The data deluge in the entire life science industry has got a huge push post-pandemic with ever-increasing sources of data streams of information being generated at an exceptional pace and the numbers are really astounding.
“Our customers are evolving and with the shift in the healthcare landscape, we can no longer take a static one size fits all approach. Rather, we need to take an agile and more localised customised approach to align our resources to better meet our customer’s evolving needs, and for that, we need a lot of dependency on the data that we have around,” said Debashish Roy, Director & Head, Pfizer Digital during South Asia, Digital Week 2022 in a panel discussion titled ‘Enterprise & Data Centre: A Collaborative Governance’.
The session was moderated by Namrita Mahindro, Chief Digital Officer, Aditya Birla Group. The panelists included Sanjay Bhutani, Senior Vice President, AdaniConneX, Sharad Kumar Agarwal, CDIO, JK Tyre & Industries Ltd, Debashish Roy, Director & Head, Pfizer Digital andUtkarsh B., Chief Architect, Flipkart.
He further explained that the healthcare industry has relied on desperate clinical trials, medical publications, patient outcome data, and case stories. A lot of treatment patterns have for decades not been able to easily integrate and analyse this information in a unifying way. So this type of patient-centric data, which the company refers to as real-world evidence data, is becoming increasingly instrumental in making healthcare decisions.
“RWD, which we call Real World Evidence is basically becoming actionable real-world evidence when powered by analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, with the potential to ultimately lead to the right treatment protocols, at the right time, which translates into precision medicine for all of us and some of the use cases if I were to ponder on some of the use cases that we have around. There are cases that are like personalised treatments and drug therapies for our patients that reveal new indications for existing therapy areas. It’s in determining more new patient outcomes results and efficient and more cost-efficient clinical trials, the support that we need around, integrating disparate data sources from different health systems from the ecosystem partners that we do,” added Roy.
He further pointed out that starting from the awareness to diagnosis to treatment to fulfillment all the way to adherence and compliance there is a lot of data that is being churned across this care continuum and finally all of this accelerates the time to market for new therapy areas, due to the accessibility of retrospective studies that we have that we do with the data at hand. So this growing demand for data and adoption of cloud and digital transformation journeys for Indian companies, which includes pharma, has really boosted the demand for data centres services in India.
AI’s role
Artificial intelligence will play a big role with so much data being collected with five-edge data becoming more relevant data will get processed at the edge and faster decisions can be taken.
“There is a huge amount of use cases, which will be rolled out, be it in the autonomous car segment, beating the gaming industry, the pharma industry, or even in the local content distribution for that matter right and AI ML and some of the new technologies, emerging technologies are going to bring in that shift tectonic shift, I would say AI has to happen closer to the user and say for instance you walk into a mall and somebody will process the data quickly and say, hey last time you visited us this restaurant, and the store. So this is your profile, and you will be immediately offered some discounts, so maybe by the same store or by a competitive store,” said Roy.
“I think a lot of automation needs to be done in the processes at the data centre, which will improve the delivery timelines and the uptime as well. Second, would be the industry it is working towards Decreasing the PUE which used to be somewhere around 1.8 earlier which has come down to 1.4, probably made the estimate in the next five years, Target, reaching somewhere below 1.2,” pointed out Sharad Kumar Agarwal, CDIO, JK Tyre & Industries Ltd.
He further explained that with the amount of data that is being generated today that has to be processed. The processing capabilities needed to be pleased with the latest technology is probably quantum computing may become useful delivery from the data centres and one of the other important things is, how that transition migration to our data centre to hyperscalar forward, the reverse can become seamless.
“A lot of innovations are happening and probably at a much more accelerated pace, right now, and every year or two, you see a new view of technologies coming through and so on and once these technologies come in, then you try to derive a certain business value out of it right now whereas blockchain and crypto and so on right now. What I want to see a bit differently going forward is probably we let’s anticipate what are the real business problems, customer problems that, you know, the generation of tomorrow will need to face and solve for and then, practically spin the technology web around it, not the other way,” said Utkarsh B., Chief Architect, Flipkart.
He further pointed out that stakeholders need to come together and whether it’s data centres edge partners or devices technologies. If one can say that in three years’ time that there is a problem and probably what we need to solve for. Can the organisation start spinning a new web of technologies and that probably is the dream vision around all of us coming together and making it work.
“Second is more of a technology-centric wish list that probably we need to gravitate a lot more towards cloud-native solutions and abstractions which allow for interplay across data centres across devices and technologies, and that interoperability and some kind of compliance will help us innovate and be agile,” concluded Utkarsh.
