VISFO – a West Yorkshire-based healthcare consultancy – has seen demand for its heathcare consulting services and software platforms soar over the past year as global pharmaceutical (pharma) clients look for more agile solutions to answer the unmet needs of patients.
The company has announced significant growth driven by demand for digital insights and software solutions as pharma and life sciences organisations accelerate their transformation strategies. VISFO’s consultancy services grew by 200% during the same period from 2020 to 2021, with sales of its software platforms up 400%. Pre lockdown, the business secured two new major global contracts, tripling its client base with an enviable roster now spanning consumer health, biotech and pharma.
“In a time where the world has looked to the pharma industry to solve a global epidemic, the need to find solutions at pace is now greater than ever,” says Dr Max Noble, CEO and founder of VISFO. “With our roots firmly grounded in science and medicine, we’re well placed to serve the growing needs of the pharma industry, utilising our problem-solving approach to allow clients to think differently and tackle healthcare challenges fuelled by cutting-edge data science, technology and validated insights.
“Every consultancy likes to believe it does things differently, but at VISFO we do. Through our extensive domain experience, we challenge convention and find the invisible truth, delivering data driven, evidence based, strategic recommendations to clients within weeks, not months, to enable them to act faster and smarter to benefit their therapy areas, and ultimately their patients.”
The VISFO team spans some of the harder disciplines such as health economics and modelling, machine learning and analytics, all of which have seen an uplift in demand from clients, but by far the greatest area of opportunity and development is within the digital insights and innovation offering, which has grown exponentially during the past year. Medical conference analysis has boomed in the new virtual world, as has scientific and digital landscaping, with VISFO harnessing the power of its machine learning algorithms and natural language processing tools to dive into the data, creating actionable insights to guide therapy area strategy, key opinion leader mapping and digital engagement at country, regional and global levels.
To support its growth, VISFO has been building an expert team that supports its current and future plans, recruiting 25 new members to the VISFO family despite the pandemic. The majority of new recruits are software engineers, driving forward the development of the company’s software platforms, but key appointments have also been made expanding the medical writing team and digital insights and innovation function.
Max continues; “There’s no doubt that lockdown presented us all with some very serious challenges, but as digital business we adapted quickly and successfully to virtual working. Appointing staff virtually is by no means easy but as most of our new recruits are already “cloud natives”, we have been able to expand based on the best minds and talent on the market. Our team is spread across the UK and into Europe now, with some based locally, others in London and even Spain. Location is no longer a constraint by which to be bound.”
Plans for the future are ambitious with the company setting its sights on becoming one of the largest healthtech businesses north of London in the next 12 months and the biggest in the UK in the next two years. An overseas presence will follow as part of the three year vision, with the team keen to establish offices in the US at the end of 2022 in order to continue expansion with US global pharma clients and their affiliates.
