15 minutes with: Jenna Phillips

How would you describe your role to someone who was unfamiliar with consulting and the life sciences industry?

For the last couple of years, most of my work has been in clinical trial transformation, with a focus on technology and digital capability enablement. So, what that means to a person on the street is that there are a lot of legacy ways of working in use for developing drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics, and they rely on manual, step-by-step processes.

My role is about introducing technology into those processes to improve accuracy and reliability, while making sure those tools are useful for people as they change how they work, and, in turn, add value for clients.

What unique value does PA offer to clients in the life sciences space?

A couple of things make PA well-suited for life sciences. Instead of bringing in a group of new-to-the-industry individuals who have never worked in that space before, we tend to staff our projects with small and senior teams. This gives our clients a lot of confidence and gives us credibility, because we’ve seen these problems before. We know what works. We also know what sounds good on paper, but doesn’t succeed in real life. So, senior insight and expertise is important.

But what really differentiates us from our peers in the industry is our engineering heritage, which tracks back all the way to the 1940s. The way we approach our clients’ challenges is structured in frameworks and logical process steps. It’s specific and replicable across engagements within the same client and the same industry. This means our results are understandable, traceable, and repeatable.

What is the biggest challenge your clients are facing, and how are we helping them to solve it?

There’s a big question around how and when to leverage AI in drug development and clinical development. Clearly, we should, so we can use high-quality data to bring better medicines to patients more quickly. However, the operating model and the ‘people part’ of what AI means for businesses isn’t well understood, and hasn’t been implemented in many organizations in a high-quality way.

More importantly, we’re defining how teams trust the technology and each other to parallelize some of the processes that AI enables. Blending the regulatory question, technology capabilities, and technical feasibility is among the biggest challenges our clients face.

In the project I’m leading at the moment, our client is implementing new technology in a clinical trial setting with multiple different components and highly manual systems. It would be naïve for a consultant to say, “well, let’s just use AI.” Instead, we speak from hands-on experience of having used the tools on the ground in the midst of transformation. This lends credibility to our work, because we’ve done the things that we advise our clients to do. And, it shows that technology is not enough to transform results and ways of working – you need the systems, processes, and frameworks to make it real.

What trends are changing your world of work right now?

One thing is the consumerisation of healthcare devices and medical technology, due to a combination of factors related to high cost of care, and the accessibility of wearable devices like Apple Watches or Oura Rings, and higher consumer awareness of their own health metrics. There’s an opportunity to use consumer-level data to inform treatment decisions, whether through screening or diagnostics and even to personalized care delivery in the future. There’s interesting research underway at big medical centres worldwide to understand how crossover opportunities in diagnostics can accelerate the diagnosis of serious conditions at an earlier stage so people can get treatment sooner.

There is an opportunity in the chronic disease space to leverage this technology and the insight it gathers. Diseases such as cancers, which were previously fatal, can now be managed like a chronic disease, with monitoring delivered from people’s homes via wearables. And PA has expertise in bringing consumer-level data insights into the medical sphere for better diagnosis, prevention, and treatment.

Which of your projects have you found most exciting or surprising?

I have learned so much from my work in clinical development. Understanding the interconnectivity of a clinical research programme has been fascinating from a technology and digital transformation angle, and seeing the interdependencies among collaborators’ data, tools and teams within the programme has driven home the point that success in this industry is a team sport. The trust that colleagues must put in each other and in their systems to run an effective study in due time is fascinating, and underscores the importance of reliable data and decision-making frameworks.

I have also worked with large pharma organizations to define their strategy to use real-world data to support various business needs, including regulatory submissions to the US Food and Drug Administration. Real-world data in combination with clinical trial data can help prove the efficacy of drug and device products as they are used outside of the clinical setting, which lends credibility as they file for recognition. It’s all well and good for products, devices, and drugs to work in the clinic with a small population, but the performance of technology and drugs in the real world is ultimately what’s crucial to long-term health management for patients.

I’ve also been a part of our registries team for a long time, doing interesting work to make registry data more accessible and insightful to healthcare providers, and to the wider industry that’s interested in how certain clinical modalities or practices operate in real-world clinical settings.

What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to work on technology and digital transformation in life sciences?

One of the things that I think is helpful is doing a tonne of reading and writing in the space. I’m a prolific thought leadership writer, and I think it has made the difference in the maturity of my perspective on the life sciences industry. One of the most important capabilities as a consultant is to have an informed point of view about a topic you can then talk about to build credibility with clients in senior operating roles, especially something that’s important to their business. So, a key piece of advice I’d give to new consultants is read as much as you can, develop an opinion, and put it out in the world for someone to interact with and press you on. It’s also helpful in a business development context, because it builds new relationships and develops opportunities for conversations when we can bring a strong, well-informed point of view to our clients – even before they become our clients.

The other thing I would say is don’t sell yourself short as a non-technical person, which was a barrier for me. I dealt with imposter syndrome for years – I thought, why would anyone listen to me about technology transformation or digital? But just like any other subject, practice and learning, asking questions, and watching to learn what others are doing can build ability in a way that does not match conventional training. Particularly in the AI transformation age, when so much is new and rapidly changing, I advise my colleagues and clients all the time to release their expectations of what is or is not possible. If you’re interested in technology, yes, you can be a technologist. It doesn’t need to be part of your job title.

What are your future goals?

Learning how better to use AI tools and technology to deliver outcomes is definitely an ongoing goal for me, keeping up with what’s going on in our industry as it intersects with technology. I’m developing recognised expertise in the wearables device diagnostic space, which grew out of necessity because devices and hybrid drugs are evolving so fast. At the same time, a lot of the folks I work with are very focused on the drug side, so developing a differentiated perspective has been helpful. It means I can identify opportunities to bring new processes and insights to our clients.

I wasn’t always ‘a technology person’. But today, that’s not an option. I encourage everyone to figure it out, and get technical. Having the opportunities to develop my skills from leaders and mentors in the firm, and from our clients, has given me space to learn things I might not have done on my own. Related to that, another goal is to work more with medtech experts like Andy Savarese so I can bring insights from digital transformation to support the work that he and his team do.