How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are Transforming Sales in the Pharmaceutical Industry

 

Studies have demonstrated that both artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have brought about a sea change in the pharmaceutical industry’s landscape by helping them sell better. They are able to achieve them by making clinical and research trials more efficient, augmenting innovations, aiding in devising new tools for physicians and end-users, besides helping the healthcare industry to make more informed decisions. 

The data in circulation in the pharma industry is humongous. It is gathered by pharma companies and hospitals when they undertake researches, R&D tasks, clinical trials and results of outcomes of wellness through several years. Until the end of the 20th Century, data was, however, analysed manually by healthcare specialists. But it bugged the pharma industry majorly by making data sharing and regulation difficult. 

With drug makers partnering with IT companies, researchers and others, they end up sharing the healthcare data of large chunks of the population. Although there is a lack of authorized regulatory framework the world over to enable the pharma sector to embrace AI, some companies have managed to put in place governance measures for such partnerships, allowing this vertical, as a whole, to benefit. 

Using AI and ML, the pharma industry has been able to increase the rate at which conditions are being diagnosed. The way diagnoses are being carried out has also improved. It is frustrating when the conditions of patients remain undiagnosed for prolonged periods. As the healthcare specialists remain unsuccessful at zeroing in on the right therapies, they wrest with various medical treatments to identify the right cures for problems. The major hurdle here is their helplessness to dig through past records of instances of treating patients with certain symptoms. 

On the other hand, machine learning helps pharma companies in tracking the medical histories of patients depending upon specific yardsticks, like symptoms, treatments, lab results, etc. This information will help in diagnosing conditions quickly and in an improved manner, tracking improvements and suggesting treatments to patients depending on their individual histories. 

Technologies like AI and ML also help healthcare professionals detect diseases before they strike patients based on their medical histories. In such cases, the right treatment can be recommended to them much earlier to prevent the outbreak of those ailments. Pharma companies, meanwhile, can use the same data to launch direct campaigns to advertise their medications and therapies. Alternately, they can build awareness where such conditions may be existing in certain untested people who may be having them. In addition to boosting the sales of the pharmaceutical companies, they also help them in identifying individuals who may be at risk.  

The progress, or the lack of it, of a patient, helps in identifying whether certain medical treatments or effective or not. Such data can be then put to use by medical professionals to foretell the results of treatments in patients.

Machine learning aids healthcare professionals to devise roadmaps for treatments of patients afflicted with severe diseases too as they monitor their responses even when there are slightest changes in drug dosages, improving their experiences in achieving better health outcomes.

As for AI, it can help pharmaceutical companies in recording trends of physicians. It may well include the frequency of a certain treatment’s efficacy in treating patients, assessing medical procedures and detecting the basic needs of patients based on their respective environments. These companies may also use this data to conduct market research extensively on a commercial basis.

Data helps experts in gathering critical patient evidence in real-time so that medical professionals can take action immediately to avert occurrences of serious consequences. Patients have been monitored based on the risks they would have faced with the aid of equipment based on AI (including sensors, ECGs and other useful devices) to capture data and detect possible risks. 

With massive data being accessible to both healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical players across fields of medicine, machine learning can be used to process it to identify the right physicians for patients suffering from different ailments in quick time. When this is achieved, the physicians can share those experiences in writing or through their speeches with their counterparts across the globe, allowing pharma companies to identify the right audiences for specific conditions. 

As telemedicine is evolving at a disproportionate pace in the healthcare field, pharmaceutical companies are collaborating more with tech companies to develop online processes to monitor patients’ conditions, gather various treatment processes, improve regulations and also alert patients on time about their medical appointments. It also helps medical professionals to virtually monitor if their patients are following their advice diligently or not. 

In addition to gathering and storing data, AI and ML will enable sharing of knowledge among healthcare professionals, improving the ability of the pharmaceutical industry to acquire more health-related information. This will, in turn, help them cut costs where required and improve their R&D efforts on discovering new drugs, improving both their top and bottom lines eventually.      

Written for eccenca - a parent company of Aarth Software, where I worked  

Why are smart homes the future & what does it mean to you?

 In today’s world, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has taken over our everyday lives at home. It enables gadgets to function smartly because they are embedded with sensors, making them capable of connecting and exchanging data with other household devices with a single primary contact - a smartphone, PC/laptop, or tablet. This single device lets you manage lights, fans, ACs, TVs, refrigerators, microwave ovens, and other home appliances.   

Millennials and first-time home buyers are capitalizing on this technology which is catering to their needs and, in turn, propelling them toward a sustainable planet. These smart homes provide energy efficiency savings because the devices they use have Zigbee and Z-wave, popular wireless network protocols that allow them to be switched off when they are not being used. They begin operating again when you give them commands, giving you the benefit of reducing your home electricity bills significantly. In short, you can run all home appliances on your fingers. 

According to researchandmarkets.com, an online global market research firm, the Indian smart homes market will account for the spending of more than US$ 9 billion by 2025. 

With three out of four millennials evincing interest in buying a home in the next three years, they are the key drivers of India’s housing market. Moreover, the spread of Covid-19 has only accelerated the adoption of smart homes as they enable work from home, studying from home, shopping from home, etc.  

Millennials are at the forefront, pushing forward newer concepts, innovation-driven technology, and trends to come to fruition while keeping a progressing viewpoint when it comes to sustainable practices. Choosing smart homes comes with several benefits to the world which is developing rapidly.  

With climate change becoming an alarming issue, the onus is now on the citizens of the planet Earth to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and smart homes do that by decreasing carbon footprints considerably.   

Needless to say, about 33% of all the world’s carbon emissions are due to the energy consumption of household appliances, as stated in a study conducted by Finnish researchers.

The upshot of that study was that home automation could save around 13% of these GHG emissions and, in the bargain, diminish the effects of global warming. 

 Given that the Indian market segment is predicted to grow by 5% in 2022, a smart home will be both attractive as an asset and for settling down. When the real estate market continues to expand, you, as an owner of a smart home, are assured of a decent profit if you decide to sell it.

What is global warming and why should we be worried

 What is global warming and why should we be worried  

According to the United States Geological Society (USGS), “Global warming” “refers to the rise in global temperatures due mainly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” 

 

On the other hand, greenhouse gas (GHG) is a gas that enables heat to be trapped by hindering the movement of longwave radiation out of the atmosphere of Earth. What it does is cause the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) to increase staggeringly. Because of this, global warming is happening. 

 

Owing to all of this, the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has stated that the world has seen its warmest five years between 2015 and 2021 since 1880! If that happens, the temperatures on most of the Earth’s surface will reach a tipping point – a point of no return for the existence of humans on the planet.  

 

What role do humans play in all of this? To a large extent, human activities cause the concentration of GHGs to swell. In other words, humans are directly responsible for global warming as we burn fossil fuels (coal and oil) at a tremendous rate. Additionally, pollution caused by industries and power-guzzling vehicles is also another major contributor to GHGs, thus, in turn, global warming.  

 

GHG causes temperatures on our planet to be hotter than ever, storms to be more devastating than the ones that wreaked this planet since recorded history, and ceaselessly increasing droughts in the less fortunate parts of Earth.

Skinny-shaming

 Is it unfair to say that skinny-shaming cannot be deeply hurting and demoralizing, causing the self-esteem of its victims to be abased? Who says this form of discrimination can’t affect its targets as much as fat-shaming does? Since documentation for this group of people is very sparse, you cannot measure the magnitude of their predicament. But with people, in today's world, becoming more alive to other discriminatory practices, such as against individuals for their sexual orientation or for just being simply ‘different,’ other forms of ‘subtle’ social exclusion could also be taken note of in the future.

Israel & Iran cyberwar spills over to impact civilian lives

 A cyberwar broke out between Israel and Iran, beginning April 2020. It is now threatening to affect the lives of civilians in these two countries, besides in the US and other nations. Before the situation gets out of hand, let’s see how it can be mitigated and brought under control.

How cyberwars began affecting civilian lives

It all began in April 2020 when an Israeli water pumping station’s systems were compromised as a result of a cyberattack, leading to the breakdown of individual pumps. The source of this attack was traced to Iran. In what was said to be an act of retaliation, weeks after this incident, Israel-based hackers attacked a port in Iran, giving rise to the first-ever state-sponsored cyber war, wired.com quotes Lotem Finkelstein, a director of Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity company, as saying.

This was the flashpoint for a new trend of cyber warfare where infrastructure was targeted, disrupting the daily lives of millions of people in these two Middle Eastern nations. It intensified further this year when a team of hackers, belonging to Black Shadow, allegedly backed by Iran, made public intimate details of around a million users of the widely used Israeli LGBTQ app, Atraf, according to France24.com. Meanwhile, on October 26, 201, Iran’s 4,300 gas stations were affected due to a reported cyberattack. The Asian nation blamed the US and Israel for this violation.  

Earlier, on July 9 and 10, 2021, cybercriminals reportedly interrupted Iranian train services by posting bogus delay announcements on digital billboards that read “Long delays due to cyber attacks. More information: 64411.” The phone number is said to be of the office of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader.

The hack attacks targeted Iranian infrastructure across the board, taking into consideration the targets. They reportedly were carried out by actors, with the apparent backing of certain nations, as well as by nonaligned and loose cyber attacking units. The intent has, however, been unequivocally the same, causing turmoil and disorder that adversely impacted the ordinary citizens and business houses in this dysfunctional and autocratic Islamic nation.

Hack attacks affect the US and Australia

On the other hand, the United States has also been bearing the brunt of cyberattacks. It warned Iran for attempting to hack the computers of the world’s richest nation’s crucial infrastructure networks, including hospitals and voter registration systems.   

Stating that diplomacy has been better between nations in the Middle East, Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, is of the view that different nations are showcasing their capabilities in an attempt to create a new kind of power balance in this region.

But Iranian cybercriminals are said to be involved in nefarious activities in various Western nations. The IT security officials of the US, the UK, and Australia, on November 17, stated that state-backed hackers have upped their activities against healthcare and transport organizations in the US and Australia since March 2021.

What measures should the governments take to protect their cyberspaces?

Before things spiral out of control for all the people who are at the risk of getting affected, it is incumbent that Western countries, like the US and the UK, should act sagaciously and save the world from further misery. They should have in place regulations by engaging with non-state actors and taking forward with all earnest diplomatic proposals with Iran.

The need of the hour for the governments is to equip themselves with strong cybersecurity defense systems so that they can continue to deliver essential services to their citizens round-the-clock seamlessly. These mechanisms will ensure that cybercriminals, wherever they are operating from, are given no iota of a chance to target technology that supports the delivery of such services.

They could begin by deploying penetration testing services, armed with the advanced tools and technologies, that circumvent the security of the corporate networks having state-of-the-art security controls. These should be in line with industry standards and must be able to comply with several regulatory requirements including PCI DSS 11.3. Penetration testing of such types will be then in a position to detect threats, which hold certain IT systems and applications to ransom, that allow hackers to access confidential information.  

How will short videos help develop your business?

Video marketing is being increasingly viewed by businesses across the world as a popular tool for digital marketing owing to various factors.

·        Recording videos have become inexpensive these days, thanks to smartphones.

By infusing creativity, you can make short videos that engage audiences whom you wish to target, enabling easier conversion of them into your customers.   

Let’s see what the other reasons are that go into making video marketing a powerful online marketing tool. 

A video, obviously, conveys more to an audience than written words as it allows you to visually showcase your products or services to your prospective customers.

Besides helping in business promotion, this powerful marketing medium can also be used to educate and update your customers about your new products/services on websites, as well as on social media channels.    

Video marketing has now become an essential ingredient of digital marketing services for businesses of all types, with a joint study by Vidyard, a video marketing company, and Demand Metric, an Agile Marketing Software platform, stating in 2020, that 83% of all vendors and sellers held the view that videos had become more crucial than before to their marketing efforts. Other surveys suggest that videos have helped increase the traffic to websites of businesses by over 50% and their sales by more than 33%.

In addition, videos give businesses the advantage of engaging with audiences much more easily across multiple mediums, aiding them in converting and retaining new customers more successfully.

Post-Covid, more people are making decisions on buying while staying at home. But they have to see for themselves how effective a product/service of a company is. This is where video marketing plays a critical role in sales. 

It is also a fact that video marketing helps increase the rankings of business houses on search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yandex, among others. So, if a company uses better search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, alongside video marketing, it will most definitely profit by increasing traffic to its site and expanding its customer base.        

How blockchains help the mining industry adhere to ESG standards?

Most mining companies are guilty of not adhering to environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards, which are principles that mandate them to be environmentally friendly and fair in their dealings with their employees, partners, clients in the locations where they function. 

These companies must adhere to these standards because they determine their social credibility rankings during the process of producing a mineral. If they are high, they will, in turn, encourage investments from venture capitalists and others through various instruments like mutual funds. In addition, they also play a key role in exhibiting to governments all over the world and civil society how responsible these firms are being to the planet Earth by implementing sustainable growth strategies.

Though some mining companies are striving to be socially responsible, they are facing hurdles, especially due to supply chain issues, causing them to view their value chains in a manner that is not very transparent. This is largely due to the fact that it is unviable for them to put in place tracking mechanisms. 

From time immemorial, mining companies have been not able to keep track of their sellers and sources of minerals. Moreover, if they want to gain ESG compliance, the process involved is tedious and, at times, too expensive.

But such issues cannot be an excuse for these companies to overlook ESG compliance. They have to show themselves as ethical and respectful of citizens’ rights in their supply chain management in order to achieve enduring success and to be deemed trustworthy.  

With the mining industry worldwide becoming aware of the importance of complying with the improved ESG standards, transparency in reporting here may soon become the norm. Besides, it would help companies in this sector to move ahead by cutting costs significantly and improving productivity, leading them to benefit immensely. To achieve wholesome success, it is, thus, necessary for mining companies to invest money and resources in the supply chain.   

ESG compliance in the mining industry will also ensure that all minerals will henceforth be priced as per the carbon emissions they release during their making. The least harmful of the minerals will then be priced higher than those that are not. Such a practice will enable companies to make only those products that are eco-friendly. 

Right now, climate change is a major problem that has to be addressed. It is causing a lot of damage to our ecosystem and is leading to earthquakes, tornadoes, melting of ice cap mountains. In an upshot, it is disrupting our routine climate cycles. 

Climate change is /caused by emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and fluorinated gases. Among these, carbon dioxide emissions alone account for 81 percent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, according to the US EPA. Since the mining industry is one of the main GHG emissions contributors, it has to shoulder the responsibility of cutting them down significantly

The cause of carbon dioxide emissions can be both deliberate and inadvertent in most industries. They are inevitable when manufacturers use heating or cooling procedures, combustion equipment, vehicles, industrial discharges, etc. These emissions are classified as globally as Scope 1.

Falling under Scope 2 are GHG emissions occurring at the premises where generation of electricity, cooling or heating takes place. 

Scope 3 encompasses all emissions from sources that neither possessed nor directly under the control of the companies under question. 

How blockchains come to the rescue 

It has now been proven that blockchain plays a pivotal role in ensuring that ESG criteria are being met. If ESG data is connected to blockchain, it removes opacity from sustainable processes, moving companies to embrace best practices. 

This is because blockchains prosper in backdrops where many stakeholders with diverse and disparate interests operate, even though there may be challenges to their partnerships due to incompatible interests. 

As blockchains can gather data from diverse sources and databases, they can optimally be made use of across various reporting requirements of an industry. Moreover, this technology enables the data layer to be assigned with time and date and makes it resistant to interference.

Cryptography is used to connect all transactions taking place in blockchains. Owing to this, it is possible to establish the clear origin of data across the product life cycle to ensure clarity.

Using blockchain, companies have begun tracking minerals, like gold, diamonds, cobalt, etc., to certify that they are being made using ethical practices. So, during that process, there do not affect the interests of any human on the planet.

As blockchain technology advances, the logic that is inherently more complex can be inserted into transactions that can be recorded and verified. Then, by automating commercial logic where different parties are transacting, it is possible to finalize instantaneously transaction logic to facilitate any number of transactions. As any logic can be embedded into transactions, so can be sustainability data. Later on, the same rule can be used as a standard for transactions to be executed automatically. 

Associates in the network certify all blockchain transactions because they are recorded, allowing the data to be validated publicly. It can be determined how reliable data is by ascertaining the origins of the data documented on the blockchain. 

By using automation along with the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain will be able to come up with a completely trustworthy data source, without leaving any room for ambiguity.