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Leveraging Digital Platforms to Facilitate Patient-Centric Healthcare

Ricardo Vong, Head of IT, Malaysia, and Lekha Satish, Innovation & Internal Excellence Lead, Asia at AstraZeneca

Ricardo Vong, Head of IT, Malaysia, and Lekha Satish, Innovation & Internal Excellence Lead, Asia at AstraZeneca

Worldwide, scores of people have been impacted by Covid-19 in indescribable ways. At AstraZeneca, we had to be nimble by pivoting to digital for engagements with the healthcare practitioners (HCPs) and to drive patient- centric efforts. During the knockdown, reaching people physically to drive disease awareness was a challenge. As part of efforts to continue patient initiatives, we harnessed the power of digital platforms to reach patients. But we know we can't do this alone. A collaborative approach with the right partner is paramount to maximize outreach and elevate the Malaysian healthcare ecosystem.

With a partnership-driven approach, we were able to accelerate access to market and uplift the digital healthcare ecosystem. We focused on diseases related to Cancer, Diabetes, Respiratory and Cardiovascular. By leveraging on digital platforms and partners, we were able to increase our outreach to patients and HCPs in driving disease awareness, prevention, early diagnosis, treatment and wellness.

Partnering for Digital Patient Centric Initiatives

Some of our key initiatives include partnering with Doctor On Call (DoC)–a prominent digital health player -to run a disease awareness campaign on cardiovascular health and to advocate early screening.

For disease awareness campaigns focusing on diabetes, we developed a microsite www.beyondsugar.my to drive the key message that managing diabetes requires going beyond sugar and to highlight the impact of the disease on one’s kidney.

By leveraging digital platforms and partners, we were able to increase our outreach to patients and HCPs in driving disease awareness, prevention, early diagnosis, treatment, and wellness

As lung cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers amongst men in Asia, studies indicate that early diagnosis is key to extending a five-year survival rate for lung cancer patients. AstraZeneca through its global A. Catalyst networks couts, selects and works with start-ups which have the ability to economize and improve early detection. Qure. ai is one such start-up. It works with local hospitals and diagnostic places across many markets to identify lung nodules from radiology images. It can detect lung nodules as small as 3mm, in seconds, from routine X-ray images.

Tricog is an Indian start-up which AstraZeneca partners with for advance diagnostics in the prevention of cardio-renal complications related to type 2 diabetes. It is a cloud-connected service that makes the digitization, interpretation and analysis of an ECG report quick and easy. It provides cardiologists with a certified ECG Report in 10 minutes, enabling them to act within the ‘golden hour’.

Driving Engagements

We value engagements with our HCPs, with whom we continue to stay connected by leveraging on our integrated digital module with our CRM system.

Cross-functional team collaboration was crucial during the pandemic especially when it came to planning digital strategies and ensuring full compliance to external engagement policies. The first step in driving engagement was to increase the consent rate and stay engaged with HCPs virtually via Veeva engage. During our digital engagements, we kept them updated with i-Detailing and EDMs on relevant subject-matter. That’s not all; we hosted multiple webcasts to keep HCPs updated on our science.

Moving forward, we will be focusing mainly on Omnichannel to provide them with a seamless customer experience which is personalized using real-time insights and coordinated across physical and digital channels. We will need to start-off with MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and then migrate to Micro journey omnichannel campaigns. The next step is to move forward with a full suite of Omnichannel journey which is Macro journey where we can better personalize disease awareness campaign based on the HCPs& Patients personas to perform a more accurate re targeting.

Additionally, we will focus on driving digital engagement internally. We understand that learning is a life-long process and is crucial for an employee’s development. For this reason, we have introduced platforms like Degreed to focus on employee development through digital learning.