Our "Meet the Expert" series introduces you to our team of experts around the world. This "behind the curtain" view will help you get to know who we are on a professional and personal level, and highlight how our colleagues work together on our higher purpose to improve patient health and safety throughout the complete product lifecycle.
Meet the Expert: Dana E. Vanderwall, PhD., Senior Director Digital Transformation
What do you do at ProPharma? How does your role support improving the health and safety of patients?
As Senior Director of Digital Transformation, I help customers understand how informatics can transform their business and deliver maximum business benefit. Our practice works with subject matter experts and senior leadership to define assess the current state of lab systems and data, define a Digital Blueprint and develop a clear actionable plan to achieve their vision. We can further support their journey by helping to select the right technologies for their needs and environment and then with the implementation and configuration and validation where needed. We maintain a system agnostic and data-centric view and advise and develop a company’s Data Strategy, implement data standards, then define and roll-out a fit-for-purpose data governance program to maintain the quality and value of the data. Data is the fundamental currency of any pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, or other scientific research-intensive industry. Better access to higher quality data that’s trusted and understood enables new insights, better informed decisions and generally improves efficiency. For patients that means better medicines, sooner, at a potentially lower cost.
What is one lesson you’ve learned in this industry that has most helped you?
To really have the positive impact on science and health the transformation you have to truly understand the job the scientist or other users are trying to do, and how they do that in the pre-transformation state. “Digital Transformation” can bring significant improvement to the informatics workflow and data quality and access, but it can also be quite disruptive. In order to bring those affected along and ensure they gain the benefits the project aims to deliver you have to understand where they are starting from and build on the familiar to bring them somewhere new to help them mentally bridge a new solution and ways of working. Additionally, manual ways of working with data can sometimes have some benefits with the way someone understands data or trends, and these are not always obvious on the surface. If that process and associated spreadsheets are eliminated as part of rolling out a new solution, there has to be an alternative means in that new solution to gain that same insight or that loss can offset gains in other areas and undermine the project.
What do you like best about working with clients?
I’m irrepressibly curious and love to learn, so I really appreciate the opportunity to be exposed to and work with a broad diversity of technologies, companies and especially people. I’m a believer of the old adage that everyone has something to teach you so If one works with, say, 10-20 people at each of 10 companies over the course of the year, that’s a lot of shots on goal!
Describe the biggest challenge facing our clients/industry today. How are we addressing this?
Since I began in the industry almost 30 years ago getting the right data in front of the scientists in way that they can make sense of it and easily derive insights has been a challenge. There have been very significant gains in technologies and visualization techniques, but it’s not a static problem. The technologies and platforms for generating data have constantly increased the speed, volume, diversity and richness of data created, sometimes incrementally, in sporadic leaps in other cases. This increasing complexity has meant that the fundamental challenge of getting the right data in front of the scientists in way that they can make sense of it and easily derive insights stays just at the edge of our industries reach. More recently it’s become clear one of the greatest barriers to many companies’ aspirations for leveraging AI/ML is that their data is not ready for to use. What we see is that in chasing one set of technologies (lab and data creation) with another (software and data infrastructure) it’s easy to overlook the fundamentals. That’s where we can help by developing a foundation and strategy based on a company’s goals, industry best practices, a data centric view, and the understanding of where each data point and context comes from to create digital continuity from planning through experiment/measurement execution to insights.
What value does a client gain by working with ProPharma’s Digital Transformation experts?
The Digital Transformation team is composed entirely of people how who have had lab experience at some point in their career prior to moving to consulting and the deep scientific domain knowledge of the team encompasses the entire value chain: R&D, CMC, Manufacturing & Clinical. To truly understand someone and their and challenges, you have to walk a mile in their shoes- our team have. Similarly, our team also have extensive technology experience, maintain a current awareness of key technology providers and closely monitor for industry trends & disruptors. When we help client map their key laboratory and data capabilities, or select a technology solution, we’ve already done the legwork and background research to have a good understanding what’s likely to meet their requirements and fit in their environment. Knowing the industry trends and best practices and with experience in standards bodies, cross-industry collaborations and consortia we are well placed to work with forward thinking clients to create a blueprint of their future state and an actionable roadmap to get there.
We can translate this experience and knowledge into an efficient consulting engagement and deliver tangible value to a client because we’re working within a framework and methodologies that are proven and repeatable. And this framework provides flexibility to tailor the scope and deliverables to a specific need and situation; this balance between structure and flexibility allows us to create efficient services that deliver precisely the advice and outcomes the client needs.
