Why Digital Transformation in Pharma Is Slow (and How to Finally Start) 

Imagine a world where Uber is really bad. The familiar “Where to?” bar is gone. You have to manually find your own location on a map and then pinpoint your destination.  

The app won’t calculate your fare either. You just know the price per kilometer and must do the math to figure out the cost yourself.  

The pick-up point bar no longer exists, and you have to call your driver to understand where they’re parked. And to make things worse, if you still can’t find the car, you call again, wondering if you’ll ever meet. 

So, would you still use Uber like that? Probably not.  

People now get the right information at the right moment and have zero tolerance for repetition or mental drain on mundane tasks. Pharmaceutical companies must embrace digital transformation to meet these expectations. 

What Is Digital Transformation in Pharma? 

Digital transformation in the pharma industry is a shift in mindset and strategy that uses digital tools to simplify or improve operations and products, enhancing experiences for life sciences professionals, HCPs, and patients. Transformation can be big-picture across the company or focused on specific processes. 

For example, many leading pharma companies adopt AI to reuse their top-performing content and ensure it follows guidelines religiously. This often means training teams to confidently tag content in a digital asset management (DAM) system and quickly assemble it from modules. 

Major Benefits of Digitalization in Pharma

Digital transformation offers pharma companies tangible opportunities, like: 

Improved engagement 

If it takes a village to get your product into a patient’s medicine cabinet, you need digital experiences that influence the whole village. In life sciences, that means engaging HCPs, payors, and patients around a drug’s safety and effectiveness.  

Digital solutions let you deliver personalized content tailored not just in message, but in timing and channel mix for each audience.  

Getting HCPs excited about new products also requires creativity. While technology like AI and machine learning can’t generate genuine creativity on their own, they can scale original content to meet growing HCP and patient demands and needs. 

Better compliance 

Compliance feels like a roadblock to digital transformation. Many life sciences teams stick to “better safe than sorry,” but digital tools can actually make compliance faster and less painful. 

For instance, modern AI can spot MLR errors, suggest fixes, and help your content maintain consistent quality, as well as pass review the first time. There are also tools that make modular content easier to roll out, cutting down how often you even need formal approval.  

Cost optimization 

Digital transformation in life sciences always comes with an investment, but it often pays off with higher ROI. By adopting modern tools and platforms, you: 

• remove redundant, cumbersome operations 
• reduce manual work 
• prevent revisions and double work 
• avoid unnecessary MLR cycles 
• get more quality content sooner 
• launch faster 

Successful implementation and optimization of the entire content pipeline inevitably drives costs down. 

Why Is Pharma Industry Lagging in Digital Transformation? 

It is not that pharma businesses are inherently resistant to change. It’s that multiple bottlenecks make digital transformation painfully slow. 

Digital skills shortage  

The biggest reason life sciences brands shy away from modern digital tools is a lack of skills and talent. Interestingly, 43% of stakeholders say the demand for new technology is growing faster than the supply of specialists who can support it.  

Source: Global Data 

Large pharmaceutical firms feel this gap the most. They have more processes and operations to digitize and control to keep everything running. Smaller companies, in contrast, tend to have more agile business models and often outsource to access the expertise they lack. 

“Perfect product trap” 

Companies that develop differentiated drugs for high-burden diseases often assume they don’t need sophisticated marketing tools to drive strong sales. On the one hand, there is a certain logic to this. When a drug is a medical breakthrough and delivers outstanding patient outcomes, HCPs are unlikely to avoid prescribing it just because the brand’s emails are not informative enough.  

But even these pharmaceutical businesses need to consider challenges related to prescription barriers and how early they can get in front of providers. Digital tools help teams reach HCPs sooner and at lower cost, which is essential even for breakthrough therapies. 

Organizational silos 

Digital transformation depends on free data flow. For example, implementing an omnichannel approach requires data to move from CRM to marketing automation to content experience platforms. When teams are siloed, data analytics and information don’t travel, and digital initiatives stall. 

According to a recent GlobalData survey, 36% of respondents say organizational silos are holding back digitalization efforts. When each department follows its own workflows, adopting new technology or implementing digital innovations become an uphill battle. Teams lack unified standards and clear ownership.  

Compliance fears

Compliance is often called a major barrier to digital innovations in the pharmaceutical sector. As Pavlo Klymenko, Head of Omnichannel at Viseven, says, “In pharma, people are afraid to move. If the topic is new, it’s better not to touch it. If the channel is unfamiliar, it’s better to wait. If there’s uncertainty, you’d better say no. That fear is expensive. Not in penalties, but in missed opportunities.”  

Many brands hesitate because they expect long approval cycles, MLR reworks, and rising costs. Yet, compliance is just one item on a checklist. Instead of questioning whether something is possible, teams should focus on how to implement it safely into your business models. 

Risk-averse culture 

Ironically, the higher an organization’s digital maturity, the fewer innovative initiatives it dares to try. At some point, everything works well enough and only needs to be replicated and controlled.  

People stop questioning their operational efficiency, processes, and approaches, and the entire pipeline becomes safe but motionless. Staying in the comfort zone can bring results for a while, but in the long run it makes it difficult for these brands to catch up. “In fact, being a laggard can cost pharmaceutical companies two to three times more,” Pavlo opines. 

How to Start Your Digital Transformation Journey 

Now that you understand the potential barriers or perhaps recognize some of the challenges from your own experience, we can focus on what to do next. 

Understand your ambition 

Digital transformation is not a fancy word for implementing AI. It is about understanding your strategic priorities and building a solid plan that empowers change without harming organizational health.  

To define your goal, start by asking yourself, “What is happening in my industry that might affect our company?”, “What digital solutions are competitors adopting in response?”, and “What can we improve to deliver better experiences for HCPs and patients?” 

Upskill your workforce or outsource 

Hiring new specialists is not always the best option, since the talent pool is limited and bringing new people in can be costly. Besides, they will still need onboarding and training to adapt to your organization. If you opt for in-house teams, you may want to invest in upskilling your current employees.

Another viable solution is outsourcing. Reliable vendors can offer custom solutions and consulting support. Viseven provides 2–3-year plans with clear milestones and responsibilities for smooth execution. We also deliver training and hands-on experience, so your team can take the driver’s seat once our work is done. 

Take baby steps 

Do not try to boil the ocean by rolling out innovation across the entire enterprise. Start small. Pick one process or one workflow. Test your idea and see what happens. It is far easier and less costly to learn and adjust when the scope is manageable.  

Big digital transformation pharma plans may seem exciting on PowerPoint slides until you run the numbers or try to get teams to change their workflows. So, it is better to start with changing few digital operations, creating a proof of concept (POC) and a minimal viable (MVP) product and see what gives measurable outcomes and what does not, without draining your budget or your team. 

Invest in change management 

Many brands adopt new technologies, but very few make them part of their employees’ daily routine. Change management is often treated as an afterthought or a nice-to-have. Yet, innovation without change management is not a transformation. It is chaos with a deadline. Teams feel overwhelmed by constant change and do not clearly understand how to use new tools in daily work.  

Change management gives structure and clarity. As Cecilia Baeza Castro, Head of Change Management at Viseven, puts it: “When teams see the path, resistance disappears.” Global teams uncover their specific needs, while local teams figure out what they did not know they needed. Everyone gains clarity on ownership, which workflows to introduce first, and where technology can speed up work. 

Pharma Marketing Digitalization Trends 

You hear about these innovations at industry events. They move the needle for the entire sector and help early adopters gain market share and cut costs. 

Agentic AI 

AI agents are artificial intelligence tools that complete tasks with minimal human input. They understand user queries, grasp complex context, make decisions, and learn to meet expectations over time.  

By 2028, Gartner predicts organizations that automate 80% of customer-facing processes with AI agents will outperform their peers. 

Forbes calls 2025 the start of their era, and Reuters reports companies are finally seeing financial gains. The shift is clear: instead of ‘let’s pour money in and hope it works,’ it’s now ‘wow, our profits are climbing.’ 

Pharma marketers rely on agentic AI to connect with HCPs and patients faster. Case in point: our AI agent, eVa, creates content based on approved assets in your DAM, so you avoid extra MLR cycles. If nothing relevant exists in the DAM, eVa can generate fresh assets that will require MLR approval.  

Before anything goes to formal review, eVa checks these new materials for errors and inconsistencies. This keeps the chance of MLR-driven delays close to zero.  

Full automation sounds exciting, but removing humans from the process can misfire in the pharmaceutical industry. Our team positions eVa as an enabler, not a replacement for human judgment, experience, or cultural intuition. 

Experience orchestration 

Digital transformation is not a fancy phrase for adopting as many tools as possible. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t need more standalone products. It needs a connected ecosystem of tools that lets data flow freely. When everything is interconnected, you get your task completed end-to-end. 

Let us give you an example of how it works in practice.  

At an event, a MedRep uses our Lexi, an event coordinating tool powered by artificial intelligence, to capture consent and HCP data. Everything flows directly into a CRM system. After the event, the rep can use eVa Agent to quickly create a compliant follow-up using the gathered data collection.  

If engagement dips, it signals a good time for an in-person visit. Before the meeting, an rep visit simulator with AI avatars (currently in development) helps the rep prepare by generating realistic questions or objections the provider might raise. Each potential question is tied to the provider’s persona stored in the CRM. 

You might wonder, “What if we don’t want to buy every tool from one provider?” Even then, it’s crucial that every tool you use can be easily merged into your tech ecosystem. 

No-code content platforms 

Waiting for developers slows you down. More than 50% of life sciences marketers need new content every two months. So, there’s no time for back-and-forth.  

No-code content platforms let users create content without coding skills by dragging and dropping elements like texts, images, buttons, or footnotes. This approach helps brands launch fast and concentrate more on content itself, rather than tech issues or team communication.  

With eWizard, marketing teams can independently build eDetailers, emails, landing pages, banners, messenger ads, briefs, websites, and even video projects. The content experience platform also offers pharma companies low-code functionality, so those with coding knowledge can experiment with more complex layouts and interactivity. 

Committing to Change 

Digital transformation is an organizational change that takes time, money, and elbow grease. You need a clear vision, the right tools, and a workforce that’s ready to upskill. You also need to shift your organizational culture, so innovation sticks, becomes part of daily routines, and delivers the profit lift you expect.  

It is just as important to make sure your new tools communicate, and no data gets lost as employees switch between apps. Building a tech ecosystem where data flows freely is always the smarter move if you want to achieve better compliance, minimize double work, speed up delivery, and offer more value to your audience.