Hey there, Marc Iskowitz here. You may recognize me from my former gig.
For 15+ years, I was a reporter for B2B biopharma trade publication Medical Marketing + Media (MM+M), where I wrote about the brave new world of healthcare and medicine. I’ll still be gracing your inboxes, but reincarnated as editorial director at Beghou, having joined last month.
But my mission here remains the same as ever—to help you do your job better by bringing you actionable, engaging industry-specific content, either from our own in-house think tank or from others. This newsletter will feature a mix of news analysis, trends and practical resources of interest to biopharma commercial operations pros and leaders working with life sciences data or IT. Let’s get into it!
J&J’s AI scale-back
Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that Johnson & Johnson cut 90% of its AI projects. The move came after J&J realized the need to trim redundant or ineffective pilots in favor of prioritizing those generative AI use cases with the highest value.
As the life sciences industry transitions from “Should we do GenAI?” to accepting its relevance, this might be a teachable moment for pharma commercial operations pros on how to harness the power of AI, writes my colleague Nicole Ventrone, a partner at Beghou.
J&J has shown the way: encourage an innovation-led culture in which teams are at liberty to try and fail. At the point when innovation outpaces integration, tap BU leaders to identify applications that have potential to see wider adoption across the company, and empower them to embed the technology and track growth.
For a concise rundown on what J&J did, why it’s important, and what it could mean for the industry at large, read Nicole’s LinkedIn post.
Beghou Deep Cut: A how-to for data shoppers
With the number of available data sources growing rapidly, the choice of what to buy is more dizzying than ever. How to decide? The data timeline helps you determine what to purchase and when.
Pre-launch activities, like KOL identification, forecasting and HCP segmentation, give way to the post-launch phase, during which your data will need to inform launch reporting and post-marketing trials.
My colleagues Melissa McDevitt and Todd Foster have put together this piece on navigating the healthcare data swamp. It has a framework—and diagram suitable for grokking—they use with clients to help bring clarity in the early stages, before tools and contracts are locked in. Whether you’re choosing your first data sources or revisiting old decisions as you scale, I hope you’ll find it helpful.
P.S. Thank you for reading and to freelance writer Gowri N Kishore for helping me put this together.