The Silicon Review ^Asia

In conversation with Kedar Nigavekar, Sr. Vice President, Consulting & Business Development, BioQuest Solutions

The life-sciences industry has undergone immense transformation in recent years and is being driven more by value and outcome. Ethics and transparency are central to all sales and marketing efforts and life-sciences organizations are continually looking for novel ways to engage their audiences, comprising doctors, other medical personnel and patients/ general population. With new care delivery models underway, life-sciences organizations tend to communicate the benefits of their products and/or services as value-based, thus improving lives and health outcomes.

Life-sciences sales and marketing leaders continuously deal with the reality of marrying medical science with software and communications in the sales process. Add new multi-channel engagement models, compliance mandates, and legislative uncertainties, and the medical sales environment becomes extremely complex. Thus, pivotal to most sales and marketing efforts, is the department of ‘medical affairs' that is increasingly playing a nodal role in communications, in technology driven initiatives and in generating real world evidence.

Sales reps now need a significantly expanded skill set and impactful tools to optimally engage and build trust with healthcare providers, while ultimately putting patient outcomes first. This is why life-sciences companies need to transition from being a product-centric organization with reactive, technical sales pitches into being a customer-centric organization with proactive, needs-based pitches that make healthcare professionals and patients understand the value of their offerings.

As is evident, the domains of real world studies, medical communications and software products/ services that support medical affairs, sales and marketing in the life-sciences ecosystem are amongst the key drivers of growth for the industry. It is therefore with certainty we can say that organizations that have built credible expertise in these areas are much sought after for their skills and strengths to impact the growth of life-sciences organizations across specialties and across geographies.

We spoke to a Thought Leader in this domain, Mr. Kedar Nigavekar, Sr. Vice President, Consulting and Business Development, BioQuest Solutions, to get more insights into the industry.

Q. The Silicon Review: Tell us about your organization, BioQuest Solutions and how it is positioned in the healthcare ecosystem?

Kedar Nigavekar: BioQuest Solutions is a Consulting and Services organization in the life-sciences domain. With our core competencies in Real World Studies, Medical Education and Medical Communications, we are uniquely positioned to offer our customers ‘Capability Augmentation' and ‘Capacity Building’. It would also be fair to add that right from consulting we assist companies to do good business in the true sense.

BioQuest Solutions was incorporated in 2005, has a presence across key locations in Asia and Europe and is now making inroads in the US. While it has been empowering life-sciences companies to maximize their business potential and has been providing services across over 80 nations, it has won several awards, Global and Local, almost on a year on year basis over the last few years.

Q. The Silicon Review: Can you elaborate a bit on the solutions and services, focusing more on the software aspect?

Kedar Nigavekar: Let me answer this by saying that our services and products have a proven track record of delivering on complexity, control, cost and reach for the clients. However, it is the 'One Window' operation that our customers value the most while engaging BioQuest Solutions and it is our unique ability to integrate that highlights our competitive advantage in the life-sciences industry. Medical Communications, Medical Education and Real World Evidence are supported by Software Services and two of our proprietary products - ETREWO (for Real World Evidence) and EPTRAL (for Medical Education).

Our capability in Real World Evidence (augmented by ETREWO) helps our customers not just generate evidence of their products' competitive value but also lets them assess the associated economic value. We potentially start by assisting our clients understand the scenarios where Real World Evidence could be deployed successfully to its seamless execution, targeted at delivering outcomes that are in their best interests.

Q. The Silicon Review: Any worldwide trends that BioQuest Solutions has identified that you believe are worth watching out for?

Kedar Nigavekar: Probably the biggest shift the industry is seeing, is on integrating all the data inputs across various points of sources, cutting across the patient ecosystem. This is because silos of consumer health information continue to plague healthcare providers as they lack visibility into their patients’ entire medical histories. This is due to an industry wide interoperability issue. While medical records are increasingly becoming electronic, this hasn’t solved the problem of disparate data sources. Patients’ medical records are spread across many providers from retail clinics and standalone care centers, emergency departments, specialists and primary care physicians. On top of that, data from health apps and fitness trackers typically are not integrated into medical records.

With all these disparate sources of data, managing the ever-growing volume of patient information in a way that provides a holistic picture of an individual is increasingly challenging.

Thus, we at BioQuest believe that Interoperability is the new buzzword in Healthcare, today.

Q. The Silicon Review: What next for BioQuest Solutions?

Kedar Nigavekar: Healthcare is seeing a spurt in digitization and tech enabled services and we at BioQuest Solutions are continually investing in these fields to deepen our domain expertise and provide impactful solutions and services to our clients across the globe. For now, we are focusing on three aspects for growth: new product development to address existing issues in the life-sciences knowledge domain, honing our solutions and services to keep up our superior standards across geographies, and new client acquisition.