Innovation Buck Dossey, an expert in digital marketing and audience manager at Adobe, discusses consumer needs in healthcare and the importance of adopting a digital health strategy.  Joining the digital transformation race today means that many companies will have to transform to become digitally agile.  While the topic of digital transformation permeates…

Mexico Cristobal Thompson is the Executive Director at AMIIF (Asociacion Mexicana de Industrias de Investigacion Farmaceutica). The AMIIF represents more than 60 global companies with the aim of contributing to improving health in Mexico through innovative medicine. Here he discusses the new Alma-Ata Declaration that focuses on primary care and work at…

Canada Mark Ware, the Chief Medical Officer of Canopy Growth Corporation, has intensely investigated the effects of cannabinoids, making him perfectly placed to cover this new era of cannabis in healthcare.    I propose that the renaissance of cannabis under varying regulatory frameworks actually represents a paradigm shift in health care, and…

Regulation Chester “Chip” Davis, Jr, the President and CEO of the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) in the United States, discusses the contradictory nature of Trump’s efforts to lower drug prices.    The President has forcefully pledged to provide relief to these patients and their families, but his own trade policy threatens…

Innovation Patient groups oftentimes serve as the authority on a specific disease when it comes to advancing research.   “Without patient perspective, there is no good medical product development,” Rachel Sherman, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner proclaimed during her keynote at last week’s NORD’s Rare Disease & Orphan Products Breakthrough Summit.…

Mexico David Peña Castillo is the President and founder of The Mexican Federation of Rare Diseases (FEMEXER). Here he discusses what makes a patients association. When we find a way to communicate the complexities of rare diseases simply, we can avoid isolating anyone and the potential to uncover important information is…

Biotech Pfizer has teamed up with Bain Capital to launch Cerevel Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company based in Boston that will focus on developing treatments for a number of central nervous system (CNS) disorders. It has almost been a year since Pfizer announced that they were to cease R&D in new neuroscience…

USA After her son was diagnosed with SYNGAP1 – an extremely rare gene mutation – Monica founded Bridge the Gap – SYNGAP Education and Research Foundation to support families of those suffering from the illness and to accelerate the path to better therapies. Here she discusses the importance of community for tackling rare…

Innovation Richie Etwaru is founder and CEO of Hu-manity, whose vision is to empower people to take ownership of their inherent human data.   The pharmaceutical industry has never seen the full end-to-end benefits of a world where explicitly consented data is available. And this can happen without disruption. Everyone can indeed…

Cannabis The opioid epidemic has reached new heights of late, claiming an estimated 40,000 American lives every year. The highly addictive nature of opium-derived medicine is the cause of the rising number of overdoses in the US and Canada. There are companies out there that are working to manufacture a new…

Innovation Meghann Chilcott, Senior Vice President of OrderInsite, discusses the changing role of pharmacists and technicians.   Patients are consumers, and they expect more from pharmacies than a collection of pill bottles. Local pharmacists have seen their roles continually change over recent years due to enhanced technology that allows them better…

Innovation Article contributed by Carla Smith, Executive Vice President of The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for PharmaBoardroom. We must assertively bend the arc of technology towards our patients, clinicians, researchers, and caregivers, and re-humanise the health system. One of the many ways patients are de-humanized in a health…