6 Most Common Data Searches by Definitive Healthcare Biotech and Pharma Clients

For clients working in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, there are unique legal and clinical barriers to overcome before bringing a therapy to market. Whether a biotech or pharma firm is focused on clinical development, product launch or commercialization, their teams can find the data they need most in the Definitive Healthcare platform.

To give you insight into common tasks executed by your peers and competitors, we’ve compiled a list of the data most commonly used by Definitive Healthcare clients in the pharma and biotech markets. 

1. Patient populations by region

2. Affiliations and relationships

Understanding the strength of a provider’s affiliation with different healthcare organizations can provide valuable insights for biotech and pharma clients as they plan their go-to-market strategies.

By utilizing commercial claims data, Definitive Healthcare provides proprietary affiliation insights that help clients understand affiliation strength, affiliation length and historical affiliations.

Knowing a provider has a strong or weak affiliation to certain facilities can inform sales strategies and enable the discovery of potential influencers within an organization. Physicians with a longer and stronger affiliation may have more sway in an organization and be critical targets that impact the commercial success for treatments.

3. Centers of Excellence

A center of excellence is a care facility where patients return for treatment and primary care—which is often distinct from the initial place of diagnosis or treatment. This facility is an epicenter of care provision and is where clients can often find a physician influencer, key opinion leader, or other specialist.

Whether a care facility is a center of excellence varies from one firm to another. A pharmaceutical company developing a seasonal flu vaccine would be targeting very different care centers than a firm developing a new treatment for Parkinson’s Disease.

Once a company has identified the centers, they need to deliver programs and medical education that can influence care decisions to improve patient outcomes. Biotech and pharma companies need to facilitate the creation of Centers of Excellence around their product and disease area at the primary care level to influence referrals, treatment patterns and outcomes.

4. Medical experts at hospitals and PGs

Medical experts, sometimes referred to as key opinion leaders (KOLs), are physicians and healthcare researchers that have specialized experience in one or more clinical areas and are influential within the medical community. These KOLs are often approached by pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms to provide insight during various phases of drug or therapeutic development.

Biopharmaceutical firms often update relevant medical and scientific experts on clinical trial results and may seek feedback from the experts. Medical experts can act as consultants on how to best position a drug or therapy within the market, as well as publish articles or deliver speaking engagements to share their knowledge with their peers.

Not all medical experts will be easily identified in a standard database or intelligence platform. Depending on the need of the client, an ideal influencer might be a physician leader, high-volume physician, high-referring physician, or a published clinician or researcher.

By identifying and engaging with medical experts, biotech and pharma clients can increase their scientific share of voice, understand which experts are working with competitors and frame their message to change perceptions and care patterns, and potentially increase market share.

5. Executive and physician contacts

Once a firm has developed a therapy, they need to find the decision-makers who control access to the treatment. Our clients have access to the names, titles, and contact information for physician leaders, department heads, and executives—making it that much easier to contact key decision-makers.

Often, when approaching a sales conversation, our biotechnology and pharmaceutical clients start by pinpointing the physicians treating their patient cohorts. Leveraging a tool that can identify the patients who would benefit from a treatment enables these firms to first define their target patient populations, then identify the physicians treating them.

After a client finds a physician champion, it’s easy to identify where they work and, by extension, who the final decision-makers are in their organization. The executives that clients target could be the Head of Oncology or the CFO of a hospital. Regardless of which titles our clients need, they have access to the right information.

6. Diagnosis and procedure volume

How can clients find patient cohorts without understanding diagnosis, procedure and treatment patterns? Searching for the right combination of primary and secondary diagnoses—or diagnoses and comorbidities— along with looking at what treatments patients are receiving can be the easiest way for clients to find the ideal patient population in their target regions.

Clients use our medical claims database to find the hospitals and care facilities diagnosing and treating the highest volumes of patients that would benefit most from their therapies. These insights date back to 2016, so clients can analyze how patient cohorts and interventions have changed over time.

Clients can also leverage our Rx Claims Expansion Module to gain access to over 11 billion distinct prescription claims covering almost 250 million unique patients. These insights can help biotech and pharma companies understand prescribing patterns of physicians and uncover market opportunities.

Learn More

Are you looking for more information on how your business can leverage these essential insights? Contact us today to start your free trial and access healthcare industry intelligence and analytics, including:

• A comprehensive view of physicians and healthcare facilities
• Referral patterns, affiliations and facility networks
• Medicare and all-payer medical claims