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WHITE PAPER
Finding Hidden Referrers for Infusion Products by Leveraging Machine Learning
Mar 25, 2024
For infused biologic medicines, referring providers are often the key treatment decision makers and, therefore, a focal point for pharmaceutical manufacturers. However, medical claims, the only data asset that captures referrals, typically populates approximately half of referring healthcare providers (HCPs) because provider information is not required for reimbursement. To complement these known (or explicit) referrals found in claims, analytics teams and brand product managers usually rely on implicit referrals — educated guesses to infer the likely referring providers if they are not captured in claims. Prior to this study, the most popular approach for capturing implicit referrals was based on simple business rules that often miss the complexity of real-world referring patterns. This paper introduces an optimized approach to finding these hidden referrers developed by researchers at Amgen and IQVIA.