“Data is the new oil” In a powerful, yet nuanced sense, our post-industrial economy is becoming data-driven, much like oil fuelled our global industrialisation throughout the 20th century. Most of today’s industry experts acknowledge that data has rapidly become the most valuable resource in our digital world.
Like oil, data becomes far more useful once it is refined – a point referenced by Peter Sondergaard, vice-president of Gartner, in 2011, when he noted: “Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” Yet, even just a decade ago, most organizations were likely to view any data and analytics capability as ‘desirable’ rather than essential.
Fast forward to today and, with 97% of Fortune 1000 companies already investing in data initiatives, it appears industry is finally ready to embrace data, and data analysis, as a core business function. It’s no longer hard to find evidence of data-driven business transformation: Enterprise leaders have been inspired to reimagine business models, create new revenue streams and refresh customer experiences, while at the same time reviewing and refining their processes and operational models. Despite this laudable optimism, extracting actionable insights from business data can be a tough challenge. However, this mature deployment is often precisely what can enable organizations to bridge the last-mile gaps in their data-driven strategies, and thus drive faster value realization.
A 2022 survey conducted by NewVantage Partners found 92.1% of companies believed they were achieving returns on their data and AI investments – a significant increase on the 48.1% who shared that opinion in 2017. Nevertheless, we still saw companies worldwide caught on the back foot when the pandemic suddenly and rapidly increased demand for digital services. This quickly revealed the gaps in many databases and digital experiences, thus prompting an acceleration in digital transformation across industries.
As a result, more enterprises are now ready to move on from reactive responses to proactive operational strategies designed to unlock the real-world value of data. This includes investing in data and AI innovations, which are rapidly advancing in both capabilities and accessibility.
Data transformation and pharmaceutical companies
The pharmaceutical industry is very much part of the global trend toward a data-driven world. And here, the expanding volumes and ever-increasing complexity of pharmaceutical data means the technologies required to control and analyse this data must likewise become ever more advanced and sophisticated.
Data-driven culture now plays a crucial role in transforming pharma organisations right across the value chain. This includes clinical, medical, R&D, manufacturing, supply chains, regulatory compliance, marketing, commercial, mergers and finance etc. Furthermore, according to a McKinsey report, scaling the impact of advanced analytics has the potential to transform attainable operating efficiencies, with estimates ranging as high as 15 to 30 percent of EBITDA over five years, before accelerating to gains of 45 to 70 percent over a decade – when factoring in the anticipated impact of predictive modelling in discovering and optimizing new blockbuster therapies. So, in the context of increasingly cost-constrained global healthcare markets, those pharma companies able to harness analytics and deliver advanced data-driven decision making over the next one to three years will gain a decisive advantage over their rivals.
How data and analytics can empower the medical & commercial functions of pharmaceutical companies
With the support of an advanced analytic capability, pharmaceutical companies can significantly improve the efficiency of their market access, commercial, and medical functions. For instance, smart data and analytics can improve sales force effectiveness – perhaps by compiling HCP profile data or gaining access to a healthcare professionals database. Similar data-oriented actions can also help to tailor customer engagement, and optimize the commercial spend, while also impacting upon gross-to-net optimization and helping companies to understand, and thus optimize, real-world outcomes.
To take the example of one global biopharmaceutical company with a complex clinical-trial portfolio: Adopting a measured, value-oriented perspective to inform and focus their analytics investments and activity, they successfully created explanatory models to identify drivers of past performance, as well as machine-learning algorithms designed to forecast patient recruitment and quality events. The results were both pleasing and significant: enrolment times reduced by 10 to 20 percent, trial costs fell by 10 to 15 percent, and the company became five times better at site-selection processes.
As success becomes ever more dependent on an ability to transform raw data into smart information, the pharmaceutical companies that outpace the competition will be those who are able to manage their data most effectively and efficiently.
Healthcare data access the key to a data-driven future
The healthcare world creates and manages a vast volume, variety and velocity of personal health data – a unique trifecta that, once fully addressed, can facilitate huge strides in healthcare decision-making and patient care.
The current landscape of healthcare systems is highly fragmented across the industry – a complex web of diverse data sources. The cost and complexity of integrating, managing, and storing exabytes of data is a constant issue for everyone within the healthcare ecosystem, and even more so with pharma considering the range of data sources companies require and consume. These multiple disparate systems exhibit a variety of data formats, making integrating, exchanging, and harnessing such data a daunting challenge. Analysing all this critical data from so many sources and then staging the prodigious data flows for advanced integration and analytics is a hard task – but the rewards are immense.
PeakData support can be critical
PeakData has a unique AI driven approach with HCP profiling software which dynamically integrates the largest number of public data sources to expand and deepen what you know about healthcare professionals. PeakData can map and reveal insights for up to 90% of the healthcare universe at unparalleled scale & speed. These dynamic insights will help you determine and understand the latest thinking of healthcare professionals and thought leaders.
Briefed with this knowledge, and supported by our healthcare professional’s database, your pharma teams will then be in a prime position to deploy HCP profile data to optimise their communication and engagement plans for each healthcare professional.
