COVID-19 is something that has changed the entire world in profound ways. You won’t find a single industry in the world that hasn’t been touched in some way by this pandemic. When you look at the pharmaceutical industry, it’s easy to see that things have changed quite a bit due to this virus situation. Read on to further examine the impact of COVID-19 on the pharmaceutical industry.
Rapid Vaccine Development
Perhaps the most obvious way that COVID-19 impacted the pharmaceutical industry is that it caused many to have to push to develop a vaccine. Many of the largest companies have been working to try to come up with a vaccine due to the high demand and absolute need for one. This has led to some pharmaceutical companies working together and everything is going much faster than it normally would. What should take many years to develop is being crunched down into less than one year of development time.
A Shift Toward Personalized Care
Personalized care is something that has been coming for quite some time and many pharmaceutical companies expected this. The pandemic might have simply accelerated some plans for personalized medicine to be developed. Companies will more seriously look into personalized medicine while trying to utilize cutting-edge tech such as machine learning AI. This would have occurred even without the pandemic happening, but timelines have been adjusted.
Telehealth Is More Prevalent
It’s also interesting to note that telehealth is more prevalent and that the pandemic caused the shift to telehealth to come much faster. This does have an impact on the pharmaceutical industry because it changes how doctors are prescribing medicines to patients. Organizations are having to look into adopting new business models in response to this. Many pharmaceutical companies are still in the planning stages of determining what to do about this new normal.
After COVID-19
The one thing that people can agree on is that things aren’t suddenly going to go back to normal once COVID-19 has been dealt with. It isn’t known how long it will take to get this pandemic under control. The creation of a vaccine will make a huge difference, but lingering effects will still cause ripples in many industries. Time will tell what the pharmaceutical industry will look like after COVID-19.