"Pharma companies have already moved from 'we must do digital transformation' to 'how should my company do digital transformation,'" said Lu Tao, digital marketing leader at Jemincare Pharmaceutical Group.
"In the past, pharma companies focused mainly on offline scenarios. But in recent years, the internet has increasingly penetrated healthcare, indirectly creating opportunities for digital transformation across the industry. At the same time, policies including the three-year pandemic period and volume-based procurement have also affected pharma companies. As business growth slows, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and optimizing structure have become new priorities."
01 Pharma Digital Capability Upgrade Model
Digital transformation uses digital technologies and tools to change business models, processes, culture, and customer experience, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and ultimately strengthening competitiveness. So how should pharma companies achieve digital transformation? Lu Tao gave his answer:
Figure 1. Digital capability upgrade model
"Digital transformation is not only a technology upgrade. It also involves multiple dimensions such as data-driven operations, model innovation, and customer experience optimization. Only when the 7 x 3 capabilities above are built well can a company truly achieve digital transformation, or even leapfrog upgrades." Because the pharmaceutical industry is constrained by various compliance requirements, its overall digitalization process is slower than in some other industries. Even so, many pharma leaders attach great importance to digitalization, from management setting the overall digital strategy to each department advancing its own responsibilities. This is the common top-down model.
Does digitalization have to be led by management first before it can move forward? After thinking for a moment, Lu Tao said, "I don't think so. Many pharma business teams are already facing many challenges, including my current company. Cost control and efficiency improvement must be done, while continued business growth must also be ensured. Even the physician-patient model is gradually changing. To respond to these challenges, business teams must innovate proactively. I call this bottom-up."
02 Six Steps to Empower Business and Achieve Digital Transformation
The two cornerstones of pharma marketing are visits and meetings. Lu Tao's digital transformation first strengthened these two foundations:
Figure 2. Six steps to pharma digital transformation
Once visits and meetings are empowered, things become more interesting. Lu Tao used a vivid example to explain the operating model: "In a restaurant, washing and cutting vegetables are not handed to the chef. A few kitchen assistants can do that, but they cannot replace the chef. The same is true in pharma. Digital tools are never meant to replace sales reps. They improve sales efficiency and upgrade sales weapons."
From the perspective of full-market coverage, sales reps can focus on anchor markets, while emerging and opportunity markets can be covered by virtual reps and content platforms.
From the perspective of specific tasks, finding physicians, checking data, assessing potential, and conducting education can be handled by digital tools. Sales reps only need to focus on engagement afterward.
03 Discover Business Value From Complex Content
When digital tools are broken down further, we find that whether it is a content platform, online meetings, virtual reps, or other functions, doing them deeply, well, and precisely depends on one core foundation: the tagging system.
Tools are the shell, and tags are the core. Building a strong tagging system is an important move in digital transformation. After reaching this insight, Lu Tao led his team to actively embrace change. At that time, the team held a large amount of enterprise content accumulated over many years and hoped to find a partner to build a tagging system and tag all existing content. This was exactly an important use scenario for MeDomino's core product, MeDomino Content Hub, an enterprise content management platform.
After comprehensive testing across technology, service, and other capabilities, MeDomino stood out in the bidding process and successfully began working with Lu Tao's team. "At that time, we wanted to complete this work in a relatively short time without consuming too much manpower. Finding a vendor was necessary. We compared several vendors, and the most important evaluation criterion was whether the generated tags actually met our needs. After several rounds of testing, MeDomino stood out. Both its algorithm model capability and service team were relatively stronger."
After the partnership began, MeDomino built a content tagging system based on the business characteristics of pharma companies and the specific needs of Lu Tao's team. It completed tag generation for all existing content, helping Lu Tao's team and the broader business department improve content value:
Figure 3. MeDomino enterprise content tagging system
"Automation and intelligent transformation both need to rely on a tagging system. I believe there will be more opportunities for cooperation in the future," Lu Tao said.
04 Pharma Digitalization Has a Promising Future
Today, flexible content configuration through digital methods has become a reality. Whether it is presentation materials used in sales visits, coordinated online and offline video content for department meetings, or interesting Q&A that attracts HCPs to interact voluntarily with online platforms, there are now more creative, more visual, and more engaging ways to make it happen.
Near the end of the interview, Lu Tao imagined the future he sees: AI will become an advanced assistant in the future. As it gradually changes HCP habits, it will also understand HCP preferences extremely well. At that point, precise HCP data tags may no longer be the biggest difficulty for pharma companies. In addition, I am also looking forward to how pharma companies can use AI to improve patient services under compliance requirements. Pharma companies must keep pace with digitalization and be ready for future changes.
About MeDomino
MeDomino is a high-tech company providing digital intelligence products and solutions to 95% of global top 20 pharma companies and the global top 3 medical device companies, with many years of industry experience. Among MeDomino's products and services, its core product, MeDomino Content Hub, covers key components including platform-based content management, content tagging, content combination generation, content review, and content sharing and application, providing solid support for pharma and medtech companies to build complete content ecosystem platforms.
When choosing suitable computing infrastructure for the content management platform, MeDomino, as an AWS partner, considered multiple factors including support for various large models and cost-effectiveness of compute services, then chose to deploy its services on AWS to meet pharma companies' compliance requirements for security, privacy, and data protection. In recent years, AWS's secure and compliant cloud infrastructure has served many life sciences companies worldwide, helping the industry gain differentiated competitiveness through cloud scale. On this foundation, MeDomino combined large models and generative AI technology deployed on AWS to provide intelligent content generation, intelligent Q&A, one-click translation, and other functions, making MeDomino Content Hub a true AI knowledge base steward.
MeDomino will continue its mission of using data and technology to drive industry transformation, helping pharma and medtech companies quickly enter the digital intelligence era and discover more business value from data.
