Moving beyond the pandemic – 2022 and the new frontiers in healthcare

The dynamic nature of the Covid-19 crisis has drastically transformed the healthcare industry landscape. As the pandemic continues, the industry is swinging back and forth between crisis and opportunities.

There is a compelling need to optimize the efficiency and efficacy of complex and critical lab operations for testing. Further, proactive government policies have put the spotlight on improving healthcare outcomes in India. The emphasis on research and other essential areas in biotech, like cell and gene therapy and precision medicine, will continue to be important levers in setting a resilient healthcare ecosystem.

Thermo Fisher Scientific continues to play an industry-leading role in response to the pandemic. We have been intensely focused on developing advanced and reliable diagnostic testing capabilities and supporting the development, production, and distribution of vaccines and therapies.

Globally, we increased our R&D investment to USD 1.4 billion in 2021 to bring groundbreaking new technologies to serve our customers better. In addition, the company continues to leverage strategic collaborations that allow us to partner and support customers in the pharma, healthcare, and biotech space. These partnerships will play a pivotal role in bringing life-changing therapies to market, benefitting patients worldwide.

The pandemic has brought to the forefront the role of innovation in expanding scale, improving access to care, and making healthcare products and services more affordable. There is a renewed focus to create a digitally connected environment to automate and accelerate science. This has enabled scientists to make revolutionary breakthroughs and has allowed businesses to work more efficiently than ever during the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital enablers, such as AI, machine learning, virtual reality, digital analytics, and process automation are central to creating more agile research and development processes.

Thermo Fisher has been developing solutions to connect different software systems and laboratory instruments to provide a workflow engine for laboratory processes. These technologies help customers to orchestrate and automate workflows, store data from multiple business systems in one location, monitor experiments in real time, and visualize and manage data to derive meaningful insights.

At Thermo Fisher, we are also enabling intelligent inventory and resource-management systems to help customers with a vendor-agnostic platform for laboratory orchestration.

Finally, our investments in building digital capabilities, such as Labatar, an immersive tech-based platform that facilitates training and product demonstrations, and the On the Go mobile app that leverages data to help customers get relevant and customized product recommendations based on their workflows, empower customers to make more informed decisions. These investments allow us to be more customer-focused while driving continued growth for the company.

As we continue through the third wave, establishing robust testing facilities, surveillance systems to monitor the progression and spread of the disease, building local production facilities, and embracing digital transformations will significantly help the industry to fulfill the emerging healthcare requirements at a much faster pace.

In addition, business model innovation across the value chain of manufacturing, distribution, and marketing can generate significant benefits to all stakeholders, including patients and customers.

Moving toward new horizons
The pandemic continues to provide a remarkable opportunity to reimagine and recalibrate business strategies. Moving ahead, it is crucial to look beyond the immediate crisis response and consider other imperatives to be better prepared for future outbreaks.

At Thermo Fisher, we are well-positioned to implement new strategies, continue developing innovative solutions at an accelerated pace, and stay committed to fulfill our mission, which is to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner, and safer.