From J&J To Cognitive Psychology: Lifecycle Insights For Pharma

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

William King was a career Johnson & Johnson executive who decided he had to leave the company. Ironically, it was so he could devote himself to solving a growing challenge there. “We had these important ‘lifecycle insights’ that we couldn’t take action on, despite having all these data points coming in,” he says.

Even four years after founding and becoming the CEO of Zephyr Health, King says, “I’m still very much a Pharma guy.” Pharma may be happy he is: King is determined to integrate the millions of data points they receive into an actionable cognitive system.  

William King, CEO, Zephyr Health

In fact, straight out of cognitive psychology, the challenge at Pharma is precisely the acquisition, storage, transformation, and utility of knowledge – or, as we now refer to it, Big Data. The fundamental question is how does that data become knowledge? One measure of transference is when information becomes intelligible and can be applied to business objectives across an organization. That includes for R&D, the supply chain and partners, and all commercial, marketing and sales activities.

King set out to accomplish this data integration by grabbing a handful of industry colleagues to help him map out product requirements, then combing the streets of San Francisco in search of software engineers and programmers to write that cognitive code, and subsequently adding to his board such iconic investors as Brook Byers of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Joe Horowitz of Icon Ventures.

Today, King believes he can move pharmaceutical companies from cognitive disrepair to healthy, integrated organizations that understand and make actionable the information that flows from their extended environment.

“One of the tenets of the J&J credo is profitability,” he says. “You get profitable by running a company intelligently.” For King that starts with fueling product lifecycle insights with actionable data, leading to better decisions, higher productivity … and more dollars and cents.

Insights As A Service

King has the charisma and enthusiasm exhibited by all the best software spokespeople. Nonetheless, part way through our discussion I’m having trouble focusing on what he’s saying. Once in the software business myself, I can’t help running sales scenarios through my mind. I interrupt him in mid-sentence: “You’re bringing me back to my days in software!”

“We’re recruiting,” he replies without skipping a beat.

“I’m thinking about how I’d approach selling the solution to an executive at Big Pharma,” I say, certainly violating the rules for conducting impartial interviews. “First, I can hear the objectives: ‘We have a CRM, and that doesn’t even work right. I don’t know what to do with the data we already have.’” I then tell King: “And I know that’s exactly where we want them.”

“Absolutely,” he replies. “When I sit down with Pharma executives, I ask, ‘Don’t you hate it when a company wants to sell you more technology or more data?’ And then they ask, ‘So why are you here?’”

So … why is Zephyr there? The answer is to bring the proliferating “data-point solutions” buffeting Pharma into a single knowledge system applicable to every part of a product’s lifecycle.

King draws our attention back to his PC. We’re looking at a zoom-able, heat-map built from layers of data that normally reside unadorned – and for many purposes unusable – in a spreadsheet, or at best in disparate software applications.

“These are micro-geographies,” he explains. “I can tell Pharma, for example, the specific number of patients receiving their new drug at that brick-center. If I’m a sales person on the commercial side, I can find out which patients were dispensed product and services valued at more than $800,000. If I wear a clinical hat, I can use the same metrics to show where I am on track or behind for patient enrollment in a trial. I just need to tell it how I want to dice – or combine – and see the data displayed.”

King, who while at J&J held a range of roles in sales, marketing, training and strategy, and was a member of J&J’s international development program for global leadership and people development, likes to steer the conversation away from a focus on the data itself; he stays on the people-perspective, and “profitable insights.”

He next displays the pinpoint locations of the top 20 key accounts by revenue that a sales manager would look at. The colors change: “Now you can see results by sales reps,” he says. Then the insight:

“Most everyone gets this data in an excel spreadsheet or in separate places. They’ll pat themselves on the back and say we’re doing great. What they don’t see, though, is that their number-one sales target-market is an empty space. They’re actually missing most of the revenue they’ve anticipated.”

In fact, he says, a recent Kinsley report indicates only one-third of drugs meet commercial projections. Pharma careers can depend on the success of drug launches and obtaining commercial projections. King goes through the thought process of these executives and managers: “Is my supply chain in good shape? Do I know who to talk to about the new drug? I need to nail this in a really smart way.”

Nailing it in a smart way “means no more data-point solutions,” says King. “The lifecycle theme is comfortable for Pharma. If we were another single-point solution, we’d be exacerbating the problem.”

King says the progression of his career has been a long validation of the mounting challenges of data: “At every step I took with J&J, we had more data for decisions, but we were challenged by that. What makes J&J different from BMS, and BMS different from Merck? In large part it’s whether they can, in a meaningful way, comingle all their internal data with the exploding data sets in the public domain.” He adds: “Software as a service is now both elevated and refined to lifecycle insights as a service.”

Final Insights (Via Outsourcing)

Someone once told King that working with Big Pharma is like being pecked to death by a flock of ducks. I’d be surprised if that person wasn’t working at a CMO. Development requirements, manufacturing timing and quantities, QC and QA methodologies, and many more considerations all come into CMOs, as King would say, as disjointed “data points.”

How would better data integration at sponsors impact bio and pharma service providers? For example, an impact might be felt immediately on the current biopharma capacity uncertainties. Better coordinated and actionable data – shared with CMOs – would allow both sides to make more confident commitments and accurate capacity decisions.

The role of outsourcing throughout a drug’s lifecycle – from discovery to commercial – continues to grow. Moreover, the definition of a “pharma service provider” itself needs to expand to keep up. Dohmen is as much a provider as AdverseEvents, as is Samsung BioLogics, and Catalent. And so is Zephyr, and it’s field of cognitive repair.