Remote patient monitoring, personalised medicines or precision medicine are some examples of the potential that Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions have for the healthcare sector. Disruptive technologies have been excellent allies in providing key insights to streamline processes and accelerate decisions across all sectors, with the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry being no exception. These sectors deal with a huge volume of data coming from different sources, so it needs to be reliable and consistent to generate valuable information for the whole organisation.

In the so-called Industry 4.0, characterised by connectivity, data analytics and robotics, increasingly the healthcare sector and especially the pharmaceutical industry, benefits from automation technologies and digital processes.

In the case of pharmaceutical laboratories, these deal with a large volume of data that needs to be centralised through solutions that give them a global vision of the company and show the main strategic indicators.

Particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, which has extensive security and reporting requirements, new legislation and regulations have led to the emergence of heterogeneous systems. Through Data Analytics and AI solutions, there are numerous benefits for the industry, ranging from reducing the risks and costs of compliance with the rules of the country where the organisation operates, to the organisation’s ability to protect sensitive data (of the organisation and customers), or the agility of process validation in the context of product approval.

In the healthcare area, the benefits of Artificial Intelligence translate into the ability to manage patient information, monitor results, create individual treatments adapted to each profile or predict the outcome of a given test. Devices with Internet of Things (IoT) technology are also an increasingly present phenomenon in the sector. Products such as smart clothing or smartbands are able to monitor the health status of users/patients.

Analysing all the information coming from this new generation of devices is a challenge, but it becomes more agile with Analytics solutions, as they allow the monitoring of data related to the population’s health (predicting disease outbreaks or medical conditions), higher interaction with the patient through IoT devices (making it possible to analyse whether treatments are having the desired results, the side effects obtained and give advice in real-time), as well as analysing clinical data from diverse populations, simultaneously and in real-time.

In terms of diagnosis, there is no doubt that AI can make an excellent contribution, achieving faster and more accurate results. At a time when health professionals are overworked, AI solutions are proving to be an efficient aid, enabling early diagnosis to be accelerated or tests to be interpreted, for instance.

In addition to the speed with which they can generate diagnostic results for patients, the use of technological solutions combined with Artificial Intelligence reduces the costs of health services, providing more optimised results throughout the value chain. In this way, for example, genetic tests become increasingly cheaper and help researchers in identifying the reasons for a particular disease to develop tailor-made and more effective treatments.

In the case of medicine development, AI can speed up the process by providing scientists with powerful insights from structured and unstructured data that will accelerate the achievement of objectives.

Therefore, also at the management level, companies that integrate AI-based technology solutions will be able to have more effective and competitive business models, allowing them to identify new opportunities, reduce costs and make smarter decisions.