Pharma companies are seeing the value of digital health, and are creating departments focused on developing, scaling and investing in platforms that use technology to enhance life sciences R&D, better assist providers and engage with patients.

Sonny Surgill, vice president of commercial digital health at AstraZeneca, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the evolution of its strategy pertaining to healthcare technology and how the pharma giant determines whether it will invest in a digital health company.

MobiHealthNews: What is AstraZeneca’s perspective on the current digital health sector and investments? 

Sonny Shergill: One of the things that I’m constantly asked when I have different discussions, or what have you, is what does the ecosystem look like here?, and not many people really know where everything fits in, whether it’s a health system, a government, digital providers, foundational digital companies or pharma.

What we’ve really been trying over the last four or five years to develop in this space, always grounded in the core that we are a biopharmaceutical company and not a digital company, is really to extend the value of the treatment, the medicines that we have and the science that we have. We need to build these collaborations, not just with very traditional stakeholders like hospitals, physicians and patients, but more so with the huge explosion of providers in the digital space.

The challenge often, from a pharma company perspective, is: A) where do you start? B) Who do you start with? There’s lots of speculative shots on goal with lots of startups. We’ve been watching other companies come into the fore and become more established and then building more established relationships with them as well, again, anchored in our priorities, but also in their priorities.

Finding a quadruple or hexa win, depending on how many people are in the stakeholders, is quite tough. But when you get it and it works, and I think that’s some of the partnerships that we’ve got, it works really well, because everybody knows very clearly their place in the universe here, but we have a common objective as well.

MHN: When you’re considering partnering with digital health companies, do you take into account how much funding the organization has received, or if the company is going to be able to live up to whatever project it is the two organizations will do together?

Shergill: Absolutely. So, it depends on the type of relationship we’re getting into. 

Sometimes it is speculative and it’s early. We have a group within my team, Commercial Digital Health, which we call A. Catalyst Network. That’s what they do; they look at the ecosystem and they say, “What’s the new technology here, and how can we help those companies herald that in?” Whether that’s through seed funding, connection or using our relationships. 

It goes all the way through to the more established companies, where it’s about them trying to find shared objectives and then bringing their technology into our stakeholder universe that we work with within hospitals, et cetera. 

MHN: When you decide to partner with a digital health company and, say, as time goes on the money begins to run out. Does AstraZeneca consider funding the company?

Shergill: It really depends on the type of relationship we’ve built with that company. Sometimes we’re just going to invest in them as an investor. Typically, though, it’s more from a program perspective. We have a very solid and strong RFP [request for proposal] process, where when we decide to partner with a company, and we set up a Master Services Agreement, a lot of those prerequisites about the resiliency of that company have to be ticked off and some fall by the wayside because they’re just not ready yet. But when they are ready, it’s about building long-term partnerships.

And what ends up happening is you start here, then you identify 10 other areas where you can bring value together, and usually that’s what you grow into. And then again, some of that is investment, some of that is data purchase, some of that is building a system and then helping them put it out there as well.

MHN: There is a lot of talk about the various types of AI being used within healthcare, many times for some of the drivers you just mentioned. There is also concern around the longevity of companies based on the validity of their AI. Do you take AI models into consideration when deciding to partner with or fund a company?

Shergill: It’s changed the kind of conversations we have. Before the generative AI hype cycle, or whatever you want to call it, it was that you kind of trusted the tech, right? Now, it’s different. I had a conversation yesterday with a startup, and it was fascinating. They sounded so into their stack, like, what model are you using? And it’s a different conversation, and it’s a more considered one, because we don’t want to saddle ourselves with something that’s going to be superseded.

MHN: Digital health use increased dramatically after COVID, as did investments in digital health companies. Investors then started to step back and say, let’s make sure these products actually work before we throw money at them. How did AstraZeneca’s digital health strategy change during that period?

Shergill: Where we ended up after the pandemic was an acceleration into being adopters of digital technology and approaches.

There is much more adoption of technology into medicine on all fronts, whether it’s in the R&D setting all the way through to how a patient navigates their care journey. And so that’s a new skill set for us that we’ve had to adopt, and there are three drivers. 

There is more personalization. So, whether it’s what I understand about my customer, how I approach them, how I might manage that relationship, all the way through to a patient’s choice of treatment in terms of the data and the ability to fine-tune treatment.

Then we’re seeing a consumerization of healthcare. The patient voice is huge. That’s also something that’s been accelerated by the pandemic, and we benefited from that. 

AstraZeneca was a clear leader. It was one of the few companies that went out to bat when it came to COVID. We went from that understanding of what AstraZeneca is about and it being a brand, and the company became a lot more apparent to the general public than we were before.  

And the last one, which I think is probably most important in all of these – inequity in healthcare. That got a big spotlight put on it. Access to the right level of care, whether it is improving access to clinical trials all the way through to the commercial setting, is something that is a challenge we all have to address. 

From a commercial digital health perspective, we’re trying to address that through developing data and developing really smart insights to focus on what we’re doing so our impact can be maximized.

The HIMSS AI in Healthcare Forum is scheduled to take place September 5-6 in Boston. Learn more and register.