Weyhe / Vienna – From September 29 to September 30, 2020, imh Institut Manfred Hämmerle GmbH hosted the Forum Pharma 2020 at the NH Hotel Danube City in Vienna. More than 70 participants attended the event in person in Vienna and others took part online.

Claus Michael Sattler, Managing Director of INDUfact UG (haftungsbeschränkt), was the keynote speaker at this congress on the topic of “What impact will digitalization have on the future of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry?”

In his forty-minute presentation, Sattler gave an overview of the impact of digital transformation on the private lives of all forum participants.

He provocatively posed the question: “Which well-known carriage manufacturer of the 19th century is still active in the market today as a major manufacturer of cars or trucks?” and thus made it clear that Industry 4.0 (I4) is not a question of wanting or participating, but a question of the survival of a company, because no well-known carriage manufacturer still builds cars or trucks today.

After the first superficial presentation of the Framework Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), Sattler’s presentation addressed the importance of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in the production of chemotherapeutic drugs and described the possibility of data-based forecasting models in the development and production of such drugs for the various pharmaceutical companies.

Some conference participants described his derivation and definition of the new term Indirect Predictive Maintenance as visionary. The term predictive maintenance was defined very early on by I4 specialists. Sattler presented his definition of the new term Indirect Predictive Maintenance to the interested participants.

Following his comparison of Industry 3.0 and Industry 4.0 using the Framework Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), Sattler went into his definition of Vertical IT Integration and Horizontal IT Integration and their significance for the pharmaceutical industry. Sattler referred to his definitions, which he published in the book “Digitale Transformation von Dienstleistungen im Gesundheitswesen VII: Impulse für die Pharmaindustrie” by the editors Prof. Dr. Mario A. Pfannstiel, Prof. Dr. Patrick Da-Cruz and Prof. Dr. Erik Rederer.

At the end of his presentation, Sattler addressed the digital transformation of pharmaceutical sales and elaborated on the approaches for direct customer contact between manufacturers and patients. In his approach, Sattler does not bypass doctors and pharmacists, but involves them directly and indirectly in the data collection necessary for manufacturers.