Wen 丨 Li Shaochun Editor 丨 Zhao Bozhi
Advances in digitization over the past decade and future technological innovations have led to a reimagining of how to realize value and breakthroughs in the clinical and healthcare industries faster and better. The impact of COVID-19 on the entire healthcare system has become a catalyst for industry change. As more and more CROs and pharmaceutical companies and leading technology companies begin to study the next generation of clinical trial technology, the ecology of new drug research and development is also undergoing a huge transformation. On October 19th, "This is Digitalization" - Digital 100 Lecture Halls Season 8, Mr. Li Shaochun, General Manager of Watson Health in IBM Greater China, as the keynote speaker, shared the innovation ecology and future prospects of the medical industry in the digital era.
Changes in the healthcare industry
The rapid development of a new generation of digital technologies has made a difference in our work and life. Taking artificial intelligence as an example, through the support of massive computing power, AI has achieved leading results in competitive chess competitions, and in early 2021, the cover of Nature magazine mentioned that IBM artificial intelligence debate system Project Debater competed with top European debaters on the same stage, and prepared all the arguments in just a few minutes after getting the debate, so that everyone can see that artificial intelligence has reached a new milestone in the development of cognitive intelligence. In terms of pharmaceutical research and development, a startup in Hong Kong, China, spent only 18 months and spent $2 million to discover a new target for the treatment of pulmonary fibrosis through artificial intelligence, and then designed a new drug molecule from scratch to target this target, which is also the first time in the world to use artificial intelligence to discover a new mechanism idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis drugs to advance to preclinical.
China's 14th Five-Year Plan proposes that the application scenarios of digital technology are in smart medical care, including: improving databases such as electronic health records and medical records and electronic prescriptions, and accelerating data sharing in medical and health institutions; promoting telemedicine, promoting the application of medical image-assisted interpretation and clinical auxiliary diagnosis; and using big data to improve the supervision capacity of medical institutions and medical behaviors. The pandemic has greatly accelerated the process of digital transformation and remodeling in the healthcare industry, and according to a survey by IBM Global CEO, 52% of respondents expect IoT, cloud and AI to become core technologies in the next 3-5 years.
In the era of great changes in digital medical and platform capabilities, IBM concluded that medical care should be patient-centered to help patients get the right treatment faster; improve quality, efficiency, manage costs and competitive advantages in medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, government and other aspects; technology can play an enabling role, can play a supportive digital reshaping and transformation in the medical ecosystem industry, on the basis of hybrid cloud and platform, using data AI and analysis capabilities to accelerate data sharing, data analysis, and the entire enterprise and industry. The ability to monetize data applications.
Digital technologies enable clinical trials
New drug research and development and clinical trials are two hot topics in the medical industry, major well-known pharmaceutical companies, are through big data and digital technology to accelerate the search integration of information, target selection and drug design synthesis, effectiveness prediction and analysis of clinical data, but despite the continuous advancement of technology, clinical trials are still costly, time-consuming and inefficient, data show that 60% to 70% of drug development time is spent on clinical trials, while 86% of clinical trials have encountered delays.
During the pandemic, 80% of non-COVID-19-related clinical trials had to be postponed. At the same time, the medical industry and regulatory agencies are working hard to explore new methods for clinical trials, and the US FDA, the European Union and the EFPIA (European Pharmaceutical Industry Association) have jointly launched corresponding plans to try remote decentralized clinical trials. On July 1, 2020, China's "Good Management Practice for Drug Clinical Trials (2020 Revision)" came into effect, standardizing the requirements of clinical trials, delineating the responsibilities of all parties, strengthening the protection of subjects, and also removing various regulatory obstacles for the digitization of clinical trials. On April 30, 2020, the Guidelines for the Management of Drug Clinical Trials during the COVID-19 Epidemic of the Drug Evaluation Center of the State Drug Administration clearly stated that with the gradual maturity of remote inspection and the construction of the data management system in the electronic system of clinical trials, remote digital technology can be used to effectively carry out drug clinical trials during the epidemic.
Under the good guidance of the regulatory authorities, the world's leading pharmaceutical companies are also actively promoting virtual clinical trials and remote clinical trials, ensuring that patients perform consent through video and online means, transporting drugs from drug research to patients' homes, and conducting remote management research, including the use of wearable devices and integrated clinical trial platforms to support decentralized clinical trials.
Since the first international drug clinical trial was carried out in 1947, clinical trials have undergone the development of standardization, electronicization, intelligence and digitalization. Based on statistical findings, the use of ePro capabilities of ibm's integrated clinical trial platform has continued to grow during the pandemic, with positive feedback from pharmaceutical companies and CRO companies. We look forward to the near future, clinical trials can be through wearable smart devices, data integration and other ways to automatically feedback clinical data remotely, to support patients to carry out clinical trials at home, the current decentralized clinical trial application in all indications is still limited, but also need industry standards and regulations to support. Ibm clinical trials and data analysis platforms can seamlessly integrate all kinds of key clinical trial data, provide digital efficient tools and active ecological partners, and actively support the development of global decentralized clinical trials from the perspective of openness, safety and compliance to achieve ecological win-win results.
A trusted digital smart medical platform
In terms of smart healthcare, IBM found in the 2021 global CEO survey that from innovation from technology leadership to ecological cooperation platform economy, it is the focus of pharmaceutical CEOs.
How to become a platform enterprise of smart healthcare, how to stand out among tens of thousands of platforms, if better utilize digital technology? IBM summarized 4 important factors, the first is to accumulate and deepen the expertise of the medical industry for a long time, and find its own strengths and professional direction to establish professional barriers. The second is to provide and manage standardized healthcare data and analytics capabilities, develop data strategies, and gain insights into the value of data through analytics. The third is to achieve digital medical insights by providing professional product approach tools and services. Through predictive capabilities, combined with business processes, optimize internal operations and external ecological supply chains to form circular innovation insights. Finally, based on the enterprise and the platform of a secure, trusted and compliant hybrid cloud, IBM is also actively cooperating with government agencies, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and technology companies to promote the innovation and implementation of smart medical technology in the world through the above four capabilities.
IBM has been committed to the construction of smart medical platforms and ecological cooperation, such as: IBM RXN tools combined with artificial intelligence, automation and cloud computing technology to accelerate chemical discovery, can predict the synthesis process of organic chemical reactions, and reverse synthesis pathways, based on Transformer's language model, can predict the most likely outcome of chemical reactions or understand the natural language description of chemical programs.
As more and more CROs and pharmaceutical companies and leading technology companies begin to study the next generation of clinical trial technology, the ecology of new drug research and development is also undergoing a huge transformation, and the future is the combination of traditional clinical trials and decentralized clinical trials. The combination of technology and scenarios is very important, not only to ensure the openness of the platform, such as combining different types of data on the platform, but also to ensure the accuracy and security of the data, to support compliance and regulatory considerations, but also from the user's point of view to consider how to better achieve subject and patient-centric. IBM Integrated Clinical Development Platform, IBM Clinical Development® is the industry's leading integrated clinical trial platform, through leading technology, digital capabilities and user experience, the speed of launching the clinical trial project system is nearly 80% shorter than the industry standard, saving costs and bringing better quality.
IBM Micromedex® provides evidence-based drug knowledge bases and knowledge repositories for drug clinical decision-making, patient education, and drug market information, with in-depth clinical evidence from 8,500 journals and 750,000 publications. as well as the well-known pharmacopoeia libraries in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States. In more than 40 years, it has been used by more than 5,000 customers in more than 80 countries. In 2011, the Guangdong Pharmaceutical Association initiated and co-edited with the Science and Technology Development Center of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Society and Peking Union Medical College Hospital - China's first evidence-based academic monograph on super-instructional drugs - "Reference for Ultra-drug Instructions", the first edition of the book in 2013 and the second edition of 2019 were published by the People's Medical Publishing House, which proposed to use the Micromedex® evidence-based grading system to evaluate the use of ultra-manual drugs. The Guangdong Pharmaceutical Association has been promoting a breakthrough in reasonable over-the-label drug regulations for 11 consecutive years, and has referred to the Micromidex® evidence-based grading system for 7 consecutive years. At present, the super-instructions for drugs are included in the new version of the "Physician Law of the People's Republic of China" adopted on August 20, 2021.
IBM released a research white paper on digital therapy in 2018, through cooperation with partners to advocate the innovation of digital therapy, through data statistics, it can be seen that digital therapy can better improve patient engagement, improve the efficacy of chronic diseases, and better reduce costs.
Scenarios such as new drug discovery, clinical trials, real-world research, next-generation digital therapies, and evidence-based medical knowledge can be used as end-to-end tools and services to build an integrated digital medical platform to support the digital transformation and new ecological composition of life science enterprises.
Trusted Network, a trusted blockchain network for healthcare and medicine
One example of technology driving healthcare innovation is the Digital Healthcare Pass. A health pass is a verifiable, tamper-proof digital credential that helps organizations determine the health status of employees, visitors, or customers when they enter a location, as requested by the organization or local health department, helps organizations return to work, and helps them prioritize the health and safety of employees and customers in an efficient, safe, voluntary, and privacy-respectful manner.
Moderna and IBM Collaborate on COVID-19 Vaccine Supply Chain and Health Passport Sharing Digital Health Connect, built on blockchain technology: designed to help individuals maintain control over their personal health information and share it in a secure, verifiable, and trusted way. Organizations can use the solution to validate the health credentials of employees, customers, and travelers against criteria specified by the organization, such as test results, vaccination records, and temperature checks. Vaccine management solutions with end-to-end traceability: to address potential supply chain disruptions. These solutions enable governments and healthcare providers to quickly and securely share data on individual vaccine batches in a complex COVID-19 supply chain, from production facilities to management sites.
IBM's research found that nearly 25 percent of vaccines degraded when they reached their destination due to incorrect shipping. When it comes to priority drugs and vaccines, supply chain disruptions are more than just an inconvenience. Pharmaceutical companies need to be able to anticipate potential drug supply disruptions and plan for them accordingly, while maintaining effectiveness and integrity. According to a survey by Cardinal Health, 40 percent of health care providers canceled surgeries, and 69 percent rescheduled surgeries due to a lack of medical supplies. Being able to anticipate supply chain disruptions can result in significant cost savings and help improve the patient and staff experience. Throughout the process, blockchain, as a trusted network, can support blockchain innovation in medicine and healthcare, including establishing the integrity of the supply chain and better identifying contamination from high-value temperature-sensitive products in conjunction with IOT devices. Make sure the products on the shelves and in pharmacies are authentic. Analytics can tap into new business opportunities, improve inventory management, increase efficiency, provide early warning of disruptions to raw material purchases, and determine the location of recalled products in seconds.
Secure, compliant and trusted information architectures support the unleashed ai
IBM's products and solutions provide better tools and information architectures for enterprise hybrid cloud data end-to-end by helping enterprises with more efficient collect data, organize data, analyze data, and finally infuse AI. The criticality of information security in the healthcare industry is beyond doubt, based on a series of challenges such as ransomware, phishing emails, and human error, the medical industry needs to better respond to data security in the digital age.
IBM is also through the enterprise security strategy services, can better understand the pain points of each enterprise in the field of security, relying on the world's leading security software service products, earlier to find data security defects, monitor data access, detect the incident immediately after disposal, and finally achieve the landing of enterprise security strategy.
Innovation ecology and future prospects
Artificial intelligence as a representative of digital technology, its combination with the industry, especially the combination of medical scenarios, are the focus of attention in the industry, AI technology in different landing scenarios respectively empowered the important 2P role of AI medical treatment, in the medical end can better accelerate the ability of imaging doctors to read films through computer vision images; at the drug end, through the graph neural network to better find targets and innovative drugs and accelerate the cycle of clinical trials through AI, reducing the cost of clinical trials In the way of disease management, through massive data, from the way of sequence data analysis to understand the disease, better realize the management of cross-disease correlation, realize the risk prediction model of AI; and from the perspective of patient management, better through the processing of natural language, build a healthy steward.
从Narrow AI到Broader AI
At present, we are in the era of generalized artificial intelligence, and it is easier for us to fuse a large amount of mixed data, such as the fusion of electronic medical record data and genetic data to develop patient queues and better improve the accuracy of prediction. Broader AI can also better prevent data bias through technical methods and improve the accuracy of models.
In June 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued the Ethics and Governance guidelines for the use of AI in health care, which describe the application of AI in the medical field, applicable laws and policies, key ethical principles and corresponding ethical challenges, accountability mechanisms and governance frameworks. The WHO said that this is the first comprehensive international guide in the field of medical AI based on ethics and human rights standards, giving a good framework and making epoch-making significance.
In July 2021, the Food and Drug Administration issued the Guiding Principles for the Classification and Definition of Artificial Intelligence Medical Software Products, which also promoted the industrial supervision and development of Chinese intelligent application software, and better defined a guiding principle for medical software.
The 2021 IBM Global CEO Survey pointed out that the top performers regard ecological cooperation as the most important priority, and the proportion of outstanding performers who obtain the required capabilities through cooperation is 97% higher than that of underperformers; 78% of Chinese executives want their organizations to actively participate in the business ecosystem; platform economy and win-win cooperation through ecological cooperation are the focus of future leading digital enterprises.
IBM is a global leader in hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence, leveraging technology to help build smarter health ecosystems. Our core strengths are our deep industry experience in health, advanced technology solutions (including artificial intelligence, blockchain and the capabilities of big data and analytics), combined with a reputation for trust and security, to support our customers' digital transformation. Through a combination of leading-edge technology solutions and experienced consulting, we are helping healthcare companies become more efficient, resilient and stronger institutions that can provide their communities with a mission to advance smart healthcare with ecological partners."