Introduction

Digital health technologies are an essential tool for alleviating the strain on global healthcare systems. Yet, there are no guarantees that the technologies will deliver the hoped-for efficiency gains. To realize the promise of digital health, companies need to build robust, collaborative ecosystems that pool the full range of expertise needed to innovate, scale, and sustain digital health solutions.

The term “digital health” covers a wide range of technologies that can make healthcare more efficient, optimize the diagnosis, treatment, and management of conditions, and ultimately enable patients to live longer, healthier lives. A Reuters webinar brought together digital health experts to discuss how pharma companies and other stakeholders can work together to scale the technology. The stakes are high.

“There are a lot of companies that have tried and failed over the last 10 to 15 years, but it has to succeed because otherwise healthcare systems will simply break,” Richard Cassidy, SVP and Head of the RX+ Business Accelerator at Astellas, said. “We have to figure out a way to work together to make it happen.”

How to Build Digital Health Partnerships

The wide range of capabilities needed to develop, deploy, and scale digital health technologies make partnerships essential. Pharma companies have scientific knowledge and experience generating clinical evidence, but may lack expertise possessed by startups that specialize in digital health.

Nipun Jain, Head of Innovation Hubs & Partnerships for International at AstraZeneca, said “innovation does not happen in isolation; it requires all stakeholders to come together.” While the webinar revealed broad agreement on the centrality of partnerships to digital health success, it also showed the challenges of bringing together companies that may have very different cultures and objectives.

“Aligning on a common goal, on objectives, and on the right ways of doing things is often a challenge in creating these ecosystems,” Jain said. “It needs to start with the right objective. Getting that objective defined is the first challenge.”

Cassidy added that all parties in a collaboration need to understand what a project is trying to achieve and be able to link that back to their own business goals. Adrian Gheorghiu, Sustainability-Innovation Coordination Lead, WP 4 Industry Lead, Gravitate Health & Director, Digital Global Client Partner, Pfizer, made the case for putting the patient at the heart of partnerships.

“Digital health partnerships have to be organized around the patient’s well-being and health outcomes, not the other way around,” Gheorghiu said. “You need to frame the problem. What do I want to solve? Make a problem statement and then organize the value chain around that.”

Why Scaling Tools is Critical to Success

Technologies need to scale to have the sort of healthcare-saving impact envisaged by Cassidy. Haider Allegory, General Partner at Allegory Capital, said pharma companies can suffer from a “death by pilot effect” that causes many projects to end before making an impact. Speaking from his perspective as an investor, Allegory encouraged companies to think hard about how to scale initiatives.

“We say any engagement program that you build that has a million patients is going to have an impact. If you have a patient engagement program that has 3,000 patients doing a retrospective clinical trial, that is great for those 3,000 patients. My question will be how do we get to 1 million?” Allegory said. “That is usually where we get stuck in the conversation.”

Jain discussed how AstraZeneca is tackling the scalability challenge. Acknowledging that something that is easy to do for thousands of people can be hard to do at scale, Jain said that AstraZeneca has created a network of 17 innovation hubs to launch solutions that have impacted millions of patients globally. Jain’s successes include using AI to identify the risk of lung cancer in routine chest x-rays in 25 countries.

“We are able to do that at scale, but we are only able to do that at scale when it's rooted in science, it's rooted in evidence,” Jain said. “We are partnering with the right ecosystems and then we are creating value in terms of supporting clinicians to triage their patients and not replace them.”

What AI Means for Digital Health

Jain’s example points to the potential for AI to enable the deployment of digital health interventions at global scale. Roberta Pandolfi, Analytics Innovation strategist, Global Clinical Development & Operations at Boehringer Ingelheim, discussed the state of AI and how to maximize the impact of the technology.

“AI digitalization is here to stay. It’s not going to be the future; actually, it’s already the present,” Pandolfi said. “The most important thing in order to be effective is to use AI and digitalization with coaches and especially to educate our people. It's not magic. It's something that takes some time and effort.”

Cassidy flagged specific training and education requirements for large language models such as ChatGPT. The models enable people without specialist knowledge to interrogate complex datasets. Putting that power in the hands of more people creates opportunities to improve efficiency but, Cassidy said, it also creates risks. People need to learn how to ask models questions to get reliable results, Cassidy said.

Gheorghiu shared the other panelists’ enthusiasm for AI and belief in the need to proceed with caution, explaining that the technology “needs to be really well managed” to avoid increasing the legal, ethical, and compliance risks that companies face.

Conclusion

The digital health sector is at the leading edge of technology but its success hinges on people, not a new device, software, or other high-tech breakthrough. Human connections will inform whether companies with very distinct cultures and objectives can find the common ground needed to forge partnerships that make a virtue of their differences. Equally, it is people who will shape and be shaped by AI

As Pandolfi put it, it is “the human being that has to be there, has to be properly educated, and has to be a part of a big orchestration.” The orchestration of tech startups, pharma companies, patients, and other stakeholders is key to realizing the potential of digital health. Unifying the groups behind common goals will be demanding, but the webinar revealed widespread commitment to rising to the challenge.

Contributors

Roberta Pandolfi, Analytics Innovation strategist - Global Clinical Development & Operations, Boehringer Ingelheim

Richard Cassidy, SVP and Head of the RX+ Business Accelerator, Astellas

Nipun Jain, Head of Innovation Hubs & Partnerships for International, AstraZeneca

Haider Allegory, General Partner, Allegory Capital

Adrian Gheorghiu, Sustainability-Innovation Coordination Lead, WP 4 Industry Lead, Gravitate Health & Director, Digital Global Client Partner, Pfizer

Discover more on this topic at Pharma 2026 (22 - 24 April, 2026 , Barcelona) - the global collaborative network for leading pharma innovators. Visit the website here.

“If you're just sending the same experience to absolutely everyone in all moments, you’re not really able to move the needle,” Clark said. “You’re also probably not communicating your message appropriately.”

Yet, Clark also cautioned marketers against overdoing personalization. Companies can segment HCPs at a high level, eliminating the cost and complexity of creating many versions of a message while still driving effective communication. Clark said the cost and complexity of precise personalization is more justified for campaigns targeting patients and caregivers, when nuance is needed to address specific challenges.

The comment points to the need for a considered approach to omnichannel personalization. Clark and other experts on the webinar identified the first steps companies can take, discussing three key actions for getting started with personalization and maximizing the impact of campaigns.

Start small, measure and expand

Aletta Brandle, Team Lead Omnichannel Excellence at Boehringer Ingelheim, outlined a tiered approach to personalization, starting with simply dynamically inserting the physician’s name or sending an email based on material they engaged with in the past. At the other end of the complexity scale, teams are building full campaigns based on segmentation.

Clark recommends starting small and doing “something measurable quickly.” CRM is the easiest channel to start with personalization, Clark said, because of the one-to-one data connections. As the first project gets underway, teams should be thinking about the internal capabilities, technologies, and investments that will be needed for more ambitious campaigns.

Scott Fasser, Solutions Principal at Point B, made a similar point, explaining that “email is one of the easiest places to do personalization out of the gate” because of the potential to combine templates with information in CRM systems. Fasser added that real-time personalization of content, an approach used for years in e-commerce, offers another starting point for pharma companies.

“We did an omnichannel survey of life science companies and fully 93% are not using a next best action capability. That's table stakes in most of the other industries,” Fasser said. “Really thinking about how to use predictive analytics and AI to pick up that next best thing that you can deliver in a really easy way is a pretty low bar and you can easily measure that as well to see what the lift is.”

Brandle discussed her work to move beyond simple personalization by planning out tactics and messages by segment and automating the delivery of content. Pharma is less experienced than some industries at creating omnichannel customer experiences, but Brandle sees no regulatory barriers or knowledge gaps that would stop drugmakers from delivering more complex personalized campaigns.

“I think the most important thing, the key to success, in these instances of personalization is having your segmentation criteria defined. Who should be receiving what and why? What are the objectives? What is the end goal?” Brandle said.

Identify leading and lagging metrics

When assessing objectives, Brandle advocates for moving away from vanity metrics such as views and towards analyses of what phases of a campaign a user has engaged with. Identifying users who have and have not engaged with all parts of a campaign can empower companies to recalibrate their field forces to focus on HCPs who are yet to be fully informed.

Clark still sees a role for simple media metrics such as click-through rates as leading indicators. While the ultimate goal may be to increase patient starts, such metrics are lagging indicators that cannot provide early signals about the performance of the campaign.

Tyler Redelico, Director of Omnichannel and Content Strategy, AstraZeneca, said “lagging indicators are a bit tougher to measure” and vary depending on the targeted disease. Medical teams “don't have the luxury of looking at sales data,” Redelico said, and instead analyze changes at the drug class level or in the ordering of diagnostic tests to evaluate the impact of campaigns.

Such metrics lag even the prescription sales data received by commercial teams and are only applicable to some products. Medical teams cannot easily measure the impact of unbranded campaigns on drugs without competitors because they need to look at a drug class, Redelico said. In that situation, having a diagnostic that is unique to the drug can provide insights into the impact of a campaign.

AI could address some of the challenges medical teams face when trying to assess the impact of their campaigns. Applying AI to medical science liaison sentiment data “would be a game-changer if it works,” Redelico said, but “in medical it’s tough because we can only look at so much data on claims.”

Establish cross-functional teams

While AI could enhance parts of omnichannel marketing, unlocking the full potential of personalization is more about people and processes than tools and technology, as Fasser explained.

“Technology is the easy part,” Fasser said. “It’s really about how you bring alignment across different teams, how you bring measurements that people can respond to, how you bring a process that reduces friction in the overall flow of work.”

Agreeing, Redelico said “everyone should be working cross-functionally.” The approach makes campaigns more efficient internally and more effective, Redelico said, and “less noisy” for HCPs. The first step is for medical and commercial teams to meet and agree to work together, something that does not always happen when timelines are tight. Once an agreement is in place, teams can focus on their strengths.

“Dividing and conquering, even within a unified initiative, based on what we’re best at is important,” Redelico said. “Medical is great at creating deep scientific content, typically things that are longer form, and commercial has years of history in targeting and making things that grab attention. That partnership, where we're both working on what we're best at, is a best practice.”

Conclusion

Personalized, well-executed omnichannel campaigns can drive commercial success. The pharma industry is evolving to establish the strategic vision, cross-functional collaboration, and technology that is needed to meet the advancing expectations of HCPs and patients. Companies that rise to the challenge will deliver more relevant and impactful experiences to change behavior and improve outcomes.

Contributors
Aletta Brandle, Team Lead Omnichannel Excellence, Boehringer Ingelheim

Ben Clark, Director of Omnichannel Strategy, Jazz Pharmaceuticals

Scott Fasser, Solutions Principal, Point B

Tyler Redelico, Director, Omnichannel & Content Strategy, AstraZeneca

Moderator: Jonathan Elliot, Lead Editor, Reuters Events Pharma

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