Why Indian pharma companies should go for digital transformation and low code development

The prevailing COVID-19 pandemic has pushed large healthcare companies to step up their game around digital transformation. Digital transformation is now focused on improving operational efficiency, providing an integrated approach toward patient care, automated administrative, and clinical processes, allowing enhanced innovation, and delivering better patient outcomes.

Agility, accuracy, efficiency, and quick turnaround time are considered as key focus areas in delivering software applications to cover the length and breadth of the services rendered by healthcare organisations.

Any digital transformation initiative should focus on binding the key ingredients – data, process, people, and business objectives to deliver excellence as well as services that are the need of the hour.

Citizen developers, innovation, and all-in-one application

There is a need for pharmaceutical companies with large value-creation or idea generation opportunities to digitalise their entire value-chain. Large cross-functional processes like new product lifecycle management, annual product quality reviews etc involve substantial scope for digitalisation to make it more efficient, error-free, and automated.

Analytics and proactive nudges enable better decision-making and improve transparency across multiple teams that depend on access to critical information to execute their processes.

Building digital platforms that cater to the need of bringing process, people, and data together help improve the speed of execution and engage people in free flow ideation, foster better problem-solving, and innovation.

Considering that most companies have adopted digitalisation and have long done away with manual processes, the maintenance cost is high in terms of infrastructure and manpower if they still stick to legacy systems.

Low code development is a boon for companies that have citizen developers who bring their ideation to the screen, instead of reaching out to a developer. This helps them understand the requirement and enables them to think from a business perspective.

The roles of citizen developers resemble that of a business user or an analyst who turns ideation into reality. They have little coding knowledge and bring out the idea into an application, which depicts the ease of the platform and indicates that even those who don’t even have strong knowledge of coding can work on low code development.

This, in turn, brings out quick development and accessibility for internal IT teams to maintain the applications. Migrating legacy systems are now easy with low code development. 

With multiple systems of execution across manufacturing, quality, and supply chain, there is a reinforced need for platforms to bring aggregate information, as well as enable, collaborate and facilitate timely decisions.

The other key factors are scalability and flexibility of requirements used to measure the data. A blend of IoT coupled with application development allows many pharma companies to perform and record inspections, and track management practices such as incident reporting and providing safety observations and ratings. Hardware related data is also retrieved using predictive analytics.

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The shift to low code is here to stay

The major function and revenue driver of the pharma industry is drug creation. Creating entirely new software is too costly, time-consuming, and delays the go-to-market launch of the drug. In some cases, traditional application development does not provide the needed competitive edge.

The delayed software development does not provide insights based on the requirements. There is a need for pharma firms to adapt to new-age applications and tools to help pharma companies take competitive positioning, and give life to their ideas in a shorter span of time.

Low code development will sustain the present and future developments, and bring more flexible opportunities to business users.

Low code development makes the development phase far more stress-free than the traditional development. The future of development is going to be low code primarily because of ease of development at any complexity level.