Big data use in pharmaceuticals has been spreading quickly over the past few years, bringing with it some exciting developments. This data has generally come from healthcare outcomes, clinical trial results, national health trends, and internal data, but is it time that pharmaceutical companies started looking outside of these areas to help create more diverse and robust datasets?
One of the key elements to this is going to be gathering data from a wide range of sources, many of which may be outside the traditional range of data sources, such as social media, environmental data, or even weather data.
It may sound a little off the wall to claim that pharma companies should be looking to Twitter, the EPA, and the sky to get data to help their business model, but with the wealth of data available to them outside of their traditional silos, it would be foolish to ignore them.
One of the key elements to any pharmaceutical development is regarding the enrolment and undertaking of clinical trials, which is always one of the most time and resource intensive elements of any product launch. One of the major difficulties is in actually finding people to undertake them, with Forbes claiming that 30% of the time spent on clinical trials is on recruitment and almost 40% of trials miss their targets. Using data mined through social media may help companies to find people more easily, either through targeted advertising or looking for specific kinds of people or those who suffer from specific diseases. This could save a huge amount of resources in this process and help to complete more thorough clinical trials in a shorter amount of time.
However, although this is undoubtedly powerful in terms of saving money and resources, the ability to use data to predict trends is arguably going to have considerably more impact.
The opportunity to look at general trends within social data is another important aspect, potentially helping to identify gaps in the market or new opportunities for iterations of existing products. This could be through investigating specific areas, sub-groups related to specific product types, or just simply monitoring what people are saying about the products that already exist.
