Ashfield rolls in cloud service to speed up market launch
Ashfield Commercial & Medical Services is the larger division of UDG Healthcare plc, providing commercialisation services for the 8,000 person contract research organisation (CRO).
By implementing Salesforce Health Cloud platform, the firm hopes to increase communication between health care providers their care teams, improving patient compliance and data integrity.
The implementation comes in response to FDA issued guidelines requiring purpose-built data management systems to better protect patient data.
Lucy MacLauchlan, a spokesperson for Ashfield, told us, “We will be migrating existing programmes over to the new platform and it will be part of our integrated service offering for all programmes moving forward.”
MacLauchlan said the other key ways in which the new Health Cloud will help the biotech and pharma industry is with global patient compliance, operational efficiency, standardisation and set-up time, and to “speed up launch into new markets”.
One example of Ashfield’s clients is Diurnal Ltd., a Cardiff-based biopharma developing therapies for chronic endocrine disorders. Diurnal recently signed a deal with Ashfield to help commercialize its lead product – Infacort.
“The Health Cloud platform will provide the capability to collect, store and analyse real-world data in a more seamless way – supporting the value proposition with payers and prescribers,” MacLauchlan added.
Patient support programmes
The cloud-based tool will also be used by Ashfield’s clients for patient support programmes, by creating tailored patient care plans and centralising all patient information for clinical trials in one place.
“Our patient support programmes focus on adherence, persistence, education and support following treatment initiation in the real world,” MacLauchlan explained.
“The platform can also provide access and additional data for Healthcare providers and patients. However, this would need to be determined on a programme basis, taking into account local regulations, and the requirements of [each party] in that therapy area.”
