Technological challenges
The Life Sciences sector is undergoing major transformations at all stages of patient care.
Driven by new technologies, diagnosis, prevention and treatment methods (drugs, surgical techniques) and sharing of medical information between health-care professionals (doctors, pharmacists, home-care personnel, medical insurance and others) are undergoing rapid change and becoming more effective, bringing benefits to patients and ensuring optimum value for health expenditure.
- In medical diagnosis, 3D imaging applications are crucial, enabling doctors, radiologists and surgeons to make more rapid, reliable and appropriate diagnoses and decisions, and define and implement treatment plans for particular pathological conditions. Products and solutions are changing in three ways: mobility, making imaging tools available on smartphones, tablets, and the cloud; data virtualisation; collaborative tools enabling doctors across the world to exchange information, views, images and reports. Longer-term trends in the sector are 4D (real-time analysis of 3D images) and multimodal imaging, combining different information sources (scanners, MRI and ultrasound) to improve the quality of diagnosis.
- Pharmaceutical and veterinary laboratories are encountering competition from increasingly powerful generic drugs. In order to maintain market share and profitability, most are investing heavily in R&D, with no guarantee of eventual product launch, and are reorganizing their production tools with major synergy with manufacturing engineering and supply-chain optimisation, in highly regulated environments where qualification and validation of drug manufacturing equipment is crucial.
- A number of e-health services are now available to all stakeholders to facilitate information sharing. These include home-based monitoring for patients (e.g. blood pressure), data transmission on 4G networks and communication systems, medical consultation and diagnosis via smartphone, electronic medical prescriptions sent directly to the patient’s pharmacy for preparation, automatic alerts to inform patients that their prescription is ready, and automatic management of treatment by health insurance and complementary organisations. All these new services are made possible by connected objects and communication systems.
