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White Paper
Sangita Garg
Senior Consultant, Life Sciences
Sangita Garg is a Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) Solution
Architect with Tata Consultancy Services' (TCS') Life Sciences Technology Excellence
Group. She has more than 18 years of experience in the IT sector and is currently leading
Big Data initiatives for large pharmaceutical companies. Sangita has helped architect
large Data Warehouses for several global customers and managed large programs,
bringing innovation to the fore. Her expertise in DW and BI technologies has enriched
various engagements across multiple domains- manufacturing, cargo airlines,
investment banking, life sciences, and healthcare.
Sangita is an alumnus of National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, and holds a Master of
Technology in Heavy Electrical Equipment and Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical
Engineering.
Big Data, an 'in the news' technology, is gaining attention from organizations looking to seize
early entrant opportunities. It has become the talk of seminars, presentations, and
symposiums. The three 'V's, namely Volume, Variety, and Velocity, are the key characteristics
that are fundamental to its evolution. Current definitions qualify any data that is difficult to
manage using traditional systems as Big Data. Big Data has evolved from a bid to derive value
out of huge volumes of available unstructured data - overlooked until now because of the
existing systems' inability to process them.
Big Data has application opportunities across all value chains of the life sciences and
pharmaceutical industries. Adoption of Big Data in sales and marketing is gradually gaining
power primarily due to the underlying characteristics of the function that necessitates
interfacing through the web to listen to the 'voice of people'. Big Data has huge potential in
Research and Development (R&D) because of its intrinsic ability to process data from multiple
sources, such as millions of documents, protocols, study records, images, and applications;
and provide a unified view.
Like every nascent technology, Big Data adoption entails some challenges. In addition to
planning a significant investment in this evolving technology, collecting data elements lying
in organizational silos introduces a cultural challenge in Big Data initiatives. Recruiting and
retaining the right workforce with a balance of domain knowledge and Big Data skills is
another challenge organizations face today.
It is imperative for any organization to formulate a well-defined strategy for its Big Data
implementation to ensure alignment with its business objectives. Given that Big Data is still
in its early days, organizations looking to evaluate it can begin small by taking up proofs of
technology and factoring in multiple iterations. Recognizing the potential non-linear growth
Big Data can offer, some industry majors are acquiring lean Big Data startups.
This white paper attempts to provide a perspective to some fundamental questions
regarding Big Data, concerns and apprehensions, adoption challenges, and solutions to
understand the real value of Big Data. The paper also highlights certain Big Data prospects
that the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry can take advantage of.
Contents
Big Data Benefits across the life sciences industry value chain
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Conclusion
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Acknowledgements
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[3] NASSCOM, Big Data The Next Big thing, 2012, http://www.nasscom.in/big-data-next-big-thing
Social network analysis using Big Data technologies facilitates the identification of KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and
top influencers of a community. Using this intelligence, pharmaceutical companies can define strategies to address
this segment.
opportunities to overcome
organizational challengesexorbitant R&D costs,
complex analytics processing
capabilities, and gaining
valuable insights from real
world data across the various
life sciences and
pharmaceutical segments.
Disease pattern analysis Big Data can help analyze disease patterns across geographies, based on multiple
factors that contribute to the occurrence of a particular disease. Researchers can benefit from information about
trends or changing disease patterns over time and more importantly, about location shifts in disease patterns.
Pattern analysis can be further extended to various types of epidemic spreads in plants and animals. Epidemic early
warning systems can provide powerful insights about disease spread, which can help in undertaking
comprehensive eradication measures.
Drug discovery Big Data enables advanced search capabilities for analyzing millions of scientific publications,
patents, diseases, and clinical trials documents. This helps bio-researchers discover potential areas for target drugs.
Big Data also accelerates drug discovery by identifying target molecules in less time and in a cost effective manner.
Efficient and timely analysis of molecular imaging data for early detection of disorder or disease one of the
greatest challenges for researchers and scientists in today's world, has now become possible with the advent of Big
Data solutions.
Clinical trials management Big Data can help in the various steps involved in clinical trials - patient profiling by
identifying the right candidates through analytics of demographic information and historical data, evaluating drug
readiness, reviewing previous clinical trial events, intervention through correct drug dosage, and remote patient
monitoring. It even helps identify the possible adverse and undesirable effects of a new drug even before they are
reported.
Large scale genome sequencing The cost of generating raw data has
declined with the use of new technology and more advanced algorithms in
the area of bio-informatics. This necessitates using specific data points to
develop better statistical models for understanding the cause of disease and
identifying candidates for new drug trials. For example, in the near future,
treatments for various forms of cancer will involve not only sequencing of an
individual's diseased and healthy genomes but also quantification of
differentially expressed genes to identify the right course of chemotherapy.
Using the present set of technologies, processing of sequence data remains
a significant bottleneck, since a large number of computations using
several resource-intensive algorithms need to be carried out.
Pharmaceutical industry majors anticipate that the number of such samples
to be analyzed will scale up to hundreds in the next couple of years. Big Data
has immense potential to perform computations of large-scale genomics in
a timely and cost-effective manner.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing and engineering systems This industry segment has started adopting Big Data
in multiple drug manufacturing processes such as analysis of process deviation between drug recipe creation and
drug recipe execution. Moreover, initiatives are being taken to develop recipe models leveraging Big Data. Today,
pharmaceutical manufacturers find it difficult to quickly establish batch genealogy and its traceability to meet
regulatory compliance. Big Data technologies, with their fast computation capabilities, can quickly establish the
link between the finished product and all the input materials and processes. Companies can then take corrective
actions and analyze shop-floor activities for process deviation and improvement using Big Data.
Supply chain management and logistics Companies are increasingly adopting demand-based supply systems.
Core systems of demand management are based on forecasting systems that generate advanced analytics. Big Data
analytics can be leveraged to generate complex statistical models for insights into customer adoption patterns.
Moreover, Big Data finds its use in generating vendor profiles of potential suppliers which is an important
parameter for generating minimum lead time from order to delivery. Big Data analytics can be used to monitor
product shipments, identifying where inventory is disappearing, as well as spikes in logistics costs.
Sales and marketing Big Data finds its usefulness in a multitude of operations - analyzing unstructured data
from patients' queries and healthcare professionals' responses on the web, challenging market conditions, and
customer and product targeting and segmentation. Moreover, the need of the hour for any pharmaceutical
company is to meet patients' personalized requirements rather than continuing with a generic product. Big Data
analytics equips pharmaceutical companies with the information pertaining to individual lifestyle traits of both
health care practitioners as well as patients. Key opinion management programs can, subsequently, be designed
based on insights drawn from Big Data analytics.
Big Data analytics of real world data can be used to disseminate relevant product information such as drug efficacy,
adverse effects, and so on to health care providers and payers to build brand awareness and enhance product
loyalty. This also helps understand to whom to cross-sell or up-sell products. Big Data also facilitates brand analysis
of a pharmaceutical company and determines the effectiveness of a marketing campaign and channel.
Big Data plays a vital role in sales-force effectiveness through efficient and optimized call planning for targeted
healthcare professionals, preparing customized compensation plans for field sales-force, and customized product
campaigns and offerings based on the region and segment of patients. Big Data can be further leveraged to
manage the churn of healthcare professionals.
Patient care quality and program analysis Big Data can help organizations source and manage complaints
data, feedback data from multiple sources such as external blog posts, social media sites, data feeds from external
vendors, and providers' internal systems. The data collected can be further enriched by filtering pertinent data in
Big Data platforms into refined versions to generate unified insights about patients' managed healthcare programs.
Healthcare providers can then analyze the insights in a holistic manner to form policies and build strategies that
drive better patient care and quality managed healthcare programs.
Serving human lives through Big Data analytics Big Data technology has the potential to deliver value across
various aspects of human lives. With tremendous analytics and search capabilities, Big Data has found usage in
applications related to forensic science. Leveraging its search capabilities, evidence based documents of various
events can be searched and data from connected devices analyzed to identify patterns that can aid investigations.
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For instance, in neonatal healthcare, Big Data enables the capturing of extensive data streams from devices
connected to un-well babies; vital parameters can then be captured, monitored and analyzed in real time to
provide a comprehensive view of the babies' health. Health practitioners are able to identify disease symptoms and
take precautionary measures well in advance.
Call center data analytics Call centers of large pharmaceutical companies generate huge datasets -straight from
the customers, often in their native language. This data contains plenty of useful information such as customers'
preferences, call center representatives' responses, and product, process, and service quality. Big Data provides
opportunities to enhance the quality of call centers by generating insights on the companies' processes, people,
and products.
Data archival solution for long periods Big Data is proving its ability to complement large pharmaceutical data
warehouses by delivering 'warm storage', i.e. storage that supports rapid data access and retrieval, capability. The
solution entails harnessing data from recent years across data warehouses for decision support while historical data
may be kept on the Big Data platform, utilizing low cost storage capabilities. This way the operating data
warehouse is relieved from storing historical data, which in turn improves its performance. The historical data, part
of warm storage on the Big Data platform, can be retrieved in less time.
CRM
Internal
Data
Social Media
Real World
data
Emails
Documents
E
X
T
R
A
C
T
Enterprise
Data
Warehouse
User Experience
Data
Mart
&
CUBE
T
R
A
N
S
F
O
R
M
Big Data
Cluster
Data Stored in granular level
Data as warm storage
Data for Big data analytics
Storage for textual data
Cost effective scalability
Structured data to Data Warehouse
Mobile devices
Mobile devices
Xml,
CSV
files
Downstream applications
Reporting applications
Sensor Devices
& RFID
Figure 2: An overview of how Big Data and data warehouses complement each other
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Data Access
Data Storage
Data
Enrichment
Data
Insight
Relational
(Structured)
Discover
Value
Non-Relational
(Semi-Structured
Unstructured)
Associate(+)
Context
Streaming
(Real Time, Video,
Near Real Time)
Refine
(Filter)
Self Service
Complementary
Downstream
Applications
Data on & for
Devices
Reluctance towards making Big Data strategy investment in the current financial year
Our research indicates that the biggest challenges while deriving business value from Big Data are as much cultural
as technological.
It is imperative for organizations experimenting with Big Data to have a thought-through enterprise-wide data
strategy, which caters to the integration of Big Data with already existing traditional data.
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Our recommended approach to adopting Big Data is to start slow, realize benefits, pause, think and take the next
step, and reap subsequent benefits. The pharmaceutical industry can identify use cases to conduct pilots, especially
in the areas of sales and marketing, to establish a sense of confidence in technology and then move on to take on
more complex use cases.
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While on the subject of Big Data solutions and their cost effectiveness, the market is still evaluating both Hadoop
solutions and non Hadoop solutions. A Hadoop ecosystem utilizes massive parallel processing computing
techniques using just commodity grade desktop machines. This capability of the Hadoop platform overcomes the
challenge of optimum performance in a cost-effective manner and has been proven to be highly scalable. NonHadoop solutions are largely customized solutions for addressing specific and specialized requirements.
Cost consideration has also taken a step back for use cases where the requirement is to process near real-time data
to be able to generate more advanced analytics.
Big Data Evolution The way forward for life sciences and pharmaceutical
industries
Pharmaceutical companies want to realize near term high value from Big Data implementation projects with a
small preliminary investment. Most of them are inhibited in Big Data adoption strategies due to the stringent
regulatory bodies governing this industry. The lack of skilled IT resources imposes additional challenges in its
adoption.
The Big Data revolution, however, promises to open up myriad opportunities in diverse quarters. Some
pharmaceutical giants have realized the potential benefits Big Data has to offer and have planned budgets around
it. Companies can start to explore Big Data in sales and marketing, R&D, and clinical trials functions to establish
gains and subsequently venture into other areas of the pharmaceutical value chain.
Medical device companies are also formulating strategies to include Big Data investments in their annual plan.
Analysis of large volumes of unstructured digital data from numerous imaging/screening/sensor instruments has
provided a foothold for Big Data. Similarly, Big Data has also taken its first step in bioinformatics for exploring
genomics area.
Conclusion
With the hype generated by Big Data in recent times, it is slowly becoming a part of the growth strategy for most
enterprises. Due to limited technology competency and stringent regional laws, however, Big Data is yet to see
large scale adoption. Although Big Data initially aimed at countering the challenge of handling the large tidal wave
of social media, there also lie huge data sets within enterprises that have the potential to deliver insights.
Big Data skills cannot be acquired in silos - they require a much broader and deeper sense of understanding and a
holistic approach to problem solution. It is imperative for us to study the current environment of organizations,
data sources to be accessed, and the type of insights expected.
Today, the share of combined unstructured and semi structured data used in pharmaceutical companies is
marginally less than structured data; however, this share will see a steep rise in years to come with the exponential
growth of unstructured data.
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Pharmaceutical and life sciences companies stand to gain by using Big Data technologies across the value chain for
disease pattern analysis, drug discovery, clinical trials management, large scale genome sequencing,
pharmaceutical manufacturing and engineering systems, supply chain management and logistics, sales and
marketing, patient care quality and program analysis and call center data analytics.
Big Data technologies have the capability to closely fit in the current IT landscape and even complement existing
Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing practices.
Cost considerations have been set aside for use cases where organizations find business value through the
implementation.
A methodical and stepwise approach is needed for Big Data initiatives; exhaustive due diligence for vendor and
tool selection is required to derive maximum benefits. Due to various reasons, the pharmaceutical industry has
exercised caution in the adoption of Big Data. However, a well-defined strategy for adopting the new technology
paradigm will ensure this industry also harvests the huge potential Big Data promises to unlock.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Nitin Kumar, Head Life Sciences Technology Excellence Group, TCS, for his
contribution to the paper.
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