What role does Roche Information Solutions play in the broader footprint of the company?
Information Solutions is a unit within our diagnostics division where we are regrouping all our digital health assets. Its goal is to offer clinical decision support, digitally derived and data driven insights, digitized clinical workflows and patient centric management disease solutions. Since the early 2000's we have been focusing on precision medicine as we have seen how the rise of genomics drove the emergence of therapies that pre-identify if patients can benefit from a certain treatment. The next iteration of this step can be witnessed today through the insights that are deriving from the decontextualization of different data points generated by patients themselves. All this evolution is going to lead to a preventative space where we are going to be able to predict conditions in a much earlier time frame.
Since diagnostics is a technical business, Roche has been active in software development for more than 30 years. At first, we were only offering support to analyzers by orchestrating their workflows but soon we expanded into supporting patients directly. In this sense, digitization starts in early development when we are looking at digital signals to identify patients and to measure their progress in neurodegenerative diseases. These unique insights are an important pillar on which we can continually expand to further personalize our offering.
Technology is now mingling with personalized care in a harmonious manner; is this an inflection point in the healthcare business?
There are several reasons that lead me to believe that we are at an inflection point in precision medicine. Because it is a highly regulated environment, the healthcare industry always opted to adapt technologies only when they were completely defined. Fortunately, today the sector has finally reached a certain level of maturity in handling data in a secure and anonymized manner and, thus, we are now seeing a boom in tech related solutions. Furthermore, the pandemic and the remoteness that ensued unlocked a variety of digital tools that were rapidly adopted due to the stretched resources of the entire medical sector. Last but not least, the depths of the clinical understanding of diseases arrived to a point where clinicians are showing an increased openness in using digital solutions to augment their decision-making process.
At an internal level, AI is playing an important role in extracting unstructured data in a structured way, especially when it comes to digitizing clinical guidelines and making them available to doctors.
In addition to these, we are also using artificial intelligence to further educate algorithms so as they become more agile in providing reliable results. However, the opportunity to help patients move from a treatment-based system to a prevention-driven one is definitely the superior goal we aim to achieve through these new technologies.
Sharing personal data is a highly sensitive subject for the general public; do you bear these worries in mind in your operations?
Roche has always been committed to very high medical standards so the privacy of the patient data and the security of the products we deploy are of utmost importance. Moreover, from a life science organization's perspective, we cannot really derive benefit from knowing who is the patient behind the data set. Instead, we are building upon this information in order to make better decisions for other patients that have similar characteristics. From a patient's point of view, giving access to your information is a sort of a pay it forward system through which helping others with your own medical data finally comes back to you in the form of better diagnosis.
What are the main objectives you would like to achieve in the coming few years?
Helping patients in need is the core of our mission in this industry and this is why we must approach all endeavors with consideration and integrity. It comes to mind an especially fond memory of a patient who suffered from complex cancer throughout his childhood. Fortunately, we have been able to identify the right treatment options and now he has emerged to become a student who lives a healthy life. This inspiring story pushes us to further make such impact available for more patients in the area of oncology as well as neurodegenerative and cardiometabolic diseases.
