On the Road to Ireland road trip campaign, Evun Wyer, Ireland Country Director at Integrity, talks to Nigel Walker about how Integrity uses a risk-based approach to solve problems for its customers. They also discuss how Integrity addresses the challenges of new technology in healthcare.

Watch the full video or read the transcript below to learn about Integrity’s full range of personalized end-to-end integrated services, its skilled workforce, and how they weave compliance throughout their whole process.

Nigel Walker (NW): If you look back, how has Integrity contributed to the future of healthcare?

Evun Wyer (EW): Integrity is all about the delivery of services and technology and ensuring that they are compliant and adhere to the global regulations that govern our industry. One of our key approaches to doing so is that we use an agile framework methodology for delivery. We couple that with a risk-based approach. We add in no small degree of critical thinking. And when you couple all those and add them up together, what it does is it allows us to accelerate the rate of acceleration and delivery of these critical systems and services to our clients.

And what that does, in turn, has a knock-on effect in that it increases the speed to market for our clients to deliver their products, services, and medicines to the patients, which is ultimately what we're all about in the industry. So, we're making sure that they're robust, they're flexible, and they're delivering value-add to our clients. And when you add all those up, that's fundamentally how I see us influencing the industry.

NW: Can you talk to me about this range of services and how you work directly with your customers?

EW: First and foremost, Integrity is very much around people, it's a people organization. And we're very lucky and fortunate to have a highly skilled workforce, a very experienced workforce, that is able to  talk from a position of insight and knowledge to all of the eventualities or scenarios that we might encounter. I think the other element of that is we're constantly looking at the emerging talent market to see who we can add to supplement those skills in our organization.

But where we do really pride ourselves is that we deliver an end-to-end managed service integrated offering to our clients and our customers. And that enables us to ensure that we can deliver right-size solutions, right-size process, right-size services to them whether they're top 20 pharma, CMO, or a cell and gene therapy startup. So, as we apply that approach and logic to everything we do, whether it's at a tactical or a strategic or an operational level, whether it's people, process, or technology, or whether it's from an RFP, an audit, project delivery, or ongoing into the managed services. And the other key element to all of this is that we embed quality and compliance day one in all of these elements. And that means that we start in the right place, and invariably we end up in the right place.

NW: So, obviously, If we take a look at the Irish domestic market, it's been impressive for decades, but over the last 10 years we've had an explosion of new investment coming into your domestic market. The last five years has been the time of the cell and gene therapy.

EW: We have over the last number of years been very, very aggressive in our approach to a risk-based assessment. So whether you're a top 20 pharma, whether you're a CMO, as we've said, or a cell and gene therapy, what we'll do is we'll come in and we'll evaluate and apply a level of critical thinking and a risk-based evaluation to what it is you're trying to achieve, right? And then that will dictate how we will go about delivering the service, or the project, or whatever it is that you have engaged with Integrity to do. So anything that you can reduce and drive efficiency out of will obviously impact your bottom line. So, I think the short answer is we're not doing anything specific, we’re just getting more engagement because companies have now realized that they need to change their way of thinking.

NW: We talked about the very much personalized direction that Integrity gives. Technology as an overall is quite a nervous topic for most companies to get into. Because not only do you know that you've got to maintain it, but you also need to understand it, how you can put a value onto it. So how do you address these challenges?

EW: One of our sweet spots within Integrity is that, as an organization, we have an awful lot of ex-corporate pharma employees. So, when a client approaches us around technology, looking for insights and so on around that particular piece, we are actually talking from a position of knowledge. We are able to talk to that customer or client and say, “Well, in a previous life, here's something we did, here's how we did it.” And so, we're able to show a level of insight and understanding of their concerns and their issues, and then tie those back to why a particular approach may be more beneficial than another approach.

I think the other element to it is that not only do we have ex-corporate pharma people, we also have a number of quite senior ex-consulting house individuals. So, we can talk about what a service provider might be saying and why they might be leading you down in one direction, and then we can also flip that around and look at it from another perspective. So we give that end-to-end holistic viewpoint.

I think the element that you touched on around… there's a nervousness around artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, whatever you want to call it, the digital twins of the world. We have created a giant stick for ourselves. We have to adhere to the regulatory elements. So, we are in a position to show here's where we have done this before, and where we've been able to justify it to a regulator, and where it has passed.