Adeseun: With Technology, Nigeria Can Achieve a Perfect Healthcare System
Country Manager, IQVIA, West Africa, Remi Adeseun, spoke with Emma Okonji on the recent launch of IQVIA’s digital healthcare platform, HCPSpace, and how the company is using technology and data in strengthening the nation’s healthcare systems. Excerpts:
You can be considered as one of the key thought leaders in the area of pharmaceutical sales and marketing in the country, what new challenge drove you to the launch of IQVIA? The highest levels of professional recognition in the nation’s pharmacy industry are the Fellowship of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria, which by God’s grace was conferred on me in 2012 as well as Fellowship of the Nigeria Academy of Pharmacy. However, my involvement in the health space is beyond pharmacy and that is what has brought me to IQVIA. I have been in pharmacy all my life essentially. I started as a medical representative with Sandoz, then operating as Swissco Nig Ltd, under the Jagal Group in 1989, with my first tour of duty in pharmacy ending in 2005 as Country Manager for Janssen Cilag, a Johnson&Johnson company after spending 16 years exclusively in pharmacy.
In the last 12 years, I have gone on to do other things in the health space including a medical technology start-up, Robot representing a foremost German dialysis equipment manufacturer, from which I am on a sabbatical. Another start-up in the not-for-profit sector, which I had been engaged in is Smile Train where I was Regional Director for West Africa. Smile Train is the world’s leading charity exclusively devoted to the surgical treatment of children born with cleft lips and palette. I started it in the sub-region and ran it for two years, took another break and then I moved on to an advocacy project, PSN-PACFaH - Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health, a Gates funded programme, where I served as the Programme Director in charge of Strategy for two years. We were successful in advocating for policy changes in the treatment for childhood killer diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia, with Amoxicillin dispersible tablets and Zinc/ORS respectively, becoming the first-line treatment in the National Standard Treatment Guidelines as well as the National Essential Medicines List
As such, I have traversed a broad spectrum of healthcare sector in Nigeria. Interestingly, human data sciences also traverses the entire spectrum of the health sector from the preclinical stage, research and development to clinical trials all the way to phase four –postmarketing surveillance.
How successful is IQVIA since its launch? IQVIA has been successful over the last six decades, working with companies in the research and development (R&D) space as well as doctors, pharmacists, nurses and the other healthcare professionals who use the pharmaceutical products. In the commercial space we are able we to help in putting together the data which is the gold standard where countries are able to tell the patterns of usage of the various pharmaceuticals items in the world within various therapeutic classes in what is known as the National Pharmacy Audit. This system allows an executive in a Global Pharmacy company to sit at his desk in Switzerland and have access to information on how well his products are doing across over 100 countries. This is the kind of scale and breadth of practice that IQVIA brings.
A nationalistic passion of mine has been to contribute to remove the stigma of Nigeria being high on the ignominious list of countries that don’t have reliable data. I have always thus been inclined to work with other like-minded people to get Nigeria into the comity of nations with good and reliable data. IQVIA’s core strength plays in this space and so I welcomed the challenge when the regional leadership of the company reached out to me to help lead the charge in West Africa. Why was IQVIA launched in the Nigerian market, considering that human data science and information management systems haven’t really been fully established in the country? IQVIA is the synergistic product of the merger between Quintiles and IMS Health in 2016.
We decided to come up with a unique name that abstractly reflects the two companies but more importantly to assure the healthcare community that the company existed to help them solve their various needs via human data science.
Human data science is a relatively new category that we have brought to life and it draws on our strengths in the life sciences plus decades of deep technical and analytical data capabilities.
As a result, IQVIA is today the world’s leading company in the area of human data science.
Currently a gap exists. In the world that we live in today, evidence is what drives informed decisions and evidence isn’t something that happens by chance. It is something that has to be planned for – design data collection strategies, identify the transaction and collection points, and partner with a wide range of people who are data suppliers. The information you get from that is processed and becomes useful as a feedback report to various stakeholders including the suppliers mainly manufacturers, importers and their distributors. IQVIA through the data and analytics information assets that we’ve developed around the world, which we are currently working to develop in Nigeria, can be a ready source of that informed decision-making process. This would enable government to take evidence-based decisions that would help fast track development and prevent policy flip-flops and medicine-afterdeath approaches to issues.
Are our health professionals ready to make the transition into the digital age? Transformation, many times, takes us along with it. If you look at the introduction of what brought digital into mobile, digital as we knew it then was fixed and stationary so at best you had some form of equipment that allowed you digital procession; a desktop, computer, etc. Steve Jobs, who is the founder of Apple did not receive request from any one that we want hand-held, but he looked at people, how we work and how things can be done differently and boldly brought the first of its kind smart digital capabilities into our hands using the smartphone. So something that was already revolutionary enough, the mobile phone, he further revolutionarised it by bringing digital home. Digital as we knew it then was fixed and stationary so at best you had some form of equipment that allowed you digital procession; a desktop, computer, etc.
The same is happening in the healthcare sector. Without asking for it, people are beginning to recognise that having tons of paper files, nobody can find the right file for the patient in two hours and the patient is waiting such a long time before finding their file is not the way to go. Gradually, electronic medical records are creeping in.
The world is such that peers influence one another. As a patient, you see a colleague who has visited a particular clinic and in 30 minutes he is out while you spend three hours in your hospital. You end up asking what the difference with his own is, and he tells you it’s got electronic medical records. The next time you are looking for a hospital, you will look for one that has gone electronic. There are certain global moves that will make people embrace digital, but more importantly is that companies like ours are helping even the conservatives through the HCPSpace that we are introducing to understand digital value and embrace it. There are quite a number of networks in Nigeria that are dedicated to promoting the advantage of digital and we at IQVIA are proud to be leading that charge and creating the right environment for both healthcare practitioners as well as providers of digital technology to come together to improve healthcare practice in Nigeria.
What gaps do you expect the IQVIA HCPSpace to fill in the health sector? One of the opportunities we saw was to look at how new media has helped to bring efficiency to how we work. If you look at Facebook, for instance, if it were to be a geographical expression, it will probably be the biggest continent in the world in terms of the number of people that use Facebook. When you see such a movement that is able to bring people from all over the world to network, you start to see how this can be used for specific purposes. We got the idea that if we are to have a virtual platform that individuals do not have to build by themselves, everyone has its own core areas of competence as well as interests. So if you as a medical doctor or pharmacist start to develop your own digital environment, that is time you could spend delivering better