Enhanced Patient-Centricity: How the Biopharmaceutical Industry Is Optimizing Patient Care through AI/ML/DL.

Technologies utilizing cutting-edge methodologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), present powerful opportunities to help evaluate, predict, and improve patient outcomes by drawing insights from real-world data (RWD) generated during medical care. They played a role during and following the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic by helping protect healthcare providers, prioritize care for vulnerable populations, predict disease trends, and find optimal therapies. Potential applications across therapeutic areas include diagnosis, disease management and patient journey mapping. Use of fit-for-purpose datasets for ML models is seeing growth and may potentially help additional enterprises develop AI strategies. However, biopharmaceutical companies often face specific challenges, including multi-setting data, system interoperability, data governance, and patient privacy requirements. There remains a need for evolving regulatory frameworks, operating models, and data governance to enable further developments and additional research. We explore recent literature and examine the hurdles faced by researchers in the biopharmaceutical industry to fully realize the promise of AI/ML/DL for patient-centric purposes.

New Strategies to Improve Patient Adherence to Medications for Noncommunicable Diseases During and After the COVID-19 Era Identified via a Literature Review.

Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) place a huge burden on healthcare systems and society as a whole. Relatively early in the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, clinicians became aware that in individuals infected with COVID-19, those with preexisting NCDs such as diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease (CVD) were at a greater risk of poor outcomes and mortality than those without. The importance of adherence to medications and lifestyle changes to control and prevent NCDs has been a major focus for many years, but with limited success - the proportion of patients adherent and persistent to their medications remains very low. There are many facets to adherence and persistence. Recent evidence suggests that a patient-centric approach is important, and ensuring that a patient is both motivated and empowered is critical to improving adherence/persistence. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many changes to the way in which patients with NCDs are managed, with telemedicine and ehealth becoming more common. Changes have also occurred in the way in which patients can gain access to medications during the pandemic. The potential for these changes forms the basis of improving the management of patients with NCDs both during and after the pandemic. Over the coming months, a huge amount of work will be put into initiatives to promote adherence to COVID-19 vaccination programs. Those at highest risk of severe COVID-19, such as people aged 80 years and older, are likely to receive the vaccine first in some parts of world. Finally, social determinants of health are critical elements that can impact not just the likelihood of having an NCD or becoming infected with COVID-19, but also access to healthcare, and a patient's adherence and persistence with their treatments.