Before 2020, the Healthcare and Life Sciences (HLS) industry was already evolving, albeit slowly. Given last year’s acceleration of telemedicine, care management, and patient services, providers today face a new imperative—they must work together across the HLS ecosystem in order to enable sales teams and offer better, preventative care.

This is no easy feat, as plenty of providers are accustomed to working in silos and managing data spread across legacy systems. Yet interoperability is key to resolving pressing issues in HLS and paving the way for empathy-driven preventative care.

As a leader in integration technology, MuleSoft is delivering precisely this kind of interoperability that HLS needs. It allows sales teams to deliver better patient and provider experiences, makes data relevant and consumable across sub-verticals, and turns IT centers into spaces of value creation.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how exactly MuleSoft is guiding HLS towards a future of preventative care.

 

The demand for integration 

In HLS, many sub-verticals still function on an endpoint application—providers use electronic health record systems (EHRs) to access patient information, for example, and pharmaceutical companies use clinical trial management systems (CTMS) to test drug efficacy and safety. 

These applications are still very much at play within the industry, but the space around these apps is shifting, largely in terms of an increase in cloud-based infrastructure and changes in the way sales teams are connecting with members. 

What does this mean? Sales teams aren’t just selling products anymore, and providers aren’t just providing care; they’re now needing to address real, pressing issues that the pandemic brought to light, including policy changes related to care for the elderly, socioeconomic barriers, and chronic care. To provide better experiences for everyone in the HLS ecosystem and to address these issues, sales teams must be able to access data from multiple systems and have that data be consumable.

This means that digital transformation is an imperative in the HLS industry. Organizations need the capacity to pivot rapidly during a crisis, especially a global health crisis, and they can do so by trading highly restrictive frameworks for flexible ones. When flexibility is embedded in a data model, that model is more likely to add value and relevance to the HLS space and account for today’s acceleration in digital transformation. Take pharma’s molecule to market model, for example—this flexible, adaptive framework creates business agility through intelligent R&D and doorstep delivery of prescription drugs.

 

IT centers must create value, not cost

The MuleSoft CONNECT session Get the Business Onboard discusses the need for IT to become a space of value creation, not merely a business cost. HLS organizations investing in large-scale digital transformation want to know what value they’re getting at the end of it. Yet it’s not easy to predict the ROI of digital transformation in HLS, because there are so many factors at play, including the technology stack itself, new products appearing on the market, and even a company’s sociopolitical climate.

The good news is that value is always a given with interoperability. Having a wealth of data at one’s fingertips in HLS has only ever made things better from a care perspective. It’s the difference between a doctor relying on single-system data that only displays a patient’s history and a practitioner accessing data, including current research, from several different life sciences systems. The latter is much more equipped to harness the power of that data and offer holistic, accurate care to their patient. The cost of business in this sense is negligible, given the value add of a richer care experience.

MuleSoft leads with this sense of value creation. The platform addresses the integration challenges of today and enables adaptability for tomorrow with its API technology. We’ll dive a little deeper into that technology now. 

 

MuleSoft and the art of adaptability for preventative care

In HLS, not every system is new. Organizations and individuals in the ecosystem have to know how to work with systems from the nineties and systems that are cloud-driven. They have to find a way to seamlessly connect old and new technologies. Data can thus be very tricky in the HLS space. 

Most challenges around data boil down to three key areas:

1. How to get data from different sources and consolidate them into one

2. How to make that data available and readable

3. How to make data more real-time

In allowing cloud platforms like Salesforce to essentially “talk” to several endpoint applications in a single ecosystem, MuleSoft enables organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources and acquire real-time, relevant, usable data—simultaneously. Through API connection, it allows for the high-value interconnectedness the industry needs while keeping technical costs low. 

Simplus has further leveraged MuleSoft’s adaptability and designed a sales 360-degree model, in which teams elevate their decision support by carefully curating and integrating multiple data sources to have relevant, real-time connections with end consumers. This model hinges on our belief that the generic sales play no longer applies in HLS, which is a patient- and member-driven industry. Sales teams need to connect with end consumers in a way that is truly of value, and they can do so by gathering data from multiple streams, including social media, company data, statistics, news sources, and much more. 

 

An HLS future of preventative care

In the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry, we are always looking towards the horizon. The wealth of data that MuleSoft brings to HLS provides long-term value, as we’ve discussed in this article, but right now this model is deterministic: we set the rules for what data is relevant and what data isn’t. So what’s next? Predictive modeling. 

With the help of AI, future models will be able to pinpoint data relevance on their own. Such models pave the way for preventative medicine, which predicts illness or medical conditions—like cancer cells or tumors—before they arise. If this is the future of healthcare, we need to be operating in a similar fashion.

That’s why, in partnership with MuleSoft, we’re not just solving today’s challenges. We’re teaming up with the products, platforms, and services that allow the IT agility needed to step into a future of preventative care—and a healthcare industry that cares better by collaboratively finding real solutions to address real problems. 

You can learn more about the value of API-led integration—and how to convey this value to team members—in the MuleSoft CONNECT session Get the Business Onboard.