The influential consultants at Accenture have put their thinking caps on to offer some guidance for big drug R&D ops. First, they start out with a familiar litany of issues confronting the industry: The demand to lower costs, growing expectations from payers, patent expirations and the contrasting demands of bigger trials and more personalized therapies.
Add it all up, says Accenture, and you'll see a need to reshape R&D with a "networked, virtual and flexible approach" to development. And any organization that wants to survive the proverbial tipping point, warns the consulting group, had better be prepared to efficiently manage a mother lode of data.
Arjun Bedi, the global managing director of Accenture, outlines the informatics challenge in Industry Week. He says R&D informatics organizations need to:
- Strengthen their capabilities to support enhanced collaboration and integration, encompassing both internal and external stakeholders.
- Develop a flexible infrastructure--one that is highly secure, yet also elastic, globally present and cost-effective.
- Facilitate the incorporation of new sources of data--from partners, providers, clinical research organizations, patients and third party sources--into an improved decision making mode.
- Enhance their capabilities to assimilate and interpret a wide array of inputs, ranging from sentiment monitoring and social networks to fully digital operational data that is integrated and accessible.
- here's the column from Industry Week