The first-ever digital chief at $210 billion drugmaker Pfizer shares her top 5 priorities for using technology to transform the pharma giant
- Healthcare giants are hiring chief digital officers to help the companies better use technology within their businesses.
- Business Insider recently spoke with Lidia Fonseca, Pfizer's first CDO. She joined the company in January 2019.
- Fonseca laid out the five areas where she's spending her time working to digitize the $210 billion pharmaceutical giant.
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Technology is coming for healthcare, and the centuries-old companies in the industry are facing a steep learning curve.
To adapt, they're starting to hire chief digital officers, executives tasked with figuring out how to use new tech tools to improve every part of their businesses.
Pfizer, the 170-year-old pharmaceutical giant, is among the major healthcare firms adding digital talent. CEO Albert Bourla hired Lidia Fonseca at the start of 2019 as its first chief digital officer, a role that encompasses a company-wide effort to digitize the pharmaceutical giant. Fonseca was part of the leadership team Bourla put in place as he took over the company this year.
"I happen to believe that there are two kinds of companies," Fonseca, whose title is chief digital and technology officer, told Business Insider. "Companies that are born digital, and then companies that are trying to become digital. If you're older than 20 years old, you're in the second camp."
Before Pfizer, Fonseca was chief information officer at Quest Diagnostics, and she's also worked at lab-testing firm LabCorp and in IT at Philips Healthcare.
During her first year, she's homed in on five priorities, generally based around innovating with technology and building a digital culture at Pfizer, a $210 billion pharma company known for the cholesterol-lowering pill Lipitor and the cancer drug Ibrance.
- She's working to give Pfizer's teams of scientists tools to help them discover new drugs. For instance, the tools might be able to predict how a potential experimental drug is going to behave, ideally to help speed up the process of looking for new medicines. Pfizer is also working to figure out how to digitize the clinical-trial process, in which experimental treatments are tested in patients.
- Fonseca and her team are working to build digital tools that can be provided alongside medications, with hopes of helping the medicines work better. That can include apps as well as a robot companion.
- Coming up with digital innovations will also be critical within Pfizer's operations, helping to manage the supply chain and the manufacturing of medications.
- Ideally, by collecting more information digitally, and using the data already at Pfizer's disposal, Fonseca is keen to analyze that data to help the company make decisions based on it.
- To do any of that, it'll require a company that's willing to shift the way it has done business for decades. That's why one of Fonseca's five pillars is shifting the digital culture at Pfizer.
"When I think about a digital mind-set, it's a different way of thinking," Fonseca said. "It starts with asking the questions, 'What experience are we trying to create? What outcomes are we trying to achieve?' And then we figure out what's the best solution that makes sense."
It'll take working with tech companies big and small. For instance, Pfizer has partnered with Amazon to host Pfizer's scientific data. By putting that data in the cloud, Pfizer scientists can build artificial-intelligence applications that interrogate those datasets.
Pulling off the priorities to turn Pfizer into a tech-savvy company will also take working with other healthcare companies to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare, she said.
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