- Insights
Introducing PeakData: streamlining the drug-to-patient journey
PeakData’s platform provides the data analytics to drastically improve a process that has previously been extraordinarily inefficient.
By Molly Gilmartin, Investment Manager, Albion Capital
Pharmaceutical companies don’t sell to patients, they sell to prescribers who are mostly doctors but can also include pharmacists, specialist nurses and other healthcare professionals.
Once a new drug is approved through clinical trials and has received reimbursement, there are several steps in getting it to patients:
• Understanding which healthcare professionals play a role in prescribing the medication
• Understanding their drug selection criteria for the relevant patients
• Connecting with and educating them on the utility of the new medication
PeakData’s platform provides the data analytics to power these steps – drastically improving a process that has previously been extraordinarily inefficient.
The process of bringing approved drugs to the right patients is broken
Doctors and other prescribers are evidence driven customers. For most diseases, there is a large choice of drugs to pick from and a wide range of useful information like scientific publications, national drug formularies, drug information packages, and more. Views from both peers and key opinion leaders can also be influential but are often biased. This makes it difficult for pharma companies to communicate the benefits of a medicine to prescribers.
To this day, pharma companies use outbound marketing methods such as advertisements in medical journals and conferences to broadcast information on their medicines and they use static and typically out-of-date information to identify prescribers, which are then targeted by sales representatives to inform them about new drugs.
This is highly inefficient in bringing new medicines to patients:
Pharma companies risk targeting the wrong healthcare professionals due to a lack of understanding regarding who the relevant decision makers are.
They have limited insight on the preferences and information needs of these decision makers.
They engage using ineffective channels
The Covid-19 pandemic has made the issue worse as most healthcare professionals have limited face-to-face interactions with pharma teams. Despite restrictions having fallen away, this hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Also, clinicians have significantly less time as they are working through waiting lists as long as 2 years.
