Healthcare Industry Case Study
/ Pfizer ImprovesProductivityand Collaboration with Scientific Data Integration Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Healthcare—Life sciences and pharmaceuticals
Customer Profile
Headquartered in New York, New York, Pfizer is a global pharmaceutical company with employees in 45 countries. The firm applies science and resources to improve the health and well-being of patients worldwide.
Business Situation
To improve productivity and access to information, Pfizer needed to integrate its document repository system with its data automation system.
Solution
Pfizer contracted withAccelrys to develop the Pipeline Pilot Bridge for Microsoft SharePoint, allowing users to access Pipeline Pilot data through the familiar Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 interface.
Benefits
- Increased productivity thanks tointegrated systems
- Improved search capabilities
- Better collaboration
Leslie Sloan, Senior Director, Pfizer
Discovery in the pharmaceutical industry involves successful collaboration and socialization focused onappropriate data that is distributed across the enterprise. Not long after Pfizer implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for its document organization and collaboration needs, the company saw a need to integrate that system with its Pipeline Pilot data automation system. Pfizer contracted with Accelrys, the maker ofPipeline Pilot, to develop an integration solution.Now, all 110,000 Pfizer employees can access Pipeline Pilot through their SharePoint sites, helping usersincrease productivity, enhance collaboration, and potentially speed time-to-market.
Situation
For more than 150 years, biopharmaceutical firm Pfizer has applied science to the discovery, development, and manufacture of medicines for people and animals. The firm’s diversified global healthcare portfolio includes biologic and small molecule medicines and vaccines, as well as nutritional products and many of the world’s best-known consumer products. With headquarters in New York and nine distinct business units across the globe, Pfizer employees needed an effective way to store, organize, and communicate findings among team members and across departments.
In the pharmaceutical market, reducing time-to-market for new products is essential. Because companies obtain exclusivity to a formula for a limited number of years from the date that a patent is issued, cutting even a few months from the total time spent in development can substantially increase revenues. To improve collaboration efforts, Pfizer implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 as its collaboration and document management system for team documents.
To define and automate processes involvingdata, scientists and researchers at Pfizer had a long history of using Pipeline Pilot data analysis and reporting software from Accelrys. By using Pipeline Pilot, researchers and scientists at Pfizer haveaccess to vast amounts of scientific data through complex data retrieval and filtering viaa graphic interface.However, Pfizer employees saw room for improved efficiency.
“Although Pipeline Pilot has a graphical interface, it requires accounts, training, and expertise to useeffectively,” says Leslie Sloan, Senior Director at Pfizer. “This required access to servers and a fair amount of assistance from experts to set up and run specific data processing tasks, known as Pipeline Pilot protocols. Further, there are a limited number of employees in research and development whoare able to effectively build Pipeline Pilot protocols in order to usethis technology to its fullest.”
Pfizer wanted to improve user access to data accessible through Pipeline Pilot by connecting it with Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. In addition, Pfizer wanted to empower employees to search document repositories for specific chemical structures, often represented as embedded drawn chemical structures thatare invisible to typical keyword search functions. In addition, Pfizer employees wanted searches to return exact matches and similar structures,to enablefurther collaboration and knowledge transfer. Typical textual search engines alone are limited in their ability to provide this functionality, but Pipeline Pilot can enable them to do so.
“We wanted to tie together Pipeline Pilot, Pipeline Pilot experts, and Office SharePoint Server to give our teams collaboration tools that were geared toward scientific data rather than transactional and office functions,” says Sloan.
Solution
In March 2008, Pfizer approached Accelrys to establish a set of requirements and a timeline for delivery of an integration solution. During this time, Pfizer also migrated from Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007. Working closely with Pfizer, Accelrys delivered two innovative components within a year:
- PipelinePilotBridge for Microsoft SharePoint, which creates a window between Pipeline Pilot and SharePoint Server. Pfizer employees can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to run Pipeline Pilot data processing protocols and return results back to the SharePoint team site. Users can set up their own Web parts within SharePoint Server 2007 to display the information that they need most often.
- Scientifically Aware Search (SAS), which allows scientists or researchers to search for scientific information by a text query and structural representation. Users can choose to return either exact matches or similar structures.
Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 was already being used throughout the company, Pfizer deployed the Pipeline Pilot Bridge to a central SharePoint library, enabling any employee to set up Pipeline Pilot and SAS Web parts within SharePoint Server 2007 to customize team sites.
As of February 2010, the PipelinePilotBridge is being usedin all Pfizer research facilities, whileSAS is in the test phase in those facilities. The Bridge is also being used by other teams within Pfizer, such as administrative staff for groups who create frequently asked questions (FAQs) for team sites.
Benefits
The integration solution yields multiple benefits for Pfizer. “We wanted to take advantage of the best of both products—the collaboration and content management features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and the data processing and analysis features of Pipeline Pilot,” says Sloan. “We got the best of both worlds.”
Benefits include:
- Increased productivity. The integration of tools saves time. “Teams can now get everything done in one place,” says Sloan. “They don’t have to open Pipeline Pilot and something else. They can just go to their team sites and have their structure materials, their documents, andtheir information from Pipeline accessible in one program.” Because time-to-market is so important in the pharmaceutical industry, increasing productivity is likely to pay dividends for future product releases.
- Improved access to data through SAS. “This is the first time that users at Pfizer can actually search documents stored in Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a chemical structure or substructure,” says Sloan of the Scientifically Aware Search functionality. “For example, if I search just a keyword such as ‘Suzuki,’ I might get thousands of results. However, if I search ’Suzuki’ with a specific chemical structure that I am interested in, my results will be greatly reduced and more targeted. You have this dramatic focusing of the information.” As a result, Pfizer employees are spending less time sifting through miscellaneous documents in search of necessary data.
- Better collaboration. “Teams use the PipelinePilotBridge for SharePoint to visualize and discuss data pieces from Pipeline Pilot during weekly meetings,” says Sloan. “These tools allow teams to collaborate more effectively because they can access information and refresh queries in real time during meetings.” SAS bolsters collaboration because “users can get back information from another team’s site—depending on SharePoint permissions, of course—that could assist with their research,” addsSloan. “You can learn from your colleagues, perhaps learn something that you didn’t actually know you were looking for.”
Microsoft Solutions for the Healthcare Industry
Healthcare and life sciences organizations are under tremendous pressure to meet regulatory requirements, improve patient care, and reduce the time it takes to develop drugs and take them to market. To meet this challenge, Microsoft and its partners have developed cost-effective solutions that enable healthcare organizations to streamline and automate daily processes that improve productivity and deliver information whenever and wherever it is needed. The result is enhanced productivity, safety, and quality.
For more information about Microsoft solutions for the healthcare industry, go to: