Scalability, the one way to multiply an e-health solution's impact

TL;DR: This article explains why scalability is crucial for digital health and pharma, the challenges to scaling, and how to overcome them with a practical, field-tested checklist. Ideal for teams planning global deployments in 2025.

Scalability: a simple (a pretty one even, isn’t it melodious?) word to describe a critical issue for any business unit looking to turn a project into a cost-effective success.

For pharmaceutical companies and digital health, scalability is both a mean and a goal. A mean, as scaling a solution is indispensable to its sustainability. A goal, as it often is a decisive parameter for a smooth deployment.

In the pharmaceutical industry, the definition of scalability could be the ability to deploy, promote and monitor the same features of an e-health solution in multiple countries, therapeutic areas and languages.

Another one, based on Cambridge dictionary’s definition “The ability of a business or system to grow larger”, could be the capacity of a digital project to function beyond the pilot phase and absorb growing numbers of users and features.

Why is scalability important for the pharma industry? 

Why is scalability such an important parameter to tackle? First, because it’s cost-effective. Developing an e-health solution is still a long road. Scaling one solution across a variety of conditions or countries is a great way to save time, money and energy, and to capitalize on what’s already existing.

Second, it allows affiliates to go faster in deployment. Ensuring the scalability of the project across affiliates is a win-win situation, enabling local entities to leverage global initiatives and adapt them to the specificities of their markets.

Next, scaling one solution allows for a standardization of impact measurement. It generates real life data that can be compared across different markets, which facilitates the utilization of said data.

Finally, scalability allows the perennity and sustainability of a digital health solution, by improving its ROI. Indeed, after Covid, a lot of goodwill and enthusiasm triggered hundreds of POCs and pilots in e-health, but many of them died in drawers or after a few months of existence in pilot phase, due to lack of deployment and users. In all logic, making sure the solution is scalable and providing it to a larger target improves its distribution and return on investment.

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Why is scaling an e-health solution difficult? 

So one question is obvious: why are not all e-health solutions scalable or scaled?

Why is scaling a solution posing such difficulties?

Here are a few answers:

• Developing a solution at global level and then deploying it across different markets may be complicated as each market is different and they are trying to solve different issues for their patient populations
• User-centricity and go-to-market get forgotten. But as digital solutions usage is dependent on patients’ willingness to use them, marketing and user-friendliness are critical
• Regulatory contexts may vary, with different requirements according to countries, which may prevent one solution to meet the legal constraints of multiple markets
• Technical barriers may also arise

Is the situation desperate? Is the industry doomed to develop high-end digital health solutions with 12 users 6 months after launch? We believe not!

Success is already there. For a global pharma company, Observia developed an ePRO (Patient Reported Outcomes) solution, that is now scaled across 18 countries in Europe and Asia, and 4 therapeutic areas. Up and running since 2022, this solution is still growing with 1 new therapeutic area to launch in 2025.

Here are a few recommendations to cure “pilotitis” in your organization and scale in 2025.

How to scale an e-health solution

1. First and foremost: think and plan your deployment strategy from the very beginning of the solution’s design. As developed before, usage is one of the main key success factors of an e-health solution. By thinking ahead about how you will acquire users in your solution will allow you to remove obstacles when launch comes. A few tactics to do so could be to map all parties involved (priority markets and affiliates, key people in each country…) or to find and nurture KOLs that would reinforce the credibility of your solution.
   
   
2. Make simplicity your guiding principle at all levels. One solution won’t be able to address all pain points of all markets, that’s a fact. But trying to solve everyone’s problems will only lead to an overly complex solution. We recommmend to focus on a few simple features that you will be able to push to different audiences. Simple interfaces, simple separated and defined features will allow great agility in local regulatory constraints. As far as UX goes, the same advice still stands: simple, clean UX will limit the need to adapt design to cultural differences.
   
   
3. Include several affiliates from the beginning to collect their feedback and test with them. Remember they will be the ones in charge of deployment at launch: integrating their vision is key to adoption.
   
   
4. From a technical perspective, ensure that development teams are aware from day 1 that the solution has to be thought out to be scalable, as it will impact the data bases management and will require a multi-tenant system.
   
   
5. Map and include regulatory constraints as soon as possible: can everything be hosted in Europe? Are there target markets included in the scope more restrictive than GDPR?

These are general guidelines that will help you plan, design and deploy a scalable solution serenely.

If you need more practical advice, you will find some in our practical checklist, “Scaling an e-health solution, do’s and don’ts”, based on 14 years of experience in the digital health global landscape.

Download the Free Scalability Checklist
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