (apps, devices, platforms, etc.) that patients and caregivers actually use, people will be more likely to stick with their treatment plans. By using data from connected devices to build useful features, we can better support patients and caregivers in continuing their therapy, in turn, adherence and long-term persistence with treatment will improve.
The panel was then asked, having talked about challenges and levers, how to bring it all together to build a business case that’s not only credible and fundable, but more importantly, scalable?
John answered, touching on a common theme throughout the webinar, which was the need to tailor for specific diseases or therapy areas. He noted that while this is the case, much of the underlying digital infrastructure can be shared. He emphasized the value of a platform approach that supports multiple diseases or brands, where core components are reusable, and only certain elements are customized for each patient group. The most effective strategy, he explained, is to build global, scalable solutions that can then be adapted for local markets. This enables both efficiency and scalability, allowing very different conditions, such as growth hormone therapy and multiple sclerosis, to run on the same foundational technology.
Max agreed saying:
“It's important to not just think about the isolated solutions that all sit on basically a model where you think every project, but individually to look at the landscape, look what has been done before and see whether this fits into something, some archetype that you can customize a little bit to make it sense. “
Rasmus followed up, adding that there are two different ways to think about creating digital health solutions that span multiple brands or diseases. It can be viewed from a therapeutic perspective, where in certain disease areas, a multi-brand approach may be warranted due to the specific treatment or management of that particular disease. Determining when that makes sense is a key consideration.
Or it can be approached from a technology and company perspective where we look at how things work internally, where the technological and operational synergies are, and how to make use of them efficiently.
Rounding off the webinar with some key takeaways, Rasmus stated:
“We live in a pharmaceutical world where the core of the business is to develop a pharmaceutical product—and there are established ways of thinking about that from a business, R&D, and operational perspective. But connected health and digital solutions require a different mindset. We need to close that gap and bring organizations into the way of thinking we’ve discussed here in relation to connected health. That’s a key takeaway.”
John followed up by saying:
“I think the biggest objection, in many cases, is that people want to see evidence of past success. There’s now a growing body of evidence showing that digital health can succeed—demonstrating a clear path to market, real impact on brands, and how it can help pharma effectively support drug sales, fully aligned with the challenges that Max and Rasmus outlined.
We also now have ways to help pharma address much of that complexity. There are platform companies—S3 Connected Health among them, but others too—that work to solve challenges around the safety and efficacy of core technology. This enables pharma to build very specific, global solutions that truly support their patient populations. It’s definitely easier now than it was ten years ago.”
To dive deeper into these insights and gain expert guidance on crafting compelling business cases for digital health solutions, access the full webinar now. Hear from industry leaders at Ascendis Pharma, Takeda, and S3 Connected Health as they explore ways to shape digital health strategies across the brand’s commercial lifecycle that are grounded in commercial reality and clinical need.