Digital Pharma is a hot topic those days. There currently is a virtual Tsunami of articles, blog posts, guidance, opinions, etc. on how to make our business more digital. But with all the things you will read and hear, there is an obvious question. Where to start, which measures to take first? Here I am going to share with your the 5 immediate actions I would take. 1. Push coordination (some call it “governance”) Today, in most life science companies I have seen so far, there seems to be a scattered rag rug of digital customer engagement activities. There will be projects driven by different divisions, different functions, and across layers (e.g. global, regional, local). So, one of your first measures has to be linking the nodes of the net. You may call it governance. But not governance is the sense of ruling, controlling or patronizing. One the one hand, the concept of control is contradicting agile approaches (in final consequence). On the other, getting control of a cross-functional rag rug simply is a complete illusion. So, don’t waste your valuable time with it. If you cannot solve the patchwork, use it! Aim at governance in the sense of coordination and alignment. Get an overview of your organization’s rich digital landscape. With the mission to use the synergies, to reduce duplicated efforts and redundancies, and to ensure that all digital activities provide a consistent external picture and all tell the same story to your customers. First action: Link scattered digital activities, and kick-off a cross-divisional, cross-functional, cross-layer digital governance board. 2. Get clarity on real-world customer needs and preferences Identify digital customer needs, digital customer and preferences, and prioritize. Sounds easy? Well, with the right approach it is certainly not rocket science, but still needs to be done rock solid. Second action: Compile and review available customer research findings on digital needs and preferences. And consequently fill gaps with state-of-the-art digital customer needs research. 3. Grow an internal ‘community of digital excellence’ You cannot save the world alone. An internal community of digital excellence is you ‘army’ for penetrating the organization with digital transformation. You need a group of dedicated, committed, motivated ambassadors, “activists” and stakeholders, in whatever function or business unit, being involved or would like to be involved. Third action: Initiate, grow and include an internal Digital CoE. 4. Start digital upskilling Upskilling is about enabling, but also about aligning. The mission is not only to provide specialized courses for people being in digital or omnichannel roles. The whole organization needs to be brought to another level of understanding the requirements and consequences of digital transformation. Education needs to support the cultural change, which typically is needed. For that reason your internal digital upskilling should cover measures for all levels and functions, from the MSLs and SalesReps to the CEO. Fourth action: Start an internal digital education program, which is taking the whole organization to a next level.  5. Foster bottom-up digital pilots Change needs success stories for being accepted. Tangible and real-world examples. Ideally bottom-up, e.g. as a pilot MVP or campaign in a single country or area. Where the set-up is based on customer-centricity, design thinking approaches, and agile methodologies. Pilots are a perfect way of learning by doing. Running those exercises will reveal general bottlenecks, process-dependencies, and requirements to be considered. So, pilots offer the chance to concomitantly deliver best practices for your environment. Fifth action: Be brave, and do digital pilots resulting in best-practices and success stories. Now, you would like to know a little bit more about ‘how-to’ for one or several actions listed by me. Let’s…

💡 Legal and compliance issues often arise late in project development.
💼 Teams in pharma or medtech face delays due to last-minute legal and compliance rejections.
⏰ Timelines and milestones are at risk, causing frustration and pressure on project teams.
🚫 Initial rejection leads to disappointment and anger towards legal and compliance.
🔄 An alternative approach involves early involvement of legal and compliance.
🤝 Engaging them from the start ensures proactive guidance and a collaborative environment.
🌟 Shifting from asking “is this compliant?” to “how can we make this compliant?” empowers legal and compliance as facilitators rather than blockers.
😊 This approach improves cooperation, potentially leading to happier legal and compliance teams and smoother project execution.

Already before the latest data privacy regulations had been released, an effective opt-in has always been key for any customer communication if not engagement campaign. GDPR now forces us to take it even more seriously. Actually, opt-ins are the bottleneck for any multi- or omni-channel campaign. Without having adequate customers’ opt-ins in place your digital or non-digital campaign is born to fail. So, do you know the quantity and quality of your opt-ins? What is your opt-in rate? What exactly did your customers actually opt-in for? Does your opt-ins management comply with GDPR regulations? It might be vital having answers to those questions before initiating any customer communication activity. I dare to say that poor opt-ins are painful road-blockers for your digital campaigns, where smart opt-ins at high rates (of e.g. at least 80%) are an effective enabler for your digital customer engagement. You should not start building a boat as long as you are not sure that there is enough water in the…

As the lead of the strategic initiative, I provided Actelion Pharmaceuticals with a digital customer & patient engagement strategy for commercial & medical functions (digital transformation of business). Together with a specialized agency, provision of a global digital strategy for Actelion business, including an omnichannel strategy for disease-specific promotional and medical communication. Establishment of a cross-functional and cross-departmental internal network linking internal digital activities, projects and expertises. Alignment with and of global/regional/local layers, IT, R&D, compliance/legal, and digital strategies at Janssen, the new ‘mother’ of Actelion. CLIENT:Actelion Commercial Excellence(as an Actelion employee)PROJECT TIME FRAME: July 2018 – February…

Yes, pharma is behind most other industries in terms of digital transformation, e.g. of customer engagement and solutions. As a permanent repetition of the evident, multiple studies (example), journal articles and blog posts are frequently reporting about pharma’s digital retardation. But that is not a fair comparison. Also being part of the truth, markets for treatments, medical devices and health services are actually no free markets similar to other industries. They are highly regulated. I am not complaining, there are good reasons for having limitations in place. It is just a general circumstance which needs to be considered with the challenge of leveraging pharma customer engagement in the digital space. But, despite a limiting environment … there are a things we in pharma actually can change … to facilitate digital transformation of our customer engagement. There are some self-made road-blockers, which can be addressed and changed. Willingness assumed. Customer-centricity … comes first. And should be self-understood … but actually is easier said and assumed than properly done. I am afraid to say that we at pharma sometimes have a fatal tendency falling in love with fascinating innovative technologies, intriguing eHealth solutions and exciting digital projects … without checking if factually a prioritized customer need is met … if any at all. Serious customer-centricity means that asking and listening comes first. What are the burning needs of physicians or patients? Which of them can be met with digital measures, which by other? Which communication channels does each single one of them prefer? Where are bottlenecks? How can we marry customer needs with our business levers? How can me measure success? … Getting the right message to the right customer at the right time and the right place via the right channel. It is not about what we would like to do or what we think our customers would need. It is about knowing real-world customer needs and preferences first. Culture “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, one of my personal favorite sayings, originating from Peter Drucker, legendary management consultant and thinker. And it is nowhere else more true than with digital transformation. Many people hear “digital” and think “technology”. No, that is exactly not what digital is about. At least not in the first instance. Certainly, technology is a key enabler. But it is not the solution. Especially with digital customer engagement, technology is nothing without a cultural change. Digital does not fail due to lack of technology; there is a vast and multifaceted market of digital technologies available, which simply need to be picked-up and applied. Digital does not fail due to a lack of ideas for exciting projects; the heads of pharma guys are full of them. Digital fails because we focus on innovative and exciting digital projects, and not on customer needs and preferences. Digital fails because it is ending up on top of the other stuff on people’s desks. Digital fails because people are concerned it might make their job redundant. Digital fails because it is seen isolated from other business activities. Digital fails, because the culture of the organization is no ‘fertile soil’, e.g. in terms of agility, collaboration and mindset. Digital transformation is not about technology. It is about changing the way we work, prioritize and communicate, actually an organizational cultural change. And this challenge needs to be tackled seriously. Digital upskilling A key enabler of the cultural change mentioned before, is a general and broad digital up-skilling of the organization. Digital is not a niche for nerds and digital passionates. Again, it is about changing the way we work and interact with our customers. So, everybody needs to be included … and to be trained in digital basics. Actually that is also what pharma associates themselves tell us again and again with every survey done. People want to do more digital, but don’t feel well equipped regarding the what and how-to, and broadly miss opportunities to develop. Willingness is not the issue, but enabling is a clearly identified bottleneck. Over-engineered compliance processes As mentioned before, we are working in a regulated environment. This is a given. But the responsibility for a pathological tendency to persistently over-achieve as well as for numerous over-engineered internal review & approval processes for digital tools and content, this responsibility is with pharma enterprises alone. Most of those processes are still developed and optimized for creating printed brochures or one time launches of (static) websites. They typically do not at all fit to the highly dynamic reality of digital content and tools updates. E.g. … There is no doubt that a the requirement for review & approval is vital. But digital business demands lean and agile processes for the same. And I dare to say, whoever is going to provide a smart solution for this general issue to the industry, is going to be a rich (wo)man. “Cobbler, stick to your trade” Honestly spoken, pharma should not try being the better digital tech provider. This simply is not our core competency, and all arrogant attempts being better than specialized companies have spectacularly failed. Always started with a lot of noise, but died silently after a couple of months if not years. Let’s focus on pharma’s core business and its challenges first, where there is still more than enough to do, but simply shop the digital tech parts from the true experts. So, let’s stop complaining about our industry being behind and authorities’ regulations repressing us. Let’s start doing our part, removing self-made road-blockers and creating frameworks for pharma digital transformation unifying agile innovation and the legitimate wish for patients’ safety and…

Limiting digital customer engagement in pharma to commercial and medical communication would be like asserting that the violins are the most important part of a symphony orchestra. If you ask a violinist, he certainly will confirm. But dare asking the trumpeter. Across any pharmaceutical organization there is typically a variety of digital ‘music’ played for physicians and patients … Obviously, different projects, initiatives, tools and solutions are touching similar customers if not the same, depending on the disease area. For example in rare disease, the likeliness to interact with exactly the same individuals in parallel (patients & physicians) is quite high. For that reason, a close and cross-divisional/-functional coordination and alignment of digital of activities and projects is key. Having separate activities in different corners of the company is not the issue … but it needs to be ensured that they are all ‘concerted’, that they all tell the same story and send consistent messages. It is like a symphony orchestra. It doesn’t really matter which instruments would be the most important with a particular piece of music. But it is absolutely vital that they all play together and listen to each other for ensuring harmony and an a pleasurable experience for the…