This award recognises initiatives by life sciences companies and their partners to transform a specific disease care pathway or patient journey, at a local, regional or national level.
This award takes as its “unit of analysis” a single care pathway (provider perspective) or patient journey (patient/caregiver perspective) in a primary, secondary or end-to-end setting. Today, health innovators are transforming many historically-determined disease-specific care pathways, and we have made leaps and bounds in adapting for patients’ lived experiences as well as adopting new technologies. International norms and best practices emerge, but there is a translational gap to overcome to see them implemented across geographies. Alongside new practitioner techniques & skills, newly designed buildings and care settings, new therapies and diagnostic solutions, and increasingly powerful data, digital and – in the next few years, AI – are enabling such pathway transformations. Life sciences companies can support these care pathway transformations, and, in order to see their products deployed, it is increasingly imperative to do so.
Recognising that the life sciences industry’s key customers are designing and implementing such new care pathways, this award seeks out initiatives where the life science company made a tangible contribution, beyond its direct commercial remit, to such a single care pathway transformation. In practice, even universally agreed new best practices, are deployed in tailored ways at local or regional or sometimes national level. Therefore, in this award, we expect to see a dedicated team working in a specific setting. This can of course present a challenge to a global life sciences company whose business model is not set up to deploy resources to transform every pathway for every customer.
Hence a key element of the initiatives in this award will be the design of experiments and learning for repeating and scaling. Healthcare providers are under continued pressure. A global life sciences company may be well-placed to catalyse the wider adoption of new pathways, working alongside the academic and research groups which often lead the origination but not the practical deployment, and this requires a commitment from the partners for hands-on interventions to test and prove the changes.
To win this award, we are seeking clear scoping of the opportunities for the new care pathway, and certainly involvement beyond the narrow “intent to prescribe” step in the pathway. We are looking for evidence of the life science company leaning into upstream and downstream steps, and to steps that are not directly linked to the company’s specific product and commercial remit.
Work conducted in the two-year period from July 2023 to June 2025 will be eligible.
