News • Pharmaceutical Automation and Digitalisation Congress
Pharma Meets Digital Health: Who Owns Data Standards and Security?
A digital health tool can be accurate, affordable and well-designed, and still stall the moment it connects to a pharmaceutical system. On the pharma side, data subject to multiple regulatory regimes, repeated assessment rounds and strict validation requirements. On the digital side, standards and security responsibilities often remain unsettled. Between the two, no single party owns the whole chain.
This gap is the focus of the roundtable at the Pharmaceutical Automation and Digitalisation Congress (AutomaPlus) 2026, which takes place on 16–17 November in Zurich. The roundtable gathers practitioners who approach the question from opposite ends of the value chain. Ghaith Sankari, Director of AI for Healthcare and Health Economics at Bayer AG, looks at the cost side. His topic, Edge AI, moves computation closer to the device and asks whether evidence-based AI can become affordable enough for routine healthcare use.
Stephane Wolf, Global Head Commercial Pipeline Eye Health at Boehringer Ingelheim, presents DECODE CRS, a multi-stakeholder project that combines wearables with standardised data collection to detect and manage the condition and to widen access to advanced immunotherapies. His case shows what happens when a single tool must satisfy clinical, technical and regulatory requirements at once.
More speakers join the conversation, and the discussion rests on a simple premise: interoperability fails less often because of technology than because responsibility for standards, security and validation stays unclear once digital meets regulated pharma. Only one speaker slot remains available at the session.
AutomaPlus 2026 is built for the experts who carry that responsibility: digital and data leaders, IT and R&D teams, commercial functions and supply chain digitalisation specialists.
Source: BGS Group
28.10.2026
