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Five Data Disciplines for Specialty Product Manufacturers
John Giannouris, Vice President, Specialty Data Strategy, and Consulting Services, IQVIA
Jun 10, 2021

With access to greater depth and breadth of data, specialty product manufacturers have opportunities to advance and refine analyses across numerous vital operational areas. These include patient uptake and adherence, sales representative and reimbursement specialist effectiveness, specialty partner effectiveness, product forecasting and growth, informed decision making in interventions for patient care, and much more.

Realizing those opportunities requires sophisticated and intentional data management. Otherwise, decision makers will lose trust in the information. How can manufacturers maintain trust — and make the most of specialty product data? ValueCentric an IQVIA company recommends a structured approach that encompasses five core disciplines.

Discipline #1: Data Planning and Strategy

This discipline focuses on evaluating your potential data sources, defining key metrics that need to be supported, and identifying reporting needs. Doing this thinking upfront is essential; without it, it can be difficult or impossible to craft effective data agreements with providers.

A well-defined data plan and strategy reflects your planned channels and services, as well as product, patient, and services flow. It also delineates key performance indicators to track at product launch and beyond. With those parameters, you can build data agreements that spell out required data elements, expectations for quality assurance, and clear service level agreements.

Discipline #2: Data Acquisition and Patient De-Identification

Getting hands on data—and ensuring that it is properly patient de-identified — is the next discipline. This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of executing data agreements and onboarding diverse sources (see my earlier blog for a closer at look at potential sources). Tokenization can be used to de-identify patients while retaining the ability to anonymously match patient data across records. These capabilities are important when you need to conduct longitudinal tracking of patients over time and across sources — and do it all in compliance with HIPAA.

Discipline #3: Data Aggregation

This discipline focuses on bringing data sources together and converting them into information you can use to monitor metrics, make adjustments, and shape decisions. Done well, this discipline incorporates strong data quality assurance (QA) for surfacing and resolving issues. That starts with basic checks at the file level, continues through checks of record and record trending, and include use of strong QA business rules. Business rules can help automate identification of duplicate data while also ensuring that mandatory, optional, and conditional data fields are populated and verified to expected values.

Data aggregation also requires experience in standardizing and transforming data. For example, if you rely on a network of five specialty pharmacies, you want to ensure that the data from all of them is standardized for consistency. And by implementing location-based master data, you can ensure that you’re consistently tracking healthcare providers and organizations over time and across sources.

Discipline #4: Data Integration

Data from your sources provides significant insights. By integrating it with other sources – including a number of IQVIA offerings, such as Xponent, DDD, LAAD or OneKey reference data — you can take those insights to new heights. For example, IQVIA data can supplement the payer plan information that comes through specialty pharmacies and patient services hubs. This can yield valuable patient-journey insights (e.g., when a patient moves from a medical to pharmacy benefit for a specialty therapeutic).

Discipline #5: Reporting and Analytics

To turn data into insights that drive patient experience and clinical outcomes, you need access to information in real time — whether to view by account or healthcare provider, or to support plan-level or patient-journey analysis. You also need reports that provide an enterprise view of product performance.

Mastering these disciplines is key to finding specialty therapeutics patients — and keeping them engaged throughout their journey. Not every manufacturer has the resources needed to handle all of these aspects of specialty product data management and analytics. If you need help, contact ValueCentric, an IQVIA company, to learn how we have honed these disciplines since 2002 — and how these strengths can help you achieve your goals.

doctor showing patient tablet

Hunting for Specialty Therapeutics Patients?

Pharmaceutical companies developing specialty drugs need detailed data about patients, their physicians, and healthcare organizations to ensure commercial success.
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