Pharma’s digital inflection point

Pic by Charl Folscher on Unsplash

Billed as the world’s most influential technology event, this year’s CES show saw its first ever keynote from a healthcare company when Abbott CEO Robert Ford took to the stage in Las Vegas in January.

For Ford, the focus was on his company’s new range of consumer ‘biowearable’ health devices, but his appearance was also another reminder of the increasing importance of ‘digital’ in all its forms across the life sciences sector.

Alongside buzzworthy metaverse, NFT and cryptocurrency offerings, this year’s CES also saw updates in remote patient monitoring tech, mobile games for better mental health and a slew of wellness devices.

Episode 19: How Eisai is using digital health and Amazon’s Alexa in a rare form of epilepsy

My latest guest on the pharmaphorum podcast is Alexander Scott, who’s chief strategy officer for Eisai’s neurology business group in the US.

He joined me to talk about the pharma company’s use of digital health technology with a particular focus on how it’s using Amazon’s Alexa to help those impacted by Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome (LGS).

Alexa: Tell me about Amazon’s ambitions in healthcare

Photo by Piotr Cichosz on Unsplash

Over the last two years Amazon’s healthcare plans have gone from being a closely guarded secret to underpinning a series of very public deals and product launches, with 2018 proving to be the tipping point.

The year before, all the chatter was focused on the company’s secret healthcare team and the disruptive potential of this, as-yet-unknown, unit. Then all the behind-the-scenes work started paying off.