“The pharmaceutical industry has shifted from a physician-centric approach to one that is focused on the network of organizations delivering healthcare services,” says Iordanis Kapanides, Senior Consultant at Stratos Consulting. “Financial pressures and the drive for value-based outcomes forced hospitals and other healthcare providers to consolidate, creating centralized, integrated delivery networks (IDNs) now controlling over 50% of prescription volumes. The influence exerted by these IDNs over physicians has had a significant impact on how pharmaceutical companies market their products.”
The emergence of IDNs requires sales teams to understand the connections—or affiliations—between healthcare professionals (HCPs) and healthcare organizations (HCOs) within these complex organizations. Accurate affiliation data is critical for pharmaceutical companies since it allows marketing and sales efforts to identify and target decision-makers within the IDNs.
“Affiliations between pharmaceutical companies and HCPs and HCOs are constantly changing,” explains Kapanides. “These fluctuations might be due to a doctor changing jobs or changes in billing or referral patterns. However, for a pharmaceutical company, the challenge is keeping track of HCP-HCO affiliations as they change to maximize the impact and return of sales initiatives. Having accurate affiliation data improves decision making and reduces the effort involved in resolving errors and issues stemming from bad data.”
The Challenge
With one drug approved in 2015, a Mid-sized Commercial-stage Biopharmaceutical company submitted a new drug application within the same disease specialty. Leveraging syndicated data sources for prescription data but wanting to incorporate additional affiliation data sets for HCP mapping, the Biopharmaceutical company engaged Stratos Consulting to optimize their sale’s strategy by ensuring continuous access to reliable HCP-HCO affiliation data.
How Stratos Consulting Helped
Experienced in working with Commercial Life Sciences organizations, Stratos understood the difficulty of mapping HCPs to HCOs due to the nature of many-to-many relationships with lots of varying data points.
- Integrated data from Definitive Healthcare and Komodo into client’s Amazon Redshift Database and existing mappings
- Ensured data integrity as it flows from multiple data source to Tableau dashboards tracking sales data, behaviors, and trends
- Automated data loading and validation processes from each quarterly data refresh
The Result
Integrating the affiliation data and improving mappings enabled the client’s Executive and Sales teams to seamlessly access accurate data to optimize sales strategies based on market share, sales trend, and HCP-HCO mappings. Given the initial project success, the Biopharmaceutical company also engaged Stratos for on-going business enablement and managed services.
To have a discussion about data integration and automation enhancements opportunities to optimize your organization’s commercial sales strategy, schedule a call with Stratos Consulting today.
