How a pharmaceutical giant became a technology company

How a pharmaceutical giant became a tech company

A global pharmaceutical giant partnered with Modus Create over nine years to evolve into a technology-driven platform company. This collaboration delivered major outcomes, including multimillion-dollar savings, fortified security for petabytes of critical data, and a high level of digital transformation maturity.

Our work involved

• Hybrid app development
• Workflow automation with Atlassian
• HTA automation with custom plug-ins
• Cybersecurity assessment
• GitHub Enterprise Cloud migration
• AI and ML
• Direct-to-customer digital platform

Healthcare is at an inflection point.

Emerging technologies are transforming diagnosis, treatment, and preventive care, compelling pharmaceutical companies to rethink their roles in the digital landscape.

Over the past nine years, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical giants has partnered with Modus Create to evolve into a platform company-achieving digital maturity that extends far beyond app development.

This transformation illustrates how digital innovation can permeate every level of an organization, offering a blueprint for other Fortune 500 companies seeking to thrive in the digital era.

So, how did it all begin?

Challenge

Building digital capabilities

In 2015, the pharma company aimed to revolutionize its mobile development strategy across all business units.

The goal was to simplify both the customer experience and technical complexities by adopting hybrid technologies. Maintaining two separate codebases (iOS and Android) was proving to be challenging and expensive. Additionally, it led to an inconsistent user experience across the two versions.

As the pharma company didn’t have experience in hybrid development, it approached Modus Create to rebuild the app. What started as a simple mobile app development project eventually led to a strategic partnership for end-to-end digital transformation.

The first leg of transformation focused on the core foundation of all digital initiatives – user experience.

Phase 1: Enabling user-centric innovation

The success of the first mobile app solidified the pharma company’s belief that preventive care is essential in the digital age, and that mobile apps are a powerful tool for users to take control of their health.

Partnering with Modus Create’s engineers, designers, and product experts, the company developed several mobile applications focused on specific health outcomes. Today, these apps are empowering thousands of users worldwide.

With the “what to build” figured out, the company shifted its focus to “how to build.”

We collaborated with their engineers, designers, and project managers to implement a custom, flexible scrum framework using the Atlassian suite. This move brought a new level of transparency to their operations, aligning teams across different units with strategic priorities.

For a company of tens of thousands, where team members are scattered, this small change had a big impact-boosting collaboration across teams and business units.

One of the pharma company’s priorities was to encourage automation across its operations. We worked together to develop an automation model for HTA (health technology assessment) submissions. HTAs take up significant time and resources, and by automating 70% of the process using custom build solutions as well as plug-ins, we created a scalable solution, compatible with the existing infrastructure. This automation has the potential to reduce the cost of each new drug launched by almost $1MM.

We developed a model to automate 70% of the HTA process with custom plug-ins

Building app development expertise and adopting agile methodologies proved to be a significant milestone in the pharma company’s digital transformation journey.

They were now ready for the next stage.

Phase 2: Adopting a product mindset

With several successful digital initiatives under its belt, the company shifted its focus to strategic technology decisions impacting its products, starting with the most critical piece – security.

The pharma company was one of the pioneers in its industry to use AI throughout the customer journey, including its numerous websites. It used state-of-the-art chatbots running on sophisticated NLP models to answer customer queries. Our cybersecurity experts were tasked to conduct an extensive whitebox security audit of the AI solutions and understand their impact on the overall security posture.

Over a two-month period, the security assessment spanned an AWS data ecosystem in multiple petabytes. Our team worked together with the company’s compliance and security teams to understand the existing infrastructure, compliance rules, and data regulations. This included assessing the security posture across multiple AWS services ranging from S3 to EC2.

Additionally, the team reviewed the implementation of new chatbots, evaluated the results of various threat modeling exercises, and presented a comprehensive report to remediate potential risks and known threats.

The assessment enabled the pharma company to make several improvements in strategic areas such as application design, lifecycle management, QA, rights management, logic segmentation, and resilience implementation.

We also made use of Modus Create’s vibrant partner ecosystem to accelerate innovation. For example, as a GitHub Verified and Professional Services Partner, we migrated over 3,300 of the company’s repositories from TeamForge to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, laying the foundation of a modern DevSecOps culture. We also built and deployed GitHub Actions, integrated the company’s existing tooling into Actions CI/CD pipelines, and provided training on GitHub features and best practices.

Tool integration with GitHub at the center

Our developers became the front-line support team for the pharma company on both GitHub and SonarQube, managing over 20K repos. The revised strategy with GitHub as the core platform for code management increased the company’s speed to market, improved code quality, and created more streamlined automation for its developers.

Impact

Becoming a technology company

The pharmaceutical giant has successfully positioned itself as a frontrunner in healthcare digital innovation.

The adoption of modern product development practices, such as microservices and DevOps, has streamlined its software development lifecycles and improved operational agility.

Today, the company operates a thriving digital innovation center that’s doing groundbreaking research with our engineers in the field of advanced analytics and machine learning. Its journey serves as a blueprint for other Fortune 500 companies seeking to thrive in the digital age and is driving meaningful impact in healthcare and beyond.