Covid-19 turned upside down the digital health sector. The difficulties for the patients to physically enter clinical and hospital centers during the lockdown raised telemedicine initiatives contributing to the digital transformation.

Teleconsultation, entirely digital clinical trials, and patient support programs for remote assistance provided by specialized teams are now our routine Technology is not more a feature for a few. Still, it has become an efficient and essential tool for health assistance.

Before being digital, this was a cultural transformation, in which all pharmaceutical companies were involved with investments in new technical expertise. As a result, new research and treatment paths will significantly improve the quality of the health workers’ job and the patients’ lives.

According to Statista, the expenditure in technologies and services for the digital transformation was 1.31 trillion dollars worldwide in 2020: this data will rise to 1.78 trillion in 2022.

“Even the core business is influenced by this dynamic,” explained Daniele Rizzo, Head of Global ICT and Digital Transformation at Dompé farmaceutici. “That’s why Dompé has decided to invest in digital, starting with the Exscalate project. This is one of the most powerful supercomputing intelligent platforms for the identification of new pharmacological molecules. Furthermore, it leads to the implementation of a new telemedicine protocol which granted continuity to our clinical studies during the pandemic.”

“Our goal is to connect the internal technological domain with more advanced digital models. Today, there is a lot of information, and the only way to manage them easily is by implementing digital channels that allow more fluid protocols. An example is traditional care profiles combined with the most recent IoT biometric detection systems permanently, which are a matter of supplementary knowledge for analytic, statistics, and predictive instruments of several new digital applications”, explained Rizzo. In this way, digitalization becomes the critical factor of the entire company: from research, clinical trials, and post-marketing.

Digital transformation represents a challenge. The pandemic has taught us we need a different element: to organize open data to improve treatments and the prevention of diseases and viral or bacterial pandemic events. But this data for the protection of public health must fully respect privacy.

The responsibilities are high in the pharmaceutical industry, and regulatory, legal, and compliance are fundamental. “We are working on a journey to cloud project: an underestimated resource able to offer an incredible opportunity for quality and the industrialization of essential services without undermining quality and security. Respecting specific constraints of the pharmaceutical industry, we aim to complete the migration towards this type of system,” underlined the Head of Global ICT and Digital Transformation.

In a growing company like Dompé, digital innovation is a strategic opportunity to allow more incredible speed and efficiency to research processes, ensure operational continuity, share information on the cloud, and implement new platforms to connect doctors with patients.