The State of the Pharmaceutical Industry (Part Two): the Benefits of an Integrated Platform

In his three-blog series based on interviews with industry experts, Scott Hluhanich explores the state of pharma.

In this second blog, Scott examines the benefits of adopting an integrated platform.

It doesn’t matter if you are a large pharma company or a small biotech, everyone needs to manage their R&D data to ensure access, integrity, compliance and security.

In the past pharmaceutical companies had to maintain multiple systems. Now they can now buy a single platform that spans the processes of drug development, is flexible, and is budget-friendly.

Moving away from specialized best-of-breed applications toward platform solutions better enables R&D companies to track, identify, and use the data collected during research and development. IDBS’s vice president of product strategy, Scott Weiss, explains:

“The information flows electronically and there’s one point of truth. A lot of the attraction of having one system and why people would either build it with best of breed or through the hybrid solutions is that it really does shorten time to market.”

People spend less time writing things down, transcribing and interpreting information, reinterpreting it, reentering data into a system. “Team members can access it all from the same point, the same reference table database, the same report, so you get a huge shortening of time and less expense on those tasks.”

Gartner, a research and consultancy firm, agrees, stating that integrated platforms can^[i]:

• Improve collaboration efforts between dispersed groups with multidiscipline backgrounds
• Improve laboratory research efficiency for routine operations (commonly up to 40%)
• With lab execution capabilities, support right-first-time strategic initiatives and allow for “review by exception”
• Positively impact quality and operational effectiveness

Click here to read part one and part three of Scott Hluhanich’s blog series.

[i] Gartner, Hype Cycle for Life Sciences, 2015