Align Biopharma Provides Easier Connection To Healthcare Professionals

By Benjamin Ross 

February 8, 2017 | Life sciences companies can manage up to 60-70 digital entry points for their products and services: a host of websites, portals, and mobile apps all sharing information with users. Align Biopharma is a new industry standards group aiming to ease digital engagement challenges for member companies and their users.

“The vision for our group is to make it easier for healthcare providers to work with life sciences,” said Paul Shawah, VP of Commercial Strategy at Veeva Systems. “It’s that simple; it’s that focused.”

Veeva leads the group and is responsible for group management, operations, and communications. The founding members of Align Biopharma are Allergan, AstraZeneca, Biogen, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and Pfizer.

“The idea of forming a group that collaborates across the industry to develop standards, that in and of itself is not entirely new,” said Shawah told Bio-IT World. “But in the area we’re focused on we think it’s relatively unique.”

Veeva and a number of technology leaders convened in 2016 to deliberate the state of the life sciences, and identify ways they could deliver better results as a group than any one company on their own. “We were having a conversation about digital engagement,” Shawah recalled. “We said, ‘If we do things in a common way, and we agree with what those standards are, then we can have better results. Better results in particular for customers, creating a more common, consistent, familiar healthcare provider experience.’”

It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for Align Biopharma, as it took a while for the founding member companies to settle on what exactly the industry standards group would accomplish, though once they settled on a goal everyone was quick to get on board.

Shawah said: “We all wondered where we would end up. This is a new thing for everyone involved, and there’s a very high level of collaboration. These are very needy, significant problems for all of these companies and they’re all committed to solving them. They’re not sharing anything that’s competitive in nature, they’re sharing information in terms of establishing common frameworks for technology standards and access… We’ve all been extremely open, extremely willing to collaborate, and even more so, willing to have open debate, dialogue, and even compromise on where the standards should end up.”

Identity Standards

The first standard for Align Biopharma is Identity Management. Slated to publish early this year, this identification and authentication standard will enable single sign-on for healthcare professionals to access online content, including websites, portals, virtual events, or webinars across all companies. “We think of [Identity Management] as the foundation, in that the most important thing is identifying who someone is with certainty,” Shawah explained. “The foundation really is who are they, are they in fact who they say they are, so that we can comply with all regulations, and we can start to do things like personalization and give them services that are specifically tailored for them as individuals.”

There is also a legal application for the Identity Management standard. While it doesn’t happen frequently, there are some cases of fraudulent registration from people claiming to be healthcare professionals, Shawah said. “When you get to something like ordering samples there’s a really clear case for someone to try to be fraudulent and claim that they’re an HCP [healthcare professional].” Even if something like this were to happen once, it would still be a disaster for the pharma industry.

Align Biopharma hopes to release its next standard—HCP Consent and Communication preferences—sometime late this year. This standard will focus on creating a common definition of what it means to “opt in” or “opt out” of receiving information from a company, as well as a common definition of what it means to define the dimensions by which a customer consumes information. For instance, a customer may want to receive an email about new information from a life sciences company, but not a phone call. It can often be challenging for healthcare providers to manage all this information, especially if there is no set standard for how these focuses should be approached.

The standards published by Align Biopharma, much like any other standards body, are living documents. Once the standards are published, they will able to adapt to the changing technology and environment of the life sciences community. This is what Align Biopharma will be focusing on for the near future, making public announcements of published standards, and improving them to fit the needs of the life sciences community.

Speculating on the future of Align Biopharma is not something on Shawah’s mind. Instead he wants to focus on the present implementation of these standards. “These standards are practical,” he said. “This is not a theoretical exercise. We want these standards to be used to actually deliver real solutions, technology, and services that life sciences communities can use… Hopefully that gives a sense of the spirit of [Align Biopharma].”