Josh Hanson is the Director of Global Digital Business Development and Licensing at Sanofi, where he fosters meaningful relationships to source digital health partnerships and leads deal execution to ensure long term productive partnerships that deliver innovative solutions. The Pulse sat down with Josh to discuss how Sanofi is leveraging digital solutions across a wide variety of applications.

Josh Hanson, Director of Global Digital Business Development and Licensing

Pulse: For background, can you provide an overview of Sanofi’s digital strategy?

Josh Hanson: I would need hours to describe everything going on at Sanofi! Overall, Sanofi’s digital strategy spans every global business unit and nearly the entire pharma value chain.

More specifically, we have ongoing work in drug discovery and development (artificial intelligence), clinical trials (patient finding, digital platforms for regulatory submissions), multichannel engagement (right patient/provider via the right channel at the right time), virtual care models for chronic conditions, digital therapeutics (drugs+ and Dtx), e-commerce (to reach our consumer healthcare customers) and on and on.

Of course, individual initiatives are at very different stages of maturity, with some piloting their way to find scalable solutions and others already deeply embedded into the everyday business of how teams work.

Pulse: How do you find companies to work with on these strategies?

JH: There’s no one way a partnership starts. Sanofi is a very large place and often individual teams find initial success working with a company. In this case, there is a great opportunity to elevate the relationship to an enterprise level and do much more together.

In other instances, we proactively seek out partners based on known business challenges by finding them through our own professional network or the networks of our Innovation Partners (for example, Plug and Play, MassChallenge, the venture investor community, tech companies, etc.). In addition, they can evolve from long-standing vendors who want to work on solving new problems together.

Pulse: You’ve mentioned the word “partner” a lot. What makes a partner a partner?

JH: The most promising uses of digital technology will take years to fully mature in pharma. To name a few, validating digital biomarkers, utilizing real world evidence to its full potential, and establishing go-to-market strategies for digital therapeutics all require long-term experimentation and hard work.

Partners aren’t vendors providing a service to us. These are companies with whom we work side by side to develop a solution, where each party contributes capabilities, technology, and funding. For these problems, the requirements are unknown and the specifications are still coming into focus. Off-the-shelf solutions just don’t exist. Therefore, we must shift the relationship’s focus from ‘vendor” to ‘partner’. The endgame shifts from “best price” to “best relationship” and from “transactional” to “relational” and the economic model often shifts from “fee for service” to “outcomes based”.

Tactically, partnerships include some unique operational and contractual pieces. It’s common to establish Joint Steering Committees with senior executives to: guide and adjust the roadmap; assign dedicated alliance management resources to ensure structure, goals, ways of working and metrics are met; and provide access to Sanofi’s unique assets (people, IP, domain expertise, etc.). The end result often results in intellectual property and/or licensing of that intellectual property.

Pulse: How do you set metrics for success when entering into a partnership and measure the success of the outcomes of the partnership?

JH: We have lots of tools in this toolbox. For short-term pilots, success is often limited to a few simple metrics that we can get a signal on very quickly: customer adoption, quality of an analysis, operational impact, outcomes improvement, etc. At this stage, we are also evaluating our partner’s ability to execute and problem solve with our teams.

Once we move beyond a pilot and start working at scale, the KPI’s also scale. Investments are backed with more robust business cases and have the traditional operational key performance indicators of cost saving targets and/or revenue generation projections.

Pulse: What advice do you have for existing or nascent digital health companies looking to take a first step with a pharma company?

JH: Do your homework by tuning in to our corporate communications. Large corporations have dedicated communication teams who work very hard to tell the world what the company’s strategy is. Every press release is fully vetted and behind every initiative mentioned (even if it’s only a single mention) there is most likely already a team of people (with budget) working to execute it. Comb through earnings calls, SEC filings, and press and then explicitly tie your pitch to the specific initiatives you find. Not only will this make it easier to get your foot in the door, it will also give you a much higher probability of gaining momentum.

Interviewed by Michele Dragoescu, February 2020