The Syneos Health® Insights Hub, a dynamic destination for what’s next thinking and future-focused insights, released 2020 Health Trends: Changing Lives and Life Sciences. This annual trends report outlines critical shifts and the underlying dynamics that will shape biopharmaceutical decision making in 2020. Compiled from hundreds of global trend watchers working on the frontlines of healthcare, the report provides tangible ways for biopharmaceutical companies to navigate what’s ahead to realize the full potential of innovation.
“As we enter the next decade, the state of biopharmaceutical change continues to accelerate – from scientific advances redefining what’s possible to new technologies that are changing how we generate and act on data to improve health,” said Alistair Macdonald, Chief Executive Officer, Syneos Health. “In the midst of rapid change, it’s critical to understand and anticipate market dynamics that will impact healthcare decision making. Tapping these insights will enable all stakeholder communities to better speed innovation to change patients’ lives.”
Syneos Health and other industry-leading experts identified top trends across geographies and therapeutic areas including:
Rapidly evolving interfaces are dramatically changing where people find care and how they engage with clinical research.
- The Many Points of Care: Advances in digital care connections and the growth of new customer segments have opened entirely new ways of making healthcare more scalable and accommodating to both baby boomer demands and millennial disruption.
- Better, by Design: Big shifts in clinical trial user experience are changing how patients engage – from interactive, personal ways to connect with new trial participants to new technologies and tools that make learning as easy as a conversation with a friend.
The once approval-driven clinical world is evolving to focus more on Real World Evidence and building value stories.
- Answering to Real World: From building organizational fluency in Real World Evidence to learning new methods of data-infused trial design, industry leaders are helping their teams get ahead of both regulatory requirements and payer expectations to consistently demonstrate impact.
- The Value Evaluation: From big expectations for innovation to bulk pricing, payers, advocates and regulators are challenging biopharmaceutical leaders to show initial population-relevant data and defend value against constant change.
The industry is transforming to create more impact for patients, systems and their own organizations.
- Patient Value: The industry has moved from buzzword to activation when it comes to patient-centricity. Clinical teams are engaging patients around endpoints and experiences, while commercial teams build health platforms and new ways to put stakeholders first.
- Vs. Cancer: A record number of new oncology treatments have been approved in recent years, with industry making the commitment to take on cancer in the boldest ways possible from breakthrough treatments to potential vaccines and cures.
- New Strategic Blueprint: As commercialization becomes increasingly challenging, life science leaders are resetting their focus on core assets, building ROI models around data investments and starting to talk about how work changes when purpose changes.
- Tearing Down Silos: The walls are continuing to come down as siloed groups embrace teamwork, including more strategic integration of outsourcing and agile ways of working that help everyone experiment and learn together.
Critical stakeholders are under more pressure than ever at a moment when distrust of those best positioned to help is at an all-time high.
- Profession Under Pressure: The once-lauded career of doctor is becoming less appealing to some current doctors and potential student recruits. Standing in the gap are unpaid caregivers who, in 2020, have to give so much more.
- The Trust Deficit: In an era of pessimism and worry, leaders are launching initiatives to win trust back from people continuing to question industry, platform and company reputation.
Leigh Householder, Managing Director, Innovation, Syneos Health Communications and lead author of the eBook commented, “So many of the micro shifts we’ve seen nudging healthcare to change are coming to maturity, genuinely revolutionizing the way we work and live. These trends illuminate the areas where we need to work fast and smart to relentlessly pursue better relationships, solutions and stakeholders experiences.”
