Harnessing the Digital Exhaust: Incorporating Wellness into the Pharma Model

The increasing availability of devices capable of tracking biomarkers presents major opportunities in contemporary healthcare. Herein we advocate a new role for the pharmaceutical industry to capitalize on these opportunities and, in doing so, incorporate wellness and patient engagement programs into their standard business models. Medical-grade decision-making using diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring biomarkers will require coordinated approaches between the pharmaceutical and technology industries and the careful design of longitudinal clinical studies to validate their efficacy. These studies will also require data capture, archiving, curating, and sharing on a previously unprecedented scale, and raise additional concerns with regard to data security and ownership. Concurrently, systems-based approaches to the capture and interpretation of a new class of digital biomarkers are emerging, and they hold promise for heightened levels of patient engagement and remote sensing. Collectively, if these new opportunities are approached within the context of the patient-provider ecosystem, major repositioning of the pharmaceutical industry may be possible in the near future.