Shashank Agarwal is an analytics expert who has over the years channeled his expertise within the pharmaceutical space. He has worked with several Fortune 500 healthcare companies such as CVS Health, AbbVie, and IQVIA. His experience cuts across a wide range of projects in market access, brand analytics, predictive modeling, launch strategy, and multi-channel marketing.
Shashank is an advocate of building integrated and scalable data architectures to drive data-driven strategies across the various units within organizations. He believes that the trend of healthcare services becoming more value-based and personalized has led to an inevitable increase in the use of large data sets such as genomics, EHR, and more complex analytics to measure health outcomes. Additionally, with the increase in telehealth visits and the use of fitness apps, more digital healthcare data is being generated. These trends have led to newer types of integration challenges as data is spread across various verticals.
According to Shashank, to truly maximize the value of data, digital transformation is mandatory within organizations. He predicts that with the sudden surge in telemedicine, digital therapeutics, and advancement in technological interventions, the healthcare space would witness a rise in the amount of data generated within the next 10 to 15 years.
To efficiently manage the increase and diversity of patient data being generated, Shashank emphasizes the paramountcy of building scalable, secure, cost-effective, and seamless cloud-based data lakes. Secondly, formidable collaborations between business, data engineering, and software engineering teams are highly recommended. Thirdly, more emphasis should be placed on automation and value-added insights instead of regular reporting. Finally, the acceptance and adoption of AI and machine learning are integral in analyzing diverse data sets and discovering underlying patterns that would help in improving patient health outcomes.
In his own work across multiple projects in different organizations, Shashank Agarwal has built multiple end-to-end data architectures and supported the development of organization-wide data lakes, automation tools, and statistical methods, which has led to a significant decrease in turnaround time, cycle time, and improved cost effectiveness. He adds that “by deploying modern data architectures and automation methods in my work in the pharma sector, I was able to reduce the turn-around time of some projects from a couple of weeks to hours.”
Healthcare firms are quickly learning that they must leverage big data to remain competitive as their financial success is directly correlated with patient outcomes. The fundamental building elements required to obtain salient business insights are a highly accessible and compliant infrastructure, sophisticated data integration and analytics, and also concentrated healthcare industry experience.
In today’s fast-evolving healthcare environment, healthcare organizations, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences firms that implement these key components to develop well-orchestrated and personalized solutions will not only survive but also thrive.
shashank agarwal
