Healthcare is a maze of organizations, decision makers, affiliations, clinical activity, and shifting market dynamics. So how do you choose the best path forward with confidence?
It all comes down to data.
The right data helps teams see the bigger picture: the connections between providers and health systems, the trends shaping prescribing and procedure activity, and the key opinion leaders (KOLs) and influencers across organizations and institutions.
But not all data is built to answer the same questions.
Broad cuts of business and contact data enable teams to identify companies, find contacts, and build prospect lists at scale. Narrower, specialized healthcare datasets may provide useful insights into specific areas, such as claims, hospital profiles, or market benchmarks.
However, healthcare is too interconnected and complex for a single data cut—or a general-purpose business database—to always provide the full context teams need.
Connected healthcare intelligence brings critical insights together, helping commercial, strategy, and business development teams move from finding healthcare organizations and professionals to understanding how they fit into the broader market.
Three approaches to healthcare data
When you’re evaluating data to inform commercial strategy, you’re likely to encounter three broad approaches: General business and contact data, specialized healthcare datasets, and connected healthcare intelligence.
The first two forms are the most common. But the third approach is where you’re most likely to find the next best path forward.
Business and contact data
Broad business and contact data is designed to help commercial teams identify and engage potential customers across industries.
These data products may be well suited to high-volume prospecting and outreach, providing top-level information on companies, contacts, job titles, firmographics, and general intent signals.
Teams can leverage these attributes to build and prioritize prospect lists around relevant keywords, job title seniority, company size, geography, or technology usage. The resulting view can be useful for sales and marketing automation, but it’s typically limited to representing relationships through generalized corporate hierarchies and organizational structures.
For some industries, that serves as sufficient context. Healthcare, however, is built on layers of relationships that don’t always fit neatly into conventional corporate structures.
For example, a physician may practice at multiple locations, hold privileges at several hospitals, belong to a health system network, and refer patients to providers at other organizations. A hospital may be part of a larger health system while maintaining its own facilities, service lines, financial relationships, and purchasing structures.
Understanding those connections requires deeper knowledge than simply who works where.
Specialized healthcare datasets and benchmarks
Specialized healthcare datasets take a more focused approach. They’re designed to answer specific healthcare research or benchmarking questions.
You might encounter datasets targeting:
- Medical claims
- Care facility profiles
- Provider contacts
- Financial benchmarks
- Procedure volumes
- Prescribing activity
These datasets can be useful when you need to answer a particular question at a particular place or point in time. A claims dataset, for example, can show clinical activity in a certain market or network, but it won’t reveal the organizational relationships needed to understand who owns a facility where procedures are being performed, where patients are going after a diagnosis, or how purchasing decisions are structured in relation to the supplies and technologies associated with that activity.
Likewise, a contact database alone can’t tell you much about the clinical, financial, and organizational context surrounding the individuals you’re targeting.
Specialized datasets may answer specific questions, but they’re just as likely to leave you with bigger questions.
Definitive Healthcare’s approach: Connected healthcare intelligence
Connected healthcare intelligence brings together multiple dimensions of healthcare data and analytics.
Instead of showing organizations, professionals, clinical activity, and market characteristics as separate datasets, Definitive Healthcare connects them to create a comprehensive view of the healthcare ecosystem.
Our connected intelligence includes insights into:
- Healthcare organizations and professionals
- Provider affiliations and referral patterns
- Ownership structures and health system relationships
- Claims and clinical activity
- Prescribing, diagnostic, and procedural trends
- Financial performance
- Quality metrics
- Market characteristics
- Consumer behavior and preferences
Definitive Healthcare’s connected healthcare intelligence approach provides an alternative to standalone datasets that don’t deliver meaningful context. Bringing these insights into a single, interconnected platform reveals relationships, contexts, and trends that aren’t clear when viewed in isolation. It turns a hospital from a set of contact information and claims into a commercial opportunity defined by its services, member physicians, ownership structure, and relevant clinical activity.
With this additional intelligence, teams can more effectively define targets, prioritize accounts, and approach prospects with greater confidence.
Context is king
More data doesn’t mean more value on its own. Connecting robust datasets in a clean, compliant, and secure way delivers context—and context is everything in the healthcare market.
Definitive Healthcare’s data and analytics are interwoven with intention to help you see the full market within one connected view. We help you map the affiliations, hierarchies, referral patterns, and purchasing relationships that shape healthcare decisions, so you take the most impactful commercial action on the right accounts, stakeholders, and messages.
Want to see firsthand how our approach to data connects the people, organizations, activities, and relationships your team needs to find the best path forward? Sign up for a demo today.
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