Biotech Company Looks Beyond Standard Affiliations Data to Allocate Resources Effectively for a New Rare Disease Therapy

A novel biotech company was the first to introduce a long-acting therapy for a rare disease in the pediatric population. The therapy replaces daily injections with a once-weekly treatment, making it a more pleasant experience for kids and a way to save time for parents.

To optimize their launch efforts, the company wanted to understand the prescribers and influencers in the market, including specialists, primary care doctors, pediatricians, nurse educators, and coordinators, and how they were all affiliated with each other and various healthcare organizations. Understanding the full and complete view of all the healthcare providers (HCPs), healthcare organizations (HCOs), and integrated delivery networks (IDNs) was important to build relationships, direct personal and nonpersonal promotions, and allocate their distribution resources, such as sample pens.

While the biotech company’s legacy dataset contained standard affiliations information, it provided a list of HCOs that each clinician was affiliated to without distinction. To get more details on affiliations, they asked their field force to track the primary HCO for each provider, a task that was cumbersome, imperfect, and ultimately unsustainable.

The Senior Director, Commercial Operations and Analytics, turned to her MDM vendor for help. The vendor recommended McKesson Compile due to McKesson Compile’s extensive database and unique affiliation scoring. With each HCP-HCO affiliation receiving a relationship score, the biotech company could determine the strength of each affiliation to make decisions for sampling and allocating promotional dollars. The Senior Director was also impressed with McKesson Compile’s breadth of sources, including publications and social media, which were far more extensive than those gathered by other data vendors.

To show proof of concept, the biotech shared a blinded subset of the HCPs in their universe and asked McKesson Compile to identify their affiliations. With McKesson Compile’s data, there was an almost exact match of those sample HCPs.

Every week, the biotech company receives a four-level affiliations hierarchy including HCP, facility, HCO, and parent, based on weekly prescribing information for their product. They use it to help their field force identify where to direct their efforts and for allocating non-personal promotion dollars. The recency and detail in the data ensures that they can maximize time without wasting budget.

The Senior Director values her relationship with McKesson Compile for the flexibility, expertise, and ease of use they provide. In her own words:

• Transparency in pricing - “Other vendors have sold us on capabilities, but then we would have to sift through many layers of data to find what we needed. McKesson Compile is very direct and straightforward. For example, other vendors wouldn’t provide the IDN and affiliation of providers without additional fees, whereas for McKesson Compile, this was bundled.”
• Ease of use - “We didn’t want to use complex APIs and tables to manipulate data. With McKesson Compile, we have a portal where we can get everything we need at the click of a button.”
• Expertise - “Anyone who’s worked with rare diseases knows that the data is not anywhere as clean as we want it to be. There are a lot of nuances to it, and that’s why it’s critical to have a partner like McKesson Compile that understands those nuances as we work through them together.”

Getting the most granular detail on affiliations relationships has made a real difference for this biotech. For this one-product company, resources are scarce, and good data has helped them to leverage them to the fullest.