Case Study

Building A Competitive Advantage in Personalized Therapeutics Through Data Science

Instrumenting a Novel Service Delivery Model

Our client was launching a new personalized gene therapy product globally. They aimed to drive service excellence right at launch by instrumenting their business to anticipate, find and resolve issues across the therapy journey.

Personalized gene therapies are a new category of treatments. Many treat challenging conditions, giving hope to patients who would not have had it before. These treatments need to be manufactured for each individual patient from their own living cells, in a centralized highly-specialized facility, while the patient is on supportive therapy. The exceptionally high costs, logistics of moving the patient’s cells and the finished product globally, the variable-length manufacturing process, and the need to manage the patient during the interim period make this a highly complicated endeavour for hospitals, the logistics chain, and our client: the manufacturer. It places the manufacturing process in the middle of the treatment journey and necessitates a much tighter integration between healthcare provider and manufacturer. The service delivery model, meaning the nuts-and-bolts of how the manufacturer and the provider work together to deliver the therapy, is as important to commercial success as the therapy itself.

Service Model as the Differentiator

Klick understood that adopting a services model meant creating a data strategy and architecture to capture data and generate insights that the client had never needed to consider previously. Venturing beyond the traditional paradigm of product manufacturing into the complex and highly interdependent realm of personalized gene therapies required a holistic service design approach. A successful data-driven service model was critical to differentiate the client’s product in-market.

Building out a data strategy typically starts with understanding the business needs and drivers, assessing digital assets and business metrics, and stitching all of that together to form technology and analytics roadmaps. In our client’s case, most of these inputs simply did not exist or were still under development, leaving foundational gaps and unknowns. In many cases, the staff who would ordinarily be responsible for these inputs had not yet been recruited.

Bringing a service design mindset allowed the team to identify and isolate critical scenarios and the data needed throughout the therapy journey, from provider to patient to manufacturer.

At Klick Consulting, We Solve by Doing

We wanted to establish how analytics from across the therapy journey would be used by different regional teams to drive operational and service excellence.

To turn the unknowns into knowns and fill gaps, we needed to make the idea real, and fast. We started by designing the end product; a comprehensive set of dashboards for the global regions. Klick worked with the client’s experts and provided our own expertise to “embody” the needed business functions that had not been onboarded yet to envisage a never-been-done-before future.

A multidisciplinary team of experts including data science, strategic design, and business analysis brought proven practices and insights from product manufacturing, supply chain management, e-commerce, software-as-a-service, and patient services. This combination of expertise and perspectives allowed the team to create multiple potential solutions and stress-test them against hypothetical in-market scenarios based on the personas to converge on final designs.

The resulting dashboards enabled commercial teams to have a 360-degree view on patients, providers, and all moving parts of their personalized gene therapy services from manufacturing to supply chain.

The New Norm

This suite of solutions allowed the client to prepare themselves for the transition to “Therapeutics as a Service” with global patient bases served by centralized manufacturing in real-time. The Klick team seamlessly connected its expertise in data science, design, and business to ensure the feasibility, viability, and desirability of such a transition.

This transition is not unique to our client or personalized gene therapies. Manufacturers seeking differentiation need to shift from the product to a service paradigm to maximize operational excellence and customer experience. Success in this shift is greatly enhanced with well crafted and executed data and analytics tools for commercial teams.