GenAI: embracing the transformation – with caution

Imagine learning a new language only to find you opted for the wrong dialect and while your dialogue is getting an A-plus for effort, it is only getting a D-minus for cutting through barriers and gaining understanding.

Now, contemplate a device that can map the misunderstandings, account for nuanced pronunciations and generate a revised script that is greeted with nods rather than frowns of incomprehension.

The promise of GenAI forms that multi-functioning application – a Swiss Army knife-translator cutting through confusion with tools you never knew existed for challenges both obvious and obscure.

Agility in crowded, rapidly shifting markets is essential and the growing efficacy of large language models (LLMs) and algorithms is a beguiling prospect but, despite the GenAI fervour, key observers feel there is an acute need to prepare organisations to understand what specific tools they need and how to wield them.

The secret to GenAI’s riches of resonating insights and super-fast performance relies on adapting prosaic processes and maintaining strategic focus as much as adopting billboard platforms promising organisational metamorphosis.

A Deloitte focus on the GenAI revolution, taking soundings from pharma leaders, recently located industry on the cusp of a profound transformation with benefits sweeping from clinical trials to patient engagement, but it also cautioned: “Given the multiple areas in which to apply GenAI, be careful where you choose to apply it and decide which areas have the potential to drive the biggest return on investment in both short and longer term. Be clear about what business challenges you’re trying to solve.”

Julie O’Donnell, Global Head of Digital at Inizio Evoke, comments: “There is so much potential and the opportunity to free up time and space to devote to improving patient outcomes is driving real change. That is where the opportunity lies, but it’s also where the challenge lies.

“I think there are many kinks in the chain to be worked through before we get AI integration completely right and free up HCP time. But it is genuinely an exciting time to be working in the industry and there is potential every step of the way.

“Companies have been investing in AI in drug development for years with great results, but there are also significant commercial gains from the opportunity to understand your audiences faster and more deeply with AI. With predictive modelling, you can better understand the landscape and the market dynamics and, by harnessing data at scale, you can play out different scenarios to cover all bases.”

The key, Julie observes, is identifying the relevant data and making it work across different functions and departments.

Often, data sets remain unused, unshared and undervalued.

“Most teams within a pharma company have multiple folders from different vendors or internal presentations that sit in a shared drive in different folders and formats that are just wasted,” she says. “But there are lots of low-costs ways to do better housekeeping to unlock the ability to use AI agents, which can increase the return on investment on all the research. There’s a lot of talk about digital twins and personas, but unless you get smarter at bringing your data together within cross-functional teams, you’ll always be one step behind.

“GenAI is the catalyst to help you do more advanced things with data that were once not possible or would have taken much longer.

“Looking at any aspect of AI strategy, the teams that are going to catapult themselves forward will be those that bring functions and data together to understand their patients and orchestrate their plans. AI is bringing together all the things pharma has talked about for years but not followed through on and it can provide the rocket fuel to move forward.”

Julie, who has been at the leading edge of digital and AI development over the last decade, believes that GenAI has to be used transparently, with sharp attention to trust factors that are visible to patients and HCPs and the ‘extra audience’ of LLMs that aggregate and share content.

“You almost have to create a new Venn diagram of your channels and content; where it resonates with humans through social media and traditional media and also the channels that the machines like and look at, which demands a dual strategy,” she adds. “Making the best of GenAI is more about the fundamentals of understanding your audience and thinking about content and channel strategy than it is really about anything technical.

“My excitement is inspired by the depth of insight we can obtain from data and how that will help patients being heard. Whether you are an HCP or a patient, if we are really helping people feel heard and really answering their questions, which is core to AI visibility, then we will increase trust and reputation in the industry and belief in AI’s potential.

“Google gave patients greater access to information but GenAI is now the next level in terms of patients’ ability to have access to relevant information and enable the personalisation and consumerisation of healthcare. We are almost entering a new era in terms of the informed patient and that can only help improve patient outcomes. The challenges for industry and HCPs is to make sure that we’re rising to the occasion in terms of delivering better content and making sure it’s discovered by the humans and the machines.”

Nick Hall, Senior Consultant at Sprout Health Solutions, also has a sharp focus on how technology can truly place patients at the heart of technological advances. “One huge opportunity that exists with AI is the democratisation of data, with patients being able to directly access data and information about their conditions. This is particularly important for people with rare diseases, where information can be very limited and hard to source. The flip side is that the data has to be accurate and trustworthy, so AI’s huge potential has to be weighed against its current limitations.

“Another core opportunity for AI is accelerating the drug development process, because for many conditions it can take a long time for the drug to come to market and be accessible for patients, and for some it is too late. We need oversight and regulation of AI processes, but anything that speeds up the journey is welcome. It could make huge differences to patients’ quality of life and their survival.”

Sprout Health Solutions, which combines academic rigour with commercial understanding to design evidence-based behavioural strategies, believes that careful implementation of AI will improve outcomes at a time when the public is welcoming its controlled adoption across healthcare. It highlights a recent survey that showed most patients are in favour of human oversight with AI-assisted healthcare.

“Our core mantra is putting the patient at the centre of everything and it is a natural extension to hope that they would be involved in the early stages of any AI initiative in healthcare,” Nick comments. “It is so important to have patients directly involved in the development of AI tools, because it is their data going in and their outcomes that will be affected. They should be front and centre of any decisions that are made about AI.

“AI can improve efficiencies but you always need the human in the loop giving oversight to guard against hallucinations and to have that iterative process to review and refine its output. But having that human in the loop also means having the voice of the patient and the carer. These are important stakeholders to involve at an early stage and we do a lot of work with patient advocacy organisations and pharmaceutical companies to push their involvement.”

Sprout, which specialises in stakeholder co-creation to generate deep insights across the drug development cycle, finds that the public values the opportunity AI can bring to healthcare but remain wary of data privacy and accuracy.

“AI can do amazing things, but we cannot jump in the deep end without having mechanism to check its performance,” adds Nick. “There is enormous potential across healthcare if we use it correctly and build the human voices into it. It could deliver life-changing impact, particularly through accelerated drug development pathways and better, faster access to new treatments for those who really need them.”

It is important to demystify GenAI’s recent glorification by recognising that its reach and efficacy has been growing over the last decade rather than it being a ‘Eureka’ moment of revelation. “It is the culmination of a long AI journey and a lot of hard work in the field. It may feel like it has dropped into people’s laps, but it is no surprise to people involved in its development,” says Kelly Malloy, SVP, Customer Engagement for Artificial and Augmented Intelligence at Inizio Medical.

“There are so many applications for GenAI, but where it can really pay off for pharma and medical affairs is transforming workflows and decision-making, and it is most transformative when it is embedded into processes that are tested and have some governance.

“Our primary area of expertise at Inizio Medical is scientific communications and we work alongside authors and key investigators to ensure that clinical information is translated correctly. If we use AI thoughtfully at certain points of that process, the value is that we get the science out to stakeholders more quickly so it can inform clinical practice and that is a real benefit that cannot be understated.”

Inizio’s HCP Interact – an AI-powered training product – takes that intention further by empowering MSL teams to communicate more effectively by practising on avatars modelled on real clinical profiles. Kelly says: “The avatars are trained to act as a persona that they would encounter in the field; it could be somebody that is less knowledgeable about a product or time-poor or whatever real-life scenario an MSL might encounter. It helps maximise scientific understanding at HCP level while using their feedback about knowledge gaps to help scientific communications teams refine information and messaging.”

Kelly echoes the need for data harmonisation. “Silos are never created on purpose,” she adds. “A lot of the companies that we’re working with are realising that they are paying for the same data sets multiple times across different departments. AI helps them identify duplication and to also bring large data sets together, interrogate them and drive insights that are relevant across R&D, medical and commercial.”
Embedding GenAI in workflows and cross-departmental function does not sound as alluring as headline advances proclaimed by fresh digital landmarks, but this is where the real treasure is mined, she observes.

“The amplification of what humans can derive from huge data sets is the fundamental benefit of this technology,” she says. “There’s no need to be afraid of the technology because there are guard rails that we can put into place to make it more trustworthy and the outputs more reliable. So, it is a question of using it to enhance systems that are already in place to help humans do what humans do best, which is adding the creative and the strategic element and making sure objectives are achieved.
“It is not going to take jobs. It will make jobs more interesting and more effective. GenAI has already shifted from content generation to being a consultative partner and a lot of organisations are working out how to use it well rather than an ‘all or nothing’ approach.

“If you adopt GenAI and do a little bit well then people will get to understand how it works and how it is grounded and you also increase trust. I’ve always loved technology and it now feels like GenAI is coming of age. It will keep developing and it will keep innovating and the prospects are exciting.”

Adam Boucher, Head of Innovation at STEM Healthcare, sees speed as the billboard attraction of GenAI, but with that comes a need for companies to gear up their processes to keep pace.

“There’s a huge appetite across the industry and most companies are moving to a phase of exploration and experimentation of the huge number of potential use cases right across the product life cycle, some of which will really transform the way in which pharmaceutical companies commercialise their assets,” he says.

“Get it right and you achieve an ability to leverage GenAI to speed up processes and become more agile, which can give you a significant edge. But in order to maximise this, organisations do need to transform. You can have all this data coming in at lightning speed, but it’s equally important that you remove any barriers, such as legacy systems and processes, that might inhibit your ability to harness that intelligence quickly and put it into practice.

“It is still early days in GenAI’s life cycle, so there is a need to embrace an almost experimental approach where you don’t necessarily know if things are going to work but you can try different things, learn quickly, refine where needed and continuously iterate, but also walk away from things that aren’t delivering value.
“There’s obviously a lot of change management that needs to happen to ensure organisations can expedite decision-making and sign-offs. But it’s definitely going in the right direction and I think that our clients see the potential, so are trying to move fast.”

STEM Healthcare, an Inizio Ignite company, is a global leader in strategic brand alignment deploying industry experts and 17 years of benchmarked data to analyse and optimise the critical phase of HCP engagement.

Adam identifies the potential to supercharge traditional market research and create agile projects that can flex across the diverse landscapes of therapeutic areas and reach down to tailored sectors and respond to market changes.

“Historically, market research has been more reliant on small focus groups to provide feedback, which was used to test a campaign narrative and messages. Once the campaign was then developed and rolled out, it was a big lift to change course,” he says. “With GenAI, we have the capacity to harness a plethora of interaction types to generate a wealth of data and insights revealing what is resonating with doctors and HCPs in real time, and that allows you as a leader to be far nimbler in refining your strategy based on that feedback.

Danny Buckland is a freelance journalist specialising in the pharmaceutical industry