Medical affairs organizations are increasingly leveraging novel data sources and analytics to enhance the efficiency and impact of their engagement strategies. Medical claims, in particular, provide unique value to medical affairs teams.
A medical claim is a record submitted to a payor organization that demonstrates the various levels of service addressed via a healthcare provider. Leaders across the biopharmaceutical industry use medical claims data as part of their efforts to drive awareness and understanding of novel approaches to patient care.
But how does claims data deliver insights into the world’s experts and enable medical affairs teams to identify, prioritize, and engage those experts more effectively?
The power of claims data
For starters, claims data can be used to monitor behavioral trends over time, potentially yielding important insights into care at a community or sub-specialty level as well as into differences between scientific activity and clinical care.
Claims-based insights can be combined with those gleaned from scientific exchange, real-world evidence (RWE), and expert profile activity to help identify novel activity patterns. Organizations offering more targeted therapies can leverage this intelligence to expand their reach to healthcare providers who are managing challenging issues and would benefit from access to emerging data and innovation.
Additionally, teams can identify clinicians who may not have risen to the level of a traditional (scientifically recognized) expert but may be managing the daily array of complex patient issues—from a much closer relationship with medical affairs. By leveraging this expanding set of data, medical organizations can enhance insights into existing care patterns, address gaps in knowledge, and improve impact.
Ultimately, this information can be used to improve strategic planning, enhance external engagement, and provide education and outreach, with services targeted to different sub-populations, care providers, or at-risk patient groups.
But wrangling all this data can take lots of time and effort. To make this onerous task easier, we developed a data extension for Monocl ExpertInsight that utilizes the industry-leading Atlas All-Payor Claims Dataset from Definitive Healthcare. With this data, users can now utilize Monocl ExpertInsight’s powerful features to analyze experts’ clinical activity through an array of clinical data in their profile overview. As always, there are no restrictions to therapy area or location and all data is 100% available in real-time.
Identify and prioritize clinical leaders
Monocl ExpertInsight contains information on many millions of medical and scientific experts. To be included in the database a researcher/scientist needs to fulfil a number of criteria, such as having published a minimum number of publications in peer-reviewed journals.
These inclusion criteria allow Monocl ExpertInsight’s powerful algorithms to analyze billions of datapoints and ensure a very high degree of accuracy when building and updating its millions of profiles. The addition of claims data has greatly expanded the volume and types of experts included in the platform.
Our profiles illustrate clinical behavior from not only physicians but other types of care providers including nurse practitioners, pharmacists, pathologists, and others who may be involved in diagnostic or procedural care. This enhancement allows you to identify experts with the right experience and monitor their care choices over time.
Let’s consider how you might actually use this upgraded tool to find relevant experts.
Start your search with a relevant keyword, such as a therapeutic area, disease, or drug. For this example, we are looking for experts in psoriasis research and find globally just over 53,000 in the database.
Fig. 1 A screenshot from Monocl ExpertClaims
Next, we’ll narrow this list down by filtering for results within the United States and then consider the experts’ clinical footprint by way of total patients.
To understand the role this group of physicians plays in the treatment of psoriasis more specifically, we can filter on the specific diagnostic code for plaque psoriasis, L40.
Fig. 2 A screenshot from Monocl ExpertClaims
Working down the list of experts and analyzing their patient volume as well as their specific clinical activity allows user to exclude those who may not be as relevant.
Searching for experts who treat specific diseases or perform certain procedures can help you identify those who are more receptive to engagement on a focused topic. For this example, an organization involved in genetic testing or other diagnostic procedures may look to target experts who have clinical activity with companion diagnostics or other emerging tools to align treatment. Using the sort and refine features of Monocl ExpertClaims allows us to narrow down the field of over 53,000 experts with activities related in psoriasis to individuals that match specific profile requirements.
Starting with a list of experts and then focusing on those with a significant care footprint offers a smart and streamlined way of identifying and prioritizing clinical leaders without the need for other third-party tools or a large investment in time or deep analytics.
Understanding care relationships
Monocl ExpertClaims seamlessly identifies high-impact practitioners and quantifies patient volumes by diagnosis and procedure to optimize planning and outreach efforts. By accessing physicians’ referral patterns, teams can further understand how providers collaborate on care decisions. This evolving dynamic could provide opportunities for a company to improve education, resource deployment, and therapeutic interventions. This knowledge can also help you understand critical healthcare providers and the challenges they face.
Fig. 3 A screenshot from Monocl ExpertClaims
Understanding referral relationships and the reach of your target experts can support your medical affairs teams in partnering with care providers to improve treatment outcomes and provide a more effective allocation of medical resources.
Comparing scientific expertise
Additionally, Monocl ExpertClaims allows users to compare an expert’s scientific activity with that of their own clinical practice and the behaviors of community-level healthcare providers.
Unlike academic research, clinical practice isn’t about developing new innovations or furthering existing knowledge. It’s about the current standard of care and understanding how evidence has impacted decision-making. Identifying clinical leaders provides a new avenue to share emerging evidence to enhance care choices in the future.
Historically, these insights have been generated via traditional experts, yet clinical practice involves innovation in terms of translating evidence into effective patient outcomes. Expanding awareness of clinical decision-making can augment insights, validate the impact of current evidence, and generate opportunities to enhance understanding in the future.
Fig. 4 A screenshot from Monocl ExpertClaims
Learn more
These are just a few examples of how Monocl ExpertInsight and Definitive Healthcare can help you find and prioritize the most relevant clinical leaders and experts for medical affairs engagement. If you’re ready to see how the platform works for your unique use case, sign up for a demo today.
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