Digital Health Platforms

One result of the global digital transformation is that the life sciences sector (pharma, medical devices, healthtech) and healthcare sector (hospitals, clinics) are generating unprecedented and ever-growing volumes of clinical trial and real world health data . This data suffers from significant siloization. This growth in data is being further amplified by the fact that more and more devices are becoming connected (‘smart’). Life sciences companies are also developing ever more medical-grade software applications (companion apps, digiceuticals, etc), blurring the line between the traditionally fairly distinct pharma and medical device sectors. As new innovation ecosystems are created, closer links are being forged between life sciences companies, healthcare institutions, and healthtech innovators. This trove of data creates huge opportunities for improving patient care, diagnosis, and treatment (even in some cases for replacing traditional biochemical approaches), and for realizing significant healthcare efficiency gains. It is also essential for making precision medicine a reality. However, storing, processing, and accessing these data also throws up some significant challenges. These data necessitate a robust IT infrastructure able to handle large volumes of sensitive data while ensuring compliance with local privacy, security, and quality laws and regulations. Cloud technologies provide solutions for managing virtually unlimited volumes of data, and offer scalability and, during peaks of activity, additional benefits such as vast computing power. But building a homegrown medical IoT development platform directly on this infrastructure layer is not easy. It requires high levels of capital investment, entails significant operating costs, requires sizeable teams of IT experts and data governance expertise, and, to ensure product compliance, an understanding of medical regulations. Because life sciences companies and (to an even greater extent) healthcare institutions are not tech companies, they will usually want to consider licensing a digital health technology platform (DHP) in the form of a platform as a service (PaaS) . This enables them to sidestep some of the complexity of building their own platform and focus on their core business. For life sciences companies, the ultimate aim is the development of applications to support their drug or device sales. For healthcare institutions, the aim is to leverage patient data as efficiently and powerfully as possible. In this white paper, we take an unbiased look at the reasons for the emergence of these specific, vertically-integrated, broad technology platforms for the life sciences and healthcare sectors. Our main focus is on the life sciences sector. We then look at different approaches and at the benefits and disadvantages of these platforms. We present three examples of custom-build regulated platforms for medical IoT applications and one cloud provider which has used its existing technology components to develop a platform aimed specifically at the healthcare sector. We hope this paper will help life sciences companies in particular in choosing the right IT infrastructure and technology provider. To ensure that this paper is relevant to both IT professionals and managers in the digital health space, we have tried to avoid going into too much technical detail.