#PractitionerLevelConfidence
Share this blog
24 Oct 2025
What if the way healthcare works today is just a fraction of what it could be?
In a world where entertainment platforms can anticipate what we want to watch next, and travel apps can stitch entire journeys together in a single click, it’s only a matter of time before patients expect the same seamless, intelligent experiences in their healthcare journey. This shift is pushing life sciences organizations to rethink how they capture, connect, and act on data as part of a continuous, intelligent ecosystem. At the heart of this transformation lies a single idea: connected care.
At the Indegene Digital Summit 2025, Ashish Sharma from Novartis discussed how the industry is moving closer to that reality by overcoming inherent data challenges. Let’s discover how.
Industry shifts paving way for connected care
What was once based on standardized, episodic interventions is moving toward more precise, personalized, and continuous care. This shift is being shaped by the same digital experiences that patients already encounter in their everyday lives through consumer apps. And it’s natural for patients to expect the same level of intelligence and integration in their healthcare journey.
Several trends are defining this transition:
Personalization takes center stage: Precision medicine is expanding, powered by a growing volume of unstructured multimodal and genomics data being stitched together. Like Netflix or Spotify anticipate preferences, data will increasingly guide predictive, individualized care.
Patients expect seamless, connected experiences: Patients want access to their own and tangential data to shape personalized care plans, building toward the health wallet concept.
Care is moving closer to patients: Direct-to-patient models and remote therapy monitoring are shifting how care is delivered beyond traditional clinical settings.
Diagnostics enter the home: Self-testing kits and automated devices are moving diagnostics and monitoring into the home, and creating new streams of patient-generated data.
IoT is redefining data flows: IoT and device/wearable data are generating large volumes of unstructured information that must be filtered to separate signal from noise, while allowing different systems to work together securely.
Transparency and AI accelerate innovation: Demand for data sharing, privacy safeguards, and cost transparency is rising. Since 2016, 40–60% of FDA patents have featured AI, with synthetic data and patient twins playing an increasing role.
How to build the foundation for connected care
The promise of connected care doesn’t rest on trends alone. It depends on whether organizations can turn a complex, fragmented data landscape into a trusted, scalable data foundation. The way forward is anchored in a few clear imperatives listed below.
Prioritize what matters
As compute costs increase, not every use case can or should be scaled. Making deliberate choices ensures resources are directed toward the highest-value areas.
Invest early in trusted data
Centralizing and cleaning data upfront creates a solid base for AI and GenAI . This reduces future time and cost spent on preparing data for every new use case.
Adopt scalable platforms
Cloud options have expanded beyond AWS and Azure to include Palantir, Salesforce Health Cloud, and Veeva Health Cloud. These platforms offer the flexibility to integrate new data sources without rebuilding core infrastructure.
Strong foundations enable speed
A single, trusted data layer simplifies scaling and accelerates model deployment. This allows organizations to adopt AI faster and more efficiently.
How a global pharma operationalized this vision
The speaker explained how Novartis applied these imperatives through a structured, layered approach inspired by Netflix.
Just as Netflix categorizes and personalizes content, they built a data fabric and mesh that allowed each functional domain to maintain its own access controls and privacy while contributing to a common foundation.
On top of this, an information lifecycle management layer was created with data catalogs, lineage tracking, and around 33,000 quality checks to ensure the data was indexed, compliant, and easy to discover.
This was followed by a productized data+AI layer that transformed raw data into analytics-ready, GenAI-ready, and model-ready products, creating a single source of truth for decision-making.
Finally, an application and insights layer enabled different tools and interfaces to access the same trusted data, ensuring consistent answers whether through natural language queries or dashboards.
Looking ahead: The future of connected care
The future of connected care will be defined by how seamlessly patients, providers, and insurers interact within a shared, real-time ecosystem. The speaker illustrated this through three key personas, each playing a critical role in how care is experienced, delivered, and financed.
What life sciences leaders need to know
Leaders must recognize that success depends on strong foundations, not just advanced tools. Prioritization will be essential as compute costs grow. Trusted, well-structured data will determine the speed and accuracy of AI adoption. Moreover, interoperable platforms will be critical to connect fragmented systems. And as patients, providers, and insurers come together in real-time ecosystems, governance, compliance, and agility will define who leads this change and who follows.
