Thinking Strategically about Mobility: A Road Map for Life Sciences Companies

Consumers’ expectations have been shaped by ubiquitous smart phone convenience. These consumers include pharmaceutical company employees and stakeholders. Employees and stakeholders will apply these technologies to their work as they have with their personal lives so that they can address business and administrative issues better, faster and less expensively. Mobility also enables many characteristics people desire in health care: expanded access to expertise, greater convenience and responsiveness, more ability to personalize service channels—all at potentially lower costs.

This paper explores the factors negatively affecting mobile adoption in life sciences and advocates a more thoughtful, disciplined and strategic approach. More importantly, it sets out a road map to help life sciences companies gain control and move up the mobile maturity curve with these rapidly changing technologies.

While market forces supporting mobile solutions in life sciences are strong and getting stronger, life sciences companies lag behind in exploiting mobility to serve customers and gain market advantage compared to other industries including retail, financial services, consumer products and automotive. While the life sciences industry faces some unique challenges, none is fatal and all can be addressed.

Many life sciences companies launched pilot mobility efforts over the last year and a half to get a sense of the technology, the initial investment and ongoing support needed, and the potential that mobility solutions hold for the industry. These efforts met with varying degrees of interest and market impact in part due to a lack of strategic vision and scale as well as an unpredictable regulatory environment.

Many forces, however, point to the increasing importance of mobile solutions in the future: mobile functionality continues to expand and devices multiply, and with them expectations of stakeholders across the life sciences ecosystem. Consequently, the time is right for life sciences companies to put in place foundational elements of mobility solutions to meet the needs of stakeholders and strengthen the bottom line.