Riding the Wearables Trend: Opportunities for Pharma

Riding the Wearables Trend: Opportunities for Pharma

Wearable health technology is causing a stir in Pharma with benefits across the business from smarter clinical research and improved patient monitoring and adherence to generating real-world, real-time data that underpins value claims with payers and stakeholders. But how can you separate the hype from the real potential?

Riding the Wearables Trend: Opportunities for Pharma investigates the potential for wearable devices, the current status of the sector and its likely development path. Critically, leading experts from companies such as Pfizer, Sanofi and Novartis reveal the opportunities, challenges and pitfalls for Pharma companies incorporating this nascent technology into their digital agenda.

Why this report is important to you

Wearable health devices are attracting considerable interest from Pharma. From clinical trial profiling, recruitment and remote patient monitoring through to smart tattoos and ingestible drugs, wearable devices offer Pharma multiple platforms to acquire real time patient data, improve patient adherence and refine drug development programmes. But identifying the real potential is critical to avoid costly mistakes: understanding the current status and future trends in this growing area are central to sound decision making. Through in-depth interviews with digital experts from leading Pharma companies, this report strips away the hype to give a clear and balanced perspective on the real potential and optimum applications for wearable health devices.

This report will enable you to…

• Focus on where wearable health devices are having an impact now and how the sector will evolve
• Incorporate wearable health devices into your clinical research designs and protocols and know how they can refine and improve the drug development process
• Communicate and educate patients and physicians on the clinical benefits of wearable devices and so encourage adoption
• Review the wearable devices that are already changing therapy and monitoring in key areas such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease
• Appreciate the regulatory, social and cultural obstacles facing the wearables sector which must be overcome
• Exploit the real world data gathered from wearable devices to support value claims with payers and other stakeholders
• Develop technology partnering policies that will be critical to the successful use of wearables

Expert Digital Innovation Contributors

The report is informed by the front-line knowledge of 9 US/EU experts who work in leading companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, Sanofi, Biogen and UCB.

Table of Contents

Executive summary

Research objectives

Experts interviewed

The emergence of health wearables

• Use of healthcare wearables for cost-efficiency
• Towards becoming medical device innovators

Overview of the potential of wearables

• Key insights
• Prevention, treatment and management
• Efficiency in R&D and clinical trials
• Commercial effectiveness for medicines
• Potential versus hype

Types, functions and disease area applications of existing medical wearables

• Key insights
• Clinical use of currently available wearables
• Top disease areas with wearable applications
• Diabetes
• Cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions
• Neurological conditions
• Mental health conditions
• Post-operative care plans

Challenges in the uptake of medical wearables

• Key insights
• Complexity and regulation of data from wearables
• Shifting from consumer to clinical use
• Apprehension, culture and mindset
• Overcoming the challenges
• Start now and don't expect perfection
• Try to achieve confluence with technology
• Bide your time
• SWOT analysis

The role of patients and the need for consideration of patient experience

• Key insights
• The role of design in patient engagement
• The role of the physician in driving patient experience with wearables
• Patient engagement for personalisation

Partnerships and collaboration

• Key insights
• Borrowing commercially available wearables and software for R&D
• Who should drive the wearables trend?
• Collaboration with other stakeholders

What is in store for medical wearables in the future?

• Key insights
• From early steps to the future
• The pharma business model of the future
• The expectation on industry to bear the financing burden for wearables
• The business logic behind financing wearables uptake
• The one who invests is the one who reaps the benefits
• Wearables as part of a bigger picture

Conclusion

Appendix

Expert biographies