The healthcare and life sciences (HLS) industry is being shaken up like never before. Social, mobile, and cloud technologies can empower hospitals, doctors, and other care providers to collaborate closely around their patients, and help medical device, pharmaceutical, and biotech companies redefine their products and services. As a result, IT departments within these organizations are well positioned to make an impact by introducing transformative tools. With time at Genentech and Roche, Salesforce SVP, Healthcare and Life Sciences Product Group, Todd Pierce, has experienced firsthand the challenges and opportunity HLS CIOs now face. Keep reading this “IT Visionaries” for his advice and to hear even more from Pierce, join us January 15th for the free webinar, “Medtronic Connects Devices, Doctors, and Data to Improve Patient Care.”

1. What is your take on the current landscape for healthcare and life sciences IT?

HLS IT right now is defined by the breadth of things that you're trying to do: from early drug discovery to product development, manufacturing to commercialization, to now patient services. Each one of those things have very high levels of rigor, but they need to be implemented differently, which means IT has to support them differently. It’s not one-size-fits-all. Pharmaceutical companies’ work no longer stops at the moment the drug gets shipped to the pharmacy or patient. It's continuing outside of that, where they're helping patients get better results, through services and education. That's a whole new exciting area.

2. Where should IT be focusing its efforts as a result?

So much of what IT needs to accomplish now is outside of the traditional enterprise. It’s about more than just employees. There are so many people involved in the delivery of care -- doctors, payers, health coordinators -- that now have information that's important for the joint company. This includes information about what products work with which patients, how patients respond to therapy, who is having side effects, who is not. Connecting all of this in the cloud helps your organization have better information about what stakeholders are doing. This leads to better education, marketing, and product development.

3. How specifically does cloud computing make this possible?

The power of cloud computing, certainly at Salesforce, is that you have a very flexible data model with integration and relationships built-in. You can quickly implement the unique ways your organization wants to work on one platform, so you can lower cost and be more agile. Frequently in IT, people are kind of "glass half-empty.” I think it's important to also see the joys of change. There can be challenges making the move from legacy systems, but there will be real rewards and enjoyment when you see how much faster and easier you can develop applications, how you can move at the speed of business, and how you can mobile-enable everything you do right out of the box.
 

4. What’s the secret to balancing traditional IT responsibilities with the pressure to innovate?

As an IT leader, you need a culture that can support standardization, scale, and efficiency, as well as one that knows when to take smart risks. It’s about managing the lifecycle of an idea and creating a culture across the entire organization. You don’t want to pigeonhole innovation. You want to create a culture where people can see ideas and figure out where IT is in the lifecycle of those ideas. The other thing to watch out for is making sure that innovation is not just about the “new, new thing”; innovation is also about innovating within some of the current processes.
 

5. How can IT best work with the Business?

When I was CIO, I would ride along with the salespeople. We would have sales and marketing come to IT and talk about what exactly they did and how. The more domain expertise you have, the more empathy and connection, the better you can translate your experience, skills, and knowledge, into a meaningful conversation. So often we don’t do that and the business has to then hire people to talk to the IT department. It's about investing time in really understanding what they do. What if you were trying to learn how to do their job?

6. Why do you recommend using customer metrics to prove IT’s value?

Ultimately, the end user experience can be your best poll for how to drive value. Other frameworks can be too abstract, but with the customer, people can always relate to that. It's tangible; it's measurable. I've always put a real focus on making sure that we have metrics, that they're reviewed regularly at all levels of the management team, and that we hold ourselves accountable as an IT organization. This helps people understand what the impact is of us not working well together.

7. You also place a big emphasis on improving the culture of IT.

I've been the CIO in six organizations. The thing that has lasted the longest across all of those has been the focus on people development. How can we help people grow in their jobs? How do we work together as a team? How do we bring our different perspectives to bear on something? In IT, you have a lot of conflicting demands and expertise. You have challenges where either the IT organization is not continuing to learn and stay current, or they get too far away from their customer, or they get too complacent, too slow. Creating a culture where people can continue to develop their technical expertise, to bring it to life in a way that promotes great teamwork and a great customer experience -- that is the difference between good and great organizations.

In today's healthcare and life sciences industry, successful companies are turning to the cloud to create a multi-channel engagement strategy to differentiate themselves in the minds of customers and patients. Join us January 15th to hear from Medtronic’s IT Business Systems Analyst, Nicole Leonard, on how her IT team turned to the Salesforce1 Platform to rapidly build business applications. Todd Pierce will also share Salesforce’s vision for how healthcare and life sciences companies can build a connected customer platform on Salesforce.

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