Big Pharma must embrace the shift to technological solutions in healthcare

Big Pharma’s rigid business model has been successful for such a long time that it makes change more challenging. But Yoav Shaked, an investor in healthtech companies, writes that there are signs of a shift in the healthcare industry, with many patients embracing a new generation of health technology. 

 
The pharmaceutical industry did well out of the pandemic. Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna – the companies responsible for the most successful vaccines – are making a profit of $1,000 every second, with skyrocketing share prices since March last year. Those profits can – and should – be invested in the future of healthcare.

Big Pharma, and new emerging companies, seem well aware that this future will include a paradigm change in what we define as ‘medicine’, and are starting to adjust. Their business model is simple: develop a treatment, gather enough evidence for it to be licensed, then lobby insurers, doctors, and health services to prescribe it as much as possible before the patent expires. The rigidity of this model – and the fact that it has been so commercially successful for so long – makes turning the big ship more challenging.

Unfortunately, current medicines often don’t work, or their results are unsatisfactory. Patients are starting to realise this as they move beyond the old model of being prescribed a one-size-fits-all pill for every ailment and embrace a new generation of technology. Today’s patients are more empowered than ever, do more research than ever, and ultimately take more responsibility for their health than before, allowing them to be engaged, not passive, and seek novel mechanisms of action.

 
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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk