- The author of this article is Piyush Gupta, President, Kestone.
The process of transitioning from uncertainty to stability has been pretty smooth for the pharma and healthcare industry. In the initial phase of the pandemic when a lot of businesses were reinventing their business models, both the pharma & healthcare industries were among the first few to innovate in the truest sense and virtual technology was the main driving force behind the journey.
Among the wide range of of things that ‘virtual’ constitutes, virtual events are perhaps the major driving force that is shaping up modern marketing and certainly creating new trends and processes to design value added programs for these industries.
Now these industries can vouch upon virtual ways of operating which can lead to a brighter future, without any doubt. This is primarily because of the kind of engagements the Pharma & Healthcare industry is already doing and how they have joined forces with virtual events to create a more sustainable future. Being the two important industries on which the future depends and saving lives from the forefront, the pharma & healthcare industry is very much proactive in creating innovative programs, re-defining policies and supporting a workforce that is dedicated to take every challenge head-on. It is worth mentioning that most of these are happing on virtual event platforms.
To site a more specific use-case, global advisor and thought leader in the field like Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society have leveraged virtual events to create some really interesting and comprehensive engagements to offer expertise in health innovation, public policy, workforce development, research and analytics to advise global leaders, stakeholders and influencers on best practices in health information and technology.
Medical conferences, distributor meets and other action-oriented events are also crucial to the pharma & healthcare industry as these events are a melting pot of practitioners, pharma players, retailers and distributors and play an important role in formulating policies and gives a strategic direction to these industries in terms of adoption of best practices, introduction of new mechanisms, advancement of diagnostics etc. Since the pandemic Virtual event platforms have been widely preferred to host these kinds of events on the global scale.
Reward and Recognition is another key area which the sector is actively focussing on. The pharma & healthcare industry operates with a workforce who are the frontline warriors in this battle known as Covid-19 and they are reason everyone is being able to even think about the concept of ‘new normal’.
Apart from virtual events which are solely policy driven, both the healthcare industry has also been leveraging virtual event platforms to create virtual realism to modernize their patient relations services. It is particularly useful for old people who are more vulnerable to the virus. Besides the social distancing norms have made it difficult to travel easily. Hence, various hospitals are creating virtual clinics where one can get a preliminary check-up done and consult a doctor in real-time. Pharma companies are also exploring the possibilities of creating virtual medical stores where people can check the availability of a medicine, see the medicine in virtual shelves and add it to their carts.
With this consumption trend of virtual services, the healthcare and pharma sectors can now envision a future where a lot of other needs of the industries can be met through these virtual platforms. One such need is the need to deliberate on adoption of best practices and healthcare policy making. Tele-healthcare, remote patient care, virtual dispensaries, digital consultation etc are the other outcomes of adoption of virtual technologies.
For the healthcare sector virtual consultation saw a great demand from the families who have elderly patients. Since they are the most vulnerable group in terms of Covid-19 infection, consultation and immediate medical attention over virtual mediums came as a great relief. The pharma sector is adopting technological innovations to create virtual dispensaries and medical stores where people can access medicine catalogues and match prescriptions to order the right medicine, without physically going to the chemists.
With virtualization coming in the picture, sharing and consumption of health-related information will be more effective and it will make medical intervention and monitoring more effective for long distance patients. It will also address the issue of travel restrictions and access to remote areas. Quick adoption of virtualization and proper education will also democratize healthcare.
In a nutshell, the pharma & healthcare industry is actively innovating in the virtual space and virtual event is one of the key areas where they are focusing. The virtual event platforms are on the other hands are showing lots of promises in terms of possibilities as over the last months it’s been proved that the platforms can be leveraged for lot of possibilities, other than just events.
