My name is Shazia Hassan, and I have the privilege of, leading digital transformation initiative in life sciences and health care sector.Two industries that are not only complex and regulated, but deeply human at their core. Today, I'm excited to share how we are navigating the challenges and embracing the transformation opportunities through this digital innovation presence at at this moment in the world. I hope this session is offers going to offer you the insight, inspired actions, or create dialogue as we step into the more connected, efficient, and patient centric future of health care. And for the next twenty minutes, I will be sharing some slides with you, and it has some engagement queue. Feel free to type in into the chat your responses against those queues. Okay? Let me jump to the site. Okay.

So let's begin with the shared understanding what is digital transformation. It's not about the IT upgrade or fancy dashboards. It's more just adopting new technologies. It's about reimagining how we work, how we deliver value, and how we evolve as organization. It's about using technology to reimagine workflows, empower people, data, and also accelerating the progress of the organization as we move forward. If we talk about specifically health care and life sciences, consider what already happening around us. Let's take an example of electronic health record. What's already happening is basically is becoming a backbone of patient history management. AI. It is diagnosing diseases faster than the regular radiologist in certain trial telemedicines. It has extended access to care in rural and underserved areas. IoT enabled variable. It tracks the patient vitals in real time and reduce hospital readmissions.

And nevertheless, blockchain, which is a kind of everywhere in every supply chain operations right now, is now being used for verifying the integrity of drug supply chains, especially critical for biologics and personalized medicines. So now why we are talking about digital transformation and why it is becoming critical now? First and foremost, because the patience has changed. Today's patients expect the same level of transparency and personalization in health care as they do from their banking app or online shop shopping platform. And second, because of the growing pressure on margins and efficiency to streamline the operations, reducing manual process with rises r and d cost and regulatory complexity, which must find ways to do more with the less information. Third is innovation, which is right now accelerating in each and every industry, not just the life sciences. But when we talk about specifically to the health care, personalized medicines, gene editing, MRI vaccines, all require digital infrastructure to be viable at a scale.

And fourth, to stay competitive in the world, where speed to market, data driven insight are the new currencies. Let me give you a scenario. Like, can you consider that how telehealth exploded during the pandemic? A midsize hospital system implemented a virtual care platform and integrated it with variable for chronic patient. Result, the reduced readmissions and higher patient satisfaction. So, you can also, like, chat time in type into the chats that have you ever seen a big shift to telemedicine or AI in your organization? If yes, please feel free to chat chat in the response in the chat. So with all that, what is digital transformation, why it is happening, there are some challenges which, I think each and every one of us in our organization and see.

Because we assume that every company is rapidly digitization. But from an experience, we all know that is not the case. We are still significant barriers standing in the way. And, let's see that how we are going to explore that. First and foremost is the legacy system. Many organizations are running critical trials, regulatory submissions, or manufacturing controls on decade old software. That does not connect with other system. And it's like you are streaming Netflix on a VHS player, which it does just doesn't work at all. Second is the fragmented data. Whether it's from the CRO, CDMO, internal departments, or real world evidence, data is scattered and inconsistent, which slows down the decision making and increases the risk. Third is regulation. Everybody knows that health care and medical devices, pharmaceutical, it's a very heavily regulated environment.

Be it GXP, HIPAA, GDPR, they all are essential, but they introduce friction when you go to the market for getting the approvals on those with the FDAs, EMAs, things like that. And fourth and foremost, the people. Organization resist to change and which is real. Teams are often a septal of the new system. They fear for job loss, disruption, or that the new solution will be just another tool which does not have a proper training or adoption. One of the scenario what I have experienced with while interacting with my client is, at a biotech, their regulatory department was still managing submissions in Excels and Word, emailing PDF back and forth for the supplier collaboration. And what happened? During an FDA inspection, a version control issue caused a six week delays in launching a key therapy. That moment sparked the leadership to finally invest in an end to end digital regulatory platform. So please feel free to share your experience.

Have you ever experienced something like that? Whether it's a compliance gap or system mismatch that created a risk to the product to launch in the market. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. So now let's just shift the focus, from, challenges to the enablers. Like, how what enables digital transformation to succeed, especially in such a complex and risk and work industry? So here are the five enablers which, I have seen and experienced and also implemented in the various, digital transformation project I have led. First and foremost is the leadership commitment. Without it, digital efforts stall. And with it, they become enterprise wide mandate. If you your leadership is not having the right vision or a strategy that how they want to shape up the organization and want to see their product in the market. No matter how digital effort we put together, it's not going to work. Cross functional collaboration. True transformation does not happen in silos.

Whether it's regulatory, quality, r and d, or IT of your company, they all need to co create the solution. Otherwise, there will always be silos and somebody is working individually or independently, not knowing that what is happening around the other cross functional areas. Data governance and cybersecurity. These are used to be the back office function long back, but now they are not. They are now centralized to innovation, and also they are clean trusted data, which is required to be for our future innovations when it comes to AI, Blockchain, all needs to be created and integrated with the standardized data and governance in place. And nevertheless, modern architecture is required for our technologies. You have to think through from a innovation perspective that how you are going to implement your Cloud, your API, data lakes, and definitely artificial intelligence.

And these technology has to be worked together. Though no more silos point solutions are any more applicable in this world. Change management in digital fluency. Investing in people, training, upskilling, engaging is often the most overlooked, yet most critical success factor. One example I can share with my experience in, one of the global pharma we supported, we unified 15 separate system across manufacturing and r and d by building an integrated solution and harmonized global master data. What really made it work was the governance model, like weekly forums between QA, IT, regulatory and supply chain, which ensured alignment and momentum. So if you have to pick any enabler that is missing in your organization, what it would be, tech leader or leader or, the culture. It depends. But definitely, like, I'm sure that you might have anywhere experience in your, transformation journey that what is has been, you know, seen as a enabler which needs more effort from our organization perspective.

Okay. So with the right enablers in place, what is the roadmap? Means, how should we tackle all these situations? So here's the framework I have used successfully in my organization where, the fire and first mode said, don't start with the tool. Start with the outcome. Define your vision and the strategy. It is your goal is for the patient improvement, patient safety improvement, reduce time to market, enabling the remote inspections. So that vision and strategy has to be in place for sure. Access the readiness. Map your current tech stack, data maturity, governance, talent capability. Do I need more people in the same area that we are I am trying to transform, or getting ready for the areas to be transformed digitally transformed? So hire the people, put the governance in space, and standardize your data. Prioritize the use cases. So never try to boil the ocean.

Always choose two to three areas where the impact is very much clear, and it's going to be value for the vision of your company. Invest in agility. Start small, gather feedback, and reiterate, which is very, very important at this moment because agility is where it comes down to the complexity like how people is going to take those things, and, they have to be more agile rather than going into the waterfall model which used to be the case in the few years back.

And measure and scale. Use data to track the success and business build business cases for broader rollout. Like for, one of the client which is in the medical devices space, they use the exact same framework. They begin by aligning their executive KPI to a digital labeling initiative. After a successful pilot, they expanded it globally, reducing labeling error by 70% and time to market by 30%. The key, clear vision, phased implementation, and visible value. So I'm sure that some of the framework you might have some of these areas you might have already implemented or maybe in the process of implemented. But which stage of this framework do you think your team are best at and you might need support? Please share your experience as well over the chat.

So with the enablers and successful framework, let me go through a case study. Now, this case study is very close to me because it was woman led from, from an onshore, offshore team. I mean, the client, the women leaders were the part of that particular initiative. So it is a global pharmaceutical client and, where I was leading the digital transformation of the product life cycle management work stream. The first challenge was what I have faced that they have a siloed process between r and d, regulatory, and marketing. Specs were emailed. Data was inconsistent. Supply collaboration was slow. So we implemented solution to centralize the product specs, integrate the supplier collaboration, and automate document approval.

So you see, we we started with the small by addressing their current key challenges. And once that was deployed, we expanded the solution and we addressed the batch release. The batch release was basically that where they have one click batch and their, quality is going to be, like, inspected in, like, the three five three to five days hours of days of efforts was has been has been reduced to hours. So we designed and deployed, and it has an integrated QA regulatory manufacturing, which was using the real time data and the compliance check which was there. The result release time went from days to hours, and this was particularly impacted for their sister division of cell and gene therapy where time is is critical for patient. We shortened the commercial lead time for life saving therapies, and, it resulted in end to end effort, cross functional workshop, global testing, training, change and options, all driven by the shared goal and vision of speed with quality. K? So maybe, like, you have already been in the part of your supply chain operations.

So, feel free to jive in how many of you are currently using SAP or similar platform in your supply chain operations. Alright. So with this case study, let's look at what is our look ahead of what is coming next. So definitely, artificial intelligence is increasingly used for, drug discovery, imagining the diagnostic and real time clinical trial monitoring. Digital training are being developed to model patient responses to therapy, enabling precision medicine scale. Blockchain will reverse the centralized trials and production authentication, bringing trust to complex global supply chain and sustainability, which is becoming a core priority. AI driven carbon accounting and scope three emission tracking are emerging as key capabilities.

So the organization anticipate and integrate these trend early will define the next gen of health care. These trends are not at all as optional. They are defining the next wave of competitive advantage. One of the example is the pharmaceutical industry. One company is basically using digital twin to model the lever's reaction to a compound, predicting toxicity without a single patient involvement, which saving the millions of r and d cost and reducing risk. Okay. So as we wrap up, may I know just of six minutes has been left? Here's my message to all of you. Don't wait for a perfect system or budget to start. Start with a clear goal, build small pilot, show value, and scale with confidence. Transformation is not just about technology. It's about leadership, and it's about choosing to build something better for patient, employees, and the fund for the industry at the large.

If you see these five key pillars, which I call call of I call to action, you can think through it. Be an FBI. Foster, build, and invest. Be an FBI of your company, of your project, and, think through that how you can foster your culture of innovation, how you can build the strategies with the partnership with external expertise or solutions, where, people can help you to drive those innovation in their in in the company and invest in digital talents for sure.

Upskilling the team and attracting the digital net natives is very, very important. Starting with the small is really small steps to build, pilot, measure, and expand successful, initiatives around it.