Epic grails

Precision data and the holy places in which pharma can thrive

Precision prescribing data, and precision customer data. These are the two holy grails pharma needs.

When put together, they form one giant grail that can really give industry the gift of – if not eternal life – then the best possible truth about the healthcare market, its challenges and its opportunities.

Let’s get on with this metaphor.

Grail one is robust patient-level drugs numbers, by disease, at account level – that’s your granular patient share, by disease, by account.

Grail two is exact HCP targeting - knowing the precise treaters of these patients, so you can access and engage with them.

Sounds obvious? Not so much. In many places the industry is still using the data and the market access techniques of yore, and the power of this grail is denied them.

In the 90s, pharma was averaging around ten reps per company per territory. It was a different time; lots of blockbuster launches, aimed at GPs; lots of opportunity, lots of customer access and lots of money made by sheer weight of numbers, and volume of message.

Data companies at this point were selling retail pharmacy dispensing system data, which told you how many prescriptions each doctor was prescribing for each drug.

Other data services looked at all the GP prescribing, ranked groups of 500 GPs by number of script and gave average prescribing level.

This was broadly sufficient in a primary care marketplace, and pharma has a history of being able to get quite far down in granularity in primary care.

But fast-forward to 2024. In the hospital domain – where pharma now largely finds its new molecules landing – getting that granularity on who exactly is treating those patients – and exactly how many patients are being treated for the disease you’re interested in – has been much harder.

A new generation of data is now available, which my company Wilmington Healthcare specialises in gathering, analysing and interrogating.

This allows us to tell an entirely new story about where your patients are, who is treating them and how well these patients are being served by a particular product.  And this knowledge is particularly useful in understanding the hospital picture.

It’s always been possible to get lists of names of all the cardiologists, neurologists, oncologists, gastroenterologists and so on.

But there are plenty of gaps in this. Let’s say you’re in gastroenterology and your product is for Crohn’s disease.

You may know who the 3,000 gastroenterologists are but… there are all sorts of specialties and subspecialties in this discipline. For example, upper gastro, lower gastro, colorectal, oesophagal. Who are they?

And you may know how big the hospital is – how many beds there are, and the size of the gastro department. So, you can make usage projections but – do you know exactly how many patients are being treated there?

With precision data both of these gaps can be filled. For example, one of our products, EXACT, tells you who the treaters are. And another, Specialist Share Data (SSD) gives a very robust view of how many Crohn’s disease patients are being treated. And your market share in treating them.

This is what we mean by precision. And it’s only through this kind of precision that you can really understand what’s happening in your disease area in your accounts. You can know what’s happening with your brand, what’s going up, and down.

If all you know about an account is ‘how many gastroenterologists are in it’, you might end up wasting a lot of time and resource.

Leeds might have 25 gastroenterologists in its main hospitals. That’s a lot of people to go and cover to deal with the opportunities.

But what precision data does, is identify from that range of gastroenterologists which ones treat Crohn’s disease. Now instead of being 25 in the account there are 14.

Okay, you don’t know exactly who’s treating the patient… but when you’re planning on how many people you need, you have a more robust view of the customer group size.

The data gives you a further layer of granularity, to inform your planning and your resource use, and show if you’re resourcing enough people.

I spoke about this example to my colleague Julian Snape, who leads on precision customer data insight.

“A field force is a company’s most expensive promotional resource. Think of the waste of investment in this example, and what else you could be doing with that resource”, he said. “If each contact costs £600 and you’re seeing all 25 gastroenterologists with three face-to-face contacts a year – you’re spending £1800 x 25, £45,000, on just face-to-face contacts in that account.

“So, if you only see the relevant 14, you save a staggering £19,800 in baseline activity costs on one account! Not even one territory.

“This is an illustrative cost saving, but if you magnify that across the country, even with a 50% coverage, you’re talking about saving over £1million in activity costs alone by targeting precisely the customers who treat Crohn’s Disease, and not wasting resource finding this out through misdirected activities on the ground, in the wider gastroenterology universe.”

Precision prescribing data gives you the full picture of impact, while allowing you to monitor how quickly customers are responding to treatment.

I asked Chris James, who heads up Specialist Share Data in Wilmington Healthcare, what it can offer.

“Precision prescribing data increases the visibility of the treatments patients are receiving at each account within a specific therapy area. So, it helps inform and improve account planning, forecasting and market intelligence by highlighting dynamics, trends and opportunity.

“In your Crohn’s Disease example, SSD highlights increases or decreases of treatments by account, account level biosimilar adoption, and early advocacy for new launches and their subsequent impacts, all of which is critical insight for industry.”

The importance of precision prescribing data is compounded when you factor time into the equation. Tracking how specific accounts are adapting to new treatments within a therapy area over time, or knowing how a specific treatment is increasing or decreasing, will have a significant impact on strategy.

With many treatments approved for use in multiple indications, having the ability to track these account level dynamics by therapy area is vitally important.

Coupling precision prescribing data with precision customer data creates a powerful go-to-market toolkit.

Precision data has the power to transform how pharma operates in the UK and beyond.

It can allow precision targeting. It can support smart market access projects, digital engagement, local pathway improvement and patient support programmes. It can improve patient opportunity. It can lead to collaborative working.

It offers greatly enhanced powers of forecasting, in a market where many customers say the biggest problem is supply. With precision data you can know more reliably how much the NHS needs, work out a price, build your supply chain and confidently supply the medicine.

You can expose fallacies. Your ‘biggest hospital’ might be prescribing for 40 patients but that might be 40 out of 500 – in which case your biggest hospital may actually be underperforming.

It can show your company what you could be doing, what you should be doing – and what your competitors are doing.

You can’t get the most out of market access unless you’ve got competent and confident data to support your insights and decisions – precision data that unites those twin holy grails of granular prescribing figures and exact disease treaters into one big, impressive and indispensable grail.

Oli Hudson is Content Director at Wilmington Healthcare.
Go to wilmingtonhealthcare.com