The successful outsourcing of business process operations to India has encouraged many firms to start outsourcing their high-end knowledge work and follow league.
India's abundant human resources in the pharmaceutical domain, analytics, statistics, epidemiology, bio-statistics, data modeling, and software development and presentation expertise attract pharmaceutical companies, making India a potential hub for pharmaceutical outsourcing. India remains a strong contender for becoming a preferred destination for pharmaceutical outsourcing; owing to its large, highly educated, English-speaking workforce, advantages of cost savings, operational efficiencies and prior history of success with IT, software, and financial outsourcing services.
Pharmaceutical outsourcing started out with contract manufacturing, but now the focus has extended extensively towards the following:
1. Biomedical research and development
2. Drug discovery
3. Laboratory testing and Diagnostics
4. Clinical trials
5. Clinical data management and analysis
6. Data mining and data warehousing
The knowledge extracted from research and lab work needs to be maintained in databases which then would enable in-depth analysis. This is achieved through database research and technology development to hold the ever growing volumes of data. Due to large number of databases in the market, extraction of knowledge from huge chunks of scientific literature poses a formidable challenge to the pharmaceutical community.
The heterogeneous sources and data types across the internet are not easily accessible to the end user. With rapid changes in the field of healthcare and huge data volumes, data warehousing and data mining provide tools to acquire data, to extract relevant information from it, and make this available to people involved in healthcare.
In order for pharmaceutical marketing and sales resources to customize their sales plans, they require to access and tap into comprehensive profiles of drugs and researchers, clinical studies and patents. Information from a customized database providing flexible data storage and data retrieval helps tailor their marketing strategies. These could be built using web-based data mining and data harvesting of the innumerable databases available on the internet.
Market Research data analytics and epidemiology-based medical services, in particular, are also growing fast, helping companies develop critical insights into core business strategies and strategic policies. It also reveals concealed trends, and present as well as future obstacles that the company may not have otherwise been aware of. This would be of immense benefit for business intelligence and competitive analysis, market analysis, performance measurement and reporting.
All said and done, in order to create a strong niche in this vertical, there are numerous challenges involved - maintaining high quality standards, investment in the infrastructure, accessibility to the talent pool, requirement of higher level of control, confidentiality and enhanced risk management. India is well equipped to meet this emerging sector's challenges and all set to be the global pharmaceutical outsourcing hub.
Gopi Sanghani
The author is the Program Manager for a Research and Analytics project at Motif. She is a registered pharmacist in the US with 13 years of experience in clinical pharmacy. Motif, Inc. is a knowledge based services provider in the space of customer support services, back office transaction processing and research and analytics.
(www.motifinc.com)
