The Best of Business
Intelligence 2021

The BOBI (Best Of Business Intelligence) awards recognise excellence across the healthcare business intelligence spectrum, giving business analysts, market researchers and fieldwork professionals the opportunity to showcase the contribution their work makes to the UK pharma business, the NHS and patients.
This year was the second ‘virtual BOBIs’ with hosts Wilf Iliffe, 14 Four Analytics (BOBI Chair) and Kelly West of Boehringer Ingelheim (BHBIA Board member) back on stage again. But unlike the 2020 event, this time the ceremony was truly live, streamed in real time, with the winners joining via video link.
The awards are divided into three types:

Task-based challenges

Creative Fieldwork Team of the Year invited teams to submit a creative response to the BHBIA’s ‘Request for Proposal’ in a fantasy tender, this year in the area of type 2 diabetes. The winners were Kantar, Profiles Division, whose compelling submission demonstrated a powerful combination of human understanding and technological innovation.

This year’s Analyst of the Year and Analyst Team of the Year competitions centred around the global COVID-19 pandemic. Analysts were tasked with illustrating the key issues, delivered as an interactive dashboard, spreadsheet or an infographic.
Analyst Team of the Year winners were Purdie Pascoe and The Stats People, who described working as a team on the very detailed analysis for their entry ‘Taking the Fight to COVID-19’ as “the most fun it is legal to have during lockdown”.
This year’s Analyst of the Year Kate Stevens, KES Consultancy, tackled the brief from the angle of ‘Where can I travel?’, creating an interactive dashboard allowing the user to understand the varying risks of visiting different parts of the world during the pandemic.

Real-life submissions

These four categories allow entrants to showcase excellent work based on actual projects that have demonstrated excellence and achieved great outcomes.

The Best Use of Innovation winning entry: ‘Leveraging innovative technology to speed insights to action across a globally distributed team’, was a collaboration between AstraZeneca and Hall & Partners. This technology-led comms testing approach delivered agility, efficiency and alignment. Insight-led decisions could be made confidently at speed, bringing trusted messages to patients and physicians.

Best Customer Insight was won by Instar Research and Janssen for ‘A COVID Conundrum!’. By undertaking a direct comparison of private practice behaviours to the NHS, Janssen was uniquely positioned to identify key factors contributing to a downturn in private market sales and develop new strategies to stimulate future growth within the private practice.

Best Business Impact was a win for Sanofi and Synergy Healthcare Research, with ‘Accurately identifying opportunities for a new treatment in haematology’. This research empowered Sanofi to accurately identify the commercial opportunity represented by a novel treatment for a rare blood disorder and on this basis make the decision whether or not to proceed with investing in the commercial development of the product.

The winning entry in the Best Patient-Centric Approach category was ‘PoTS LIVE: Demonstrating how Postural Tachycardia Syndrome (PoTS), a chronic, multi-system disorder, impacts quality of life’, from Origins Insights and Royal Holloway University. PoTS LIVE was the first longitudinal study into how PoTS affects everyday life and the award recognises their robust, patient-centric methodology and implementation of initiatives from the outcomes.

Best Newcomer competition day

Best Newcomer is for the rising star (up to three years’ experience in business intelligence) who best demonstrates core abilities and skills in a one-day virtual competition event. The award went to Francesca Cooper, HRW. Francesca impressed the judges with her ability to rapidly synthesise information and produce thoroughly considered responses that demonstrated her understanding of key challenges.