Health Informatics Maturity Assessment of the Life Sciences Industry

Publish date:

Health Informatics Maturity Assessment of the Life Sciences Industry The Life Sciences industry faces unprecedented challenges to its long term sustainability. Companies are turning to new business models and launching new initiatives to address these challenges. We believe that new initiatives and new business models to improve R&D productivity and product safety will rely greatly upon integrated health data and health informatics to access, utilize and manage the data. Informatics must increase access to data and support a heterogeneous but converging world of data, standards and regulations. It should provide a highly flexible and configurable platform that can be customized for a wide range of workflows and ever-changing technologies across the product value chain, from discovery, to clinical development, and to post-market.

This point of view assessed the overall informatics maturity of the Life Sciences industry. For this assessment, we developed an Informatics Maturity Framework, a comprehensive guide to evaluate informatics in an organization. This assessment framework consists of five major dimensions. Each dimension can be evaluated against three levels of maturity – “immature”, “developing”, and “mature”. These dimensions are interconnected, but can also be used separately, depending on a company’s primary focuses. The modality gives the framework a great flexibility to be used to evaluate a company at a whole, as well as to assess a specific business area.

We have found that the informatics maturity level varies a great deal within the industry and even within different business areas of the same company. Life sciences companies have started some efforts to establish their informatics capabilities but these efforts are often not integrated into a unified vision. In many companies, informatics capabilities were built using a bottom-up approach, driven by direct and imminent needs. This approach has proven to be less efficient. Even when companies have an executive vision for informatics in place, there is still a significant gap between strategy and execution. We believe that it is now critical for a life sciences company to assess their informatics maturity and benchmark it against effective industry practices.

Download the full article below.