Pharmaceutical companies with COVID-19 vaccines have become household names across the globe. Never before were AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Moderna the bread and butter of polite conversation. But what about the Swiss drug giant, Roche?

It doesn't have a vaccine against COVID-19, but it does produce 15 tests for the disease. Demand for these tests led the company's diagnostics revenue to jump 28 percent in the fourth quarter, while pharmaceutical sales fell 7 percent.

Roche says it has focused on diagnostics and not just making drugs, for a long time. The company is now taking its approach one step further, calling on a fundamental reset in how we think about the entire healthcare system.

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Personalized healthcare

"It's not just a question of there being lots of great technologies or medicines or diagnostics," says Roche Pharmaceuticals CEO Bill Anderson, "but how does that all come together so that the right patient gets the right medicine at the right time?"

The answer, says Anderson, is putting patients first.

"We've been a leader of this in cancer. So increasingly now our therapies are given only to particular patients who have a molecular diagnosis or a genomic fingerprint that says they're going to respond to this therapy. And there's no point giving that therapy to patients who don't have that fingerprint."

Anderson acknowledges various healthcare systems across the globe are simply trying to navigate their way out of the pandemic, but he says it's important to remember that most health challenges are unrelated to the disease.

Digitalization of healthcare

Looking to the future, Anderson says data and technology are central to improving how healthcare is delivered.

Of course, not everyone is happy to share private data about their health, something which Anderson says has been a "challenge." 

He points to the U.S. Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare", as an example of how huge amounts of patient data have been collected in a safe manner to help the development of new treatments.

"One of the things that was embedded in that legislation was a requirement that every patient needed to have an electronic health record," explains Anderson. "Just that one act has been a massive change in the availability to systematize care, to make sure that patients don't get the wrong therapies just because of an accident.

"Progress is being made," he says, but "it's not always as fast as we would like."