This extract is from our recent whitepaper: Commercial Pharma’s Business Case for Digital Health Solutions. Featuring insights from Novo Nordisk, Merck, Roche, and S3 Connected Health, it delves into how pharma can align digital health initiatives with brand and enterprise priorities to deliver measurable ROI. Learn how to overcome revenue barriers, drive impact across the drug lifecycle, integrate solutions early, and tailor strategies for high-value, complex therapies.
Every digital health solution must be underpinned by a compelling and well-structured business case. This strengthens the likelihood of internal approval to secure long-term investment by clearly demonstrating ROI and showing how the solution contributes to pharma’s core objectives — namely, supporting brand revenue through increased medicine sales while advancing the broader mission of medical innovation and improving patient outcomes.
At the enterprise level, evaluating digital health solutions must be a standardized, strategic process — every brand should be required to assess their relevance, even if the outcome is a no.”
Marc Zhuang, Digital Health Leader, Roche
Navigating multiple revenue barriers
Chronic, complex, and rare disease populations will continue to drive the majority of pharma’s revenue growth over the next five years, with projected compound annual growth rates (CAGR) between 9.5% and 12.5%.
These high-value therapies offer significant commercial potential but still face many of the same revenue barriers as lower value medicines, such as a challenging launch environment, pricing pressures, sub-optimal adherence and persistence, LOE, and patent expiry.
To overcome these challenges, pharma companies are increasingly adopting holistic strategies — placing digital health solutions at the center of efforts to differentiate therapies and support commercial success. This involves aligning solutions with measurable outcomes, such as adherence rates and patient engagement, to ensure accountability and demonstrate return on investment (ROI).
“The strategic reasons for developing digital health solutions in pharma are rooted in addressing real-world challenges, such as drug administration and market access, while improving patient and doctor experiences. The business case must be built on measurable, tangible outcomes — not just abstract concepts like experience improvement.”
Pete Brockmeier, Global Associate Director of Digital Health, Novo Nordisk
Each person treated with a high-cost therapy has a substantial revenue impact for pharma. This creates opportunities to align business models, revenue, and ROI with both pharma and brand strategies. However, it can be difficult to isolate the specific impact of digital health solutions on prescription rates, adherence, or persistence — especially when multiple commercial initiatives are running in parallel. Business models also need to be tailored to the specific dynamics of each brand.
“The business models that have worked best are those focused on molecule-adjacent innovation — solutions that directly support the drug.”
Alexander Klein, Former Group Leader for Digital Health, Roche
Long-term value streams should be included in the overall value dossier. This includes the value derived from data, such as predictive models that — once enough patient data has been gathered — can generate relevant insights, like identifying patients at risk of becoming non-adherent. Additional long-term value can come from research that informs new models of care and supports adoption by doctors, patients, and payers.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach — different molecules and therapeutic areas may require different timelines.”
Marc Zhuang, Digital Health Leader, Roche
While pharma companies operate within annual budget cycles, digital health teams must build business cases that reflect the longer development and adoption timelines of digital health solutions. This means identifying interim success metrics and surrogate ROI indicators to demonstrate progress during yearly reviews, while also securing stakeholder commitment to sustained investment over multiple budget cycles. Teams should set realistic expectations around a two-to-three-year value realization timeline and be prepared to present compelling evidence to support continued funding at key mid-journey evaluation points.
“Whether it's a 50-year-old drug or one still in clinical development, the key is understanding the core problem you're solving and ensuring there's value for stakeholders like patients, healthcare providers, or payers. Without identifying unmet needs, any solution will struggle to gain long-term traction.”
Cedric Foucher, Director, Global Digital Health Lead at Merck
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