Jacek Chmiel examines current challenges in the data processing space. He outlines the issues stemming from multiple health data standards, the need for more developed data quality processes, and the industry’s perhaps unnecessary aversion to data streaming. Chmiel offers hope in the form of federated analytics and federated learning to allow more collaborative data processing between countries and proposes increased use of automation. He also advocates for employing publicly and commercially available data sets and looks at how natural language processing, machine learning, and quantum computing are the future of data-driven pharma.