Every day it seems we see more and more articles published promoting the benefits of embracing digital transformation across healthcare supply chains. Few, if any however, seem to provide much insight on how to ‘digitally enable’ labeling and artwork processes to embrace this revolution.
Before looking at this specific challenge in more detail, let’s reflect on what a ‘digital transformation’ in healthcare means and who it impacts. Firstly, no one would dispute that we would want patients to be the greatest beneficiaries both at the diagnosis or treatment stage. After all, we are all likely to find ourselves at the receiving end of healthcare provision at some point in our lives.
Secondly, there are the healthcare providers. It’s possible that the traditional patient-doctor relationship will cease to exist as we each become better informed. We’re also likely to see an increasing level of diagnosis and treatment delivered electronically. Mobile and wireless applications are already transforming the role of healthcare provision in patient monitoring and treatment as reported by the Financial Times (2017).
Thirdly there are the manufacturers to consider. Both Pharmaceutical and Medical Device companies are experiencing disruption caused by the digital transformation in healthcare, both in areas of diagnosis and treatment. A recent study carried out by Roland Berger (2016) estimates the value of digital healthcare products and services to exceed USD200bn by 2020, growing 20% per year. In their article entitled ‘ Six ways digital is changing the pharma & healthcare industry’, Econsultancy (2017) suggests that consumers are becoming ever more motivated by finding the best treatment and the cheapest price.
If we are each in agreement that we are in the midst of a digital healthcare journey, we need to ask ourselves what steps we’re taking to digitally enable our labeling and artwork processes. Without doing so, we risk jeopardising the agility of our healthcare supply chains and ultimately, patient outcomes. But it’s not just the digitization of supply chains that will be disrupted, if unable to quickly and accurately persist electronic product and prescribing information across multiple channels, healthcare providers and ultimately their patients are likely to look to more enabled suppliers for their medicines and devices.
This is one reason why here at Kallik we’ve always believed that the best way of managing labeling content is as a library of re-usable digital assets. Securely managing all product and prescribing related information in a single version controlled environment enables unlimited composition, re-use and printing of any type of label anywhere. Furthermore, your labelling becomes ‘channel agnostic’, that is it can be delivered through multiple channels (web, mobile, social) as well as via the more traditional paper-based means of presentation.
