The top consultancy firm's annual global pharmaceutical report, 'Progressions: Pharma 3.0', identifies several industry trends driving non-traditional companies into the sector, including health reform, health IT, comparative effectiveness and the rising confidence in consumer power.

These factors, amongst others, are prompting pharma companies to broaden their focus from producing new medicines to delivering healthy outcomes -- a shift that will be driven through creative partnerships and business model innovation.

"The focus on emerging markets like India will increase opportunities in these markets. These include opportunities arising out of meeting the local healthcare needs, developing new supply-chain distribution models to tap the rural markets and an opportunity to migrate some of the new models to the rest of world to help meet their needs," Ernst & Young's Life Sciences Practice Partner & National Leader, Hitesh Sharma, said.

The entry of many non-traditional players in the pharma sector will heighten the need for further business model innovation by traditional drugmakers, the report said.

Development of new commercial models will be a critical counterpart to bring forth innovative medicines. Managing and optimising an increasingly complex network of partners will pose new tests for industry leaders, it said.

The report has highlighted the kind of alliances that can be formed in the industry and the changes ahead. The unprecedented nature of new partnerships pose new challenges in determining how deals are structured and how each partner's contribution is valued in cases like alliances with non-traditional partners. These partners range from micro -lenders, who could bridge the affordability gap, to food companies with existing distribution and infrastructure networks to help manage supply chains, the report said.

In the changing scenario, patients play an increasingly active role in managing their healthcare, enabled by personal health records, smart phone applications and other technologies. Pharmaceutical companies remain largely on the sidelines of this revolution, hampered by a regulatory framework governing patient interactions which has been slow to evolve, the global consultancy firm has said.

In data collection too, pharmaceutical companies have lost the exclusive control they once had as leading hospitals and others extract electronic health records for correlations between prescribing patterns and patient outcomes, the report said.

This will pose reimbursement risks and force pharma companies to make strategic decisions about whether to build new proficiencies in data analysis, the report said.