This category analyzes how companies deploy innovative approaches beyond traditional pharma models to advance health equity. We examined the use of digital health tools and new business model innovations.
Lilly has been slower to adopt digital health and novel business models compared with its peers, but it is actively exploring and implementing innovative solutions to enhance its global health programs to gain ground. Through partnerships and pilot programs, Lilly is leveraging digital tools like mobile health technology, AI and telemedicine to improve care for chronic diseases in low-resource settings. Rapidly scaling up these initiatives and further exploring partnerships with technology companies could help Lilly catch up with its peers and solidify its position in digital health and innovation for global health equity.
Shared-value partnerships: While Lilly is leveraging partnerships to drive digital health adoption, peers like Novartis and Novo Nordisk have developed more established business models that integrate digital solutions directly into access programs, expanding their impact. Mutually beneficial, sustainable solutions and alternative business models that expand access and benefits both missions are critical.
Optimizing Technology Need for Scale and Integration: Expanding pilot programs into larger, more systematic global health solutions will be critical. Lilly has an opportunity to embed digital health more deeply into its broader 30x30 initiative, ensuring that technology enhances affordability, access and long-term patient outcomes.
Emerging but Lagging Behind Peers: Lilly has started integrating digital health solutions, such as AI-powered risk scoring, telemedicine and mobile health technology, but remains behind peers who have more mature and widely scaled initiatives.
Novartis’s Arogya Parivar and SMS for Life: Novartis’s Arogya Parivar is a social business model that employs local health educators and sales representatives to reach underserved communities in rural areas, providing health education and access to affordable medicines. Its SMS for Life program uses text messaging to improve medicine stock management in remote clinics, ensuring that essential medicines are available when and where they are needed.
Novo Nordisk’s Base of the Pyramid project: Novo Nordisk’s Base of the Pyramid project combines affordability with digital health solutions, such as SMS reminders and patient registries, to improve diabetes care in low-resource settings. This integrated approach addresses both the financial and logistical barriers to accessing health care.
GSK's Healthcare Innovation Award: GSK’s Healthcare Innovation Award supports local innovators in Africa who are developing solutions to improve health care delivery. By fostering local innovation, GSK is contributing to the development of sustainable and context-specific solutions for health care challenges in underserved communities.
AI/Data Analytics: Predictive modeling for disease prevention (Novartis1, Sanofi5).
Diagnostic Ecosystems: Integrated point-of-care platforms
Partnership-Driven Scalability: Collaborations with tech firms and startups (All).
Social Determinants of Health: Vaccine access (GSK3), urban equity (Novartis1).
Table Stakes Digital Solutions: Almost all competitors deploy a core set of digital tools to support their medicines in LMICs and globally. The most common use cases we came across were:
Patient education mobile apps
SMS reminder programs for medication adherence
Telemedicine platforms for remote consultations
HCP e-learning portals
AI-Powered Disease Identification and Management:
The use of AI in resource-poor settings to extend specialist capabilities (e.g. Novartis’s AI hypertension screening, or Google’s diabetic retinopathy AI which some pharma are piloting) is a game-changer. These tools generate new demand for treatment by finding patients who were previously undiagnosed.
Comprehensive Digital Ecosystems for Chronic Diseases:
Novo Nordisk’s integrated diabetes platform is a leading example of the best digital innovations don’t stand alone – they form an ecosystem. The best-in-class element of these platforms is how the different pieces talk to each other – patient-reported data flows to doctors, doctors’ inputs trigger educational nudges to patients, etc. This kind of ecosystem drives superior adherence, loyalty and ultimately impact.
Digital Partnerships and Platforms:
Partnerships are the primary way that competitors are developing and driving digital innovation in LMICs, with leading initiatives often developed with tech firms, telecom companies, or innovative startups.
Novartis x HealthTech Hub Africa
Challenge: Most digital health solutions focus on infectious diseases (HIV, TB, malaria), leaving a gap in innovation for chronic disease care. Health tech startups in LMICs also struggle to scale because they lack funding, mentorship, and regulatory support to integrate their solutions into public health systems.
Solution: Novartis launched HealthTech Hub Africa, an accelerator that funds and supports local startups developing AI-powered diagnostics, telemedicine, and chronic disease management tools. This allows homegrown solutions to thrive, making them more sustainable and better adapted to local health challenges.
Roche x PathAI
Challenge: Cancer detection in LMICs is extremely delayed due to a lack of pathologists and diagnostic infrastructure, leading to late-stage cancer detection and worse outcomes.
Solution: Roche partnered with PathAI, an AI-powered digital pathology startup, to develop machine-learning algorithms that assist in diagnosing cancer. This AI-driven tool analyzes pathology slides, helping clinicians in LMICs make faster and more accurate cancer diagnoses. The solution is being integrated into labs across Africa & Asia, where pathology expertise is scarce.