Healthcare Tech / Pharma

Healthcare and its subsets like Pharma have a significant and growing use of Information Technology. Mistakes are costly, as literally people’s lives are at stake. The gap between the knowledge streams of the domain experts (mainly Doctors) and the programmers is very wide. This makes it challenging to have them collaborate together to create useful applications in the Healthcare space. As exciting fields like BioInformatics show a lot of promise, this knowledge gap becomes a significant obstacle in realising it.

Health tech companies rely heavily on training programmers, for imparting domain knowledge. However, it is tough to get good programmers to be equally good Health tech professionals. Healthcare professionals flexing to become good at programming is equally futile. This create challenges in creating good health tech applications quickly and cost effectively.

At Acism, we place more emphasis on the collaboration between the domain experts and programmers. This collaboration is tech-enabled – based on the X-flowcharts. Programmers do not need to understand all the nitti-gritties of Healthcare. They need to understand those only in context of the component at hand. Thus, both the programmers and domain experts can operate in their areas of expertise, and their collaboration drives successful creation of the software.

Acism’s model works better also for the long term, over which these products need to be served. In the long term, team changes are inevitable. The existing people-centric model therefore has a risk of going wrong somewhere along the way. Acism’s model stays strong, because the team changes are accounted for. Recruitment is easy, as we do not need to look for in-depth healthcare domain expertise in good programmers.

Pain Points in Pharma

1. Regulatory Compliance & Validation

• Strict standards (FDA, EMA, CDSCO, GxP, HIPAA).
• Pain: Systems must pass audits → documentation, traceability, validation is painful.
• Position: Acism can embed compliance and validation workflows into software. These workflows, being visual, are easy to get audited by the healthcare experts. Further, these changes are reflected in the design before they are coded, and that gives an opportunity to get them validated from finance domain experts. The up-to-date visual model can help in functionality audit and security audit. Being based on industry standards, moving the application from one platform to another, as a result of changes in requirements, is also easy. Apart from the flow diagram, automatically generated system documentation further helps in compliance and audits.

2. Clinical Trial & Research Data Management

• Trials generate huge data across geographies.
• Pain: Fragmented systems → risk of errors, delays, or non-compliance.
• Position: Tailor-made solutions centralize data securely, with audit trails. These systems are optimally suited to the problem at hand, and hence they are highly performant, in addition to being accurate and high quality.

3. Integration Across R&D, Manufacturing, Supply Chain

• Pharma runs SAP, LIMS, MES, CRM… often siloed.
• Pain: Data duplication, delayed reporting.
• Position: Acism ensures smooth system interoperability. Our modular approach ensures that the system integrations can be built with minimal effort.

4. Quality & Safety Monitoring

• Pharmacovigilance requires adverse event tracking & reporting.
• Pain: Manual or legacy systems cause delays → regulatory penalties.
• Position: Custom software automates reporting, ensures compliance. Further, the extra visibility one gets through the visual design makes it easy for the healthcare experts to validate the design for correct functionality and adequate error handling.

5. Data Privacy & Patient Confidentiality

• Handling sensitive patient data under GDPR, HIPAA.
• Pain: High risk if systems are not designed for privacy.
• Position: Acism builds solutions with privacy-by-design approach. User authentication and authorization checks are applied at the entry points of functionality, so that they are completely enforced and “forced browsing” attacks are foiled by design.