Definitive LIVE! customer panel

Episode transcript

Emily De Oliveira:

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Definitive Live customer panel. I’m Emily De Oliveira, and I’m a senior product marketing manager here at Definitive Healthcare. Today we have three wonderful guests from Fisher Healthcare, Kellogg’s Away from Home and Marinus Pharmaceuticals. We’ll take a moment for each person to introduce themselves. So, John, would you like to go first?

John Feilmeier:

Sure. Thanks Emily. My name is John Feilmeier. I work for Kellogg’s Away from Home, so that’s really everything besides the grocery stores. That’s how we have our different channels. This is my 15th year at Kellogg’s and I started my career in food service over 25 years ago. I actually used to work on the operator side, so I worked for Morrison and Aramark before I came to Kellogg’s, so I understand what it’s like to be on the operator sides as well as what it’s like to be on the supplier side. So that’s who I am. And thank you very much for inviting me to be here.

Emily De Oliveira:

Great, welcome John. And Bonnie, would you like to go next?

Bonnie Cooper:

Sure. Thanks Emily. My name is Bonnie Cooper. I am a director of vertical strategy in the marketing department at Fisher Healthcare. I’ve been in healthcare for over 30 years. I actually was a med tech working in a clinical lab many moons ago, and I’ve held several different roles within Thermo Fisher scientific of which Fisher Healthcare is a part of. It’s a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me.

Emily De Oliveira:

Oh, fantastic. And Bill, would you like to introduce yourself?

Bill Pentz:

Thanks Emily. So my name’s Bill Pentz. I am the director of commercial operations at a small pharmaceutical company outside of Philadelphia called Marinus Pharmaceuticals. I’ve been with the company for one year as we plan our first commercial launch coming here in the summer of 2022. We received our first FDA approval a few months ago. Marinus is a company that’s actively developing a number of compounds directed at seizure disorders in both the rare disease and broader categories. And on a personal note, I’ve been in the industry for just over 20 years now with a varied background, mostly centered on commercial operations. And then specifically over the past decade, really helping a number of small emerging companies come to market for the first time.

Emily De Oliveira:

Great. Well thank you all for joining today. I am so excited to have all of you on the panel, because each of you offer such a diverse perspective on the healthcare industry. Over the next 20 minutes or so I’d love to hear from you about how you’re using Definitive Healthcare to overcome any challenges that you’re facing and how you’re using it to grow your business.

So to start things off, I would love to hear the perspective of someone at a company that’s working towards launch. So Bill, how has Definitive Healthcare been valuable to Marinus Pharmaceuticals as you went through that pre-commercial phase?

Bill Pentz:

Absolutely. No, it’s a great question. I’ll actually take one step backwards on my first introduction with Definitive Healthcare, which was a few years ago with a prior employer who was recently acquired. And it was our similar situation as we have here at Marinus, which was it was our first commercial launch. Up until then we had been pre-commercial and a rare disease company. So having had that introduction and that experience, taking that leap, if you will, with the Definitive data, I knew from experience and found a way to communicate internally that in my opinion and objective analysis of what’s out there that Definitive truly provides what I feel is the broadest impact to multiple stakeholders across an organization for the dollar spent, tremendous value. One of the biggest challenges for small disease companies, or rare disease companies rather, is that we have limited funding, but we have everybody in the organization as a customer and there isn’t a single data source out there that satisfies every single need of every single stakeholder within the company.

But I do truly believe and have experienced that Definitive provides the broadest impact to multiple stakeholders. And this includes sales, our marketing teams, my team in commercial operations, market access, even clinical operations. Another reason why Definitive is very valuable to us is that traditionally, ahead of a commercial team landing at a small company, you have your field medical team, your market access, or I’m sorry, your medical affairs team, and they actually were subscribers of the Monocl’s data, which is now under the Definitive umbrella. A few years ago, that wasn’t the case. But now that Monocl’s also part of the Definitive family, it adds if you will synergistic effect whereby we take both sources and triangulate around the best possible targeting lists, CRM seed lists, and other related items as we cast a net into our first entry.

Emily De Oliveira:

Oh, that’s fantastic. And it sounds like Definitive Healthcare and Monocl really help to just understand the landscape and that’s critical intelligence for any company that’s in that pre-commercial phase or preparing for commercial launch.

Bill Pentz:

Absolutely. And the only thing I would add is it’s a very complex environment and the way I view it, if it is a world, if you will, the Definitive data will give us a perspective from here, Monocl from here. And then those two combine make sure that we don’t miss any critical audience as we get ready for our first launch.

Emily De Oliveira:

Right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks Bill. Let’s shift to the perspective of a company that has more fully commercialized products now. So Bonnie, how are you using Definitive Healthcare to improve your go to market strategy and execution?

Bonnie Cooper:

Thank you for asking and Bill, congratulations on your launch. That sounds really exciting. I work for a very large organization. We have a lot of different entities that touch customers. We are very focused on clinical lab diagnostics, so when you go get your blood work done or any type of testing. And over the last couple years, our market has truly changed and it’s really due to consumerism. Being a patient, where you would get your lab testing done, what you want to know about your results, how you want to own your healthcare. So in the last couple years, specifically, a lot of the clinical laboratory testing has moved out of the acute space or a traditional hospital space, and it’s moved to non-acute. For instance, you’re don’t feel good. You don’t want to wait for your family practitioner. So you run to the urgent care because you can make an appointment in five minutes, get in there, get a script and get out.

Our diagnostic testing has moved from a very traditional space to a non-traditional space. And that’s why I took this role with Fisher Healthcare. When I first started, I had been looking for data and information and really struggling a little bit. I was aware of Definitive. I had used them in previous roles that I had within the organization. And I brought it to the attention of the leadership at that point in time to say, “Hey, we really need this type of data.” And so over a long process, Thermo Fisher did get an account with Definitive and it came in super handy when I entered into this role, because I now needed to know where all my clinical testing was going. So I could use Definitive to just search on a CPT code, for example, for a pregnancy test and find all of this space outside the acute that was going ahead and billing for it. So Definitive has been really important in my role, especially this year.

Emily De Oliveira:

Oh, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, it sounds like the lab data and the claims data, both the acute and non-acute intelligence has really been incredibly valuable to your strategy.

Bonnie Cooper:

It has.

Emily De Oliveira:

Great. And so let’s shift gears a little bit because Definitive Healthcare is used by a variety of different industries. We have healthcare providers, software, and IT companies, consultants and food and beverage companies. So John, how has Kellogg’s Away from Home’s healthcare division been leveraging Definitive Healthcare to really optimize your sales organization?

John Feilmeier:

That’s a great question, Emily. And I’m going to go on the same lines as both Bill and Bonnie to a certain degree. We’re a bit less technical than those folks are, but similar in the fact that for us over the last, what 10 years or so, we’ve seen a lot of migration and integration within IDNs and hospital groups are buying up local hospital groups and people are merging together. And it’s hard for us, even though we’ve got contracts with some of the largest GPOs, group purchasing organizations, in the world, they struggle even keeping up with who’s been bought by who, what, when and how. And I got to be honest with you, Definitive gives us, we feel, the most accurate tracking information of who falls underneath whom within the IDNs. And you could have a system, an IDN healthcare system, integrated delivery network system, have 20 acute care facilities. And next month have 50 because they’ve acquired somebody else and now they fall within this group purchasing organization’s purchasing power.

For us, we marry up what we call our book of business. That may be an old salesman’s term, but that’s what we still use at Kellogg. We have area and local reps who have their books of business and we can assign them to these different IDNs. So, I don’t know of a single other company that has on time and real time tracking of IDNs and the migration and the integration of all of these healthcare facilities, not just acute care, but all the facilities in general, online, up to date, live as Definitive does. And so that’s a huge tool in our toolbox to be able to let our folks know who’s buying our food and where and how.

Emily De Oliveira:

Yeah. There’s so much consolidation happening in healthcare. And so, without that centralized source for that information, it could just be so time consuming and resource intensive.

John Feilmeier:

Emily, I’m just going to throw, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I’ll throw one last thing in there too. It’s not only does it help us identify what the hospital, the name of the system or the acute care facility is, but we also drills down and gives you who are the department leads and who is the people who are responsible. For us, it doesn’t do us a lot of good to go speak to the clinical and the dieticians, excuse me, and the clinic and other departments and pharmaceuticals. We need to know who the people are in food service and it gives that to us. So that’s another key element that Definitive gives us that I don’t know of any other tool that does.

Emily De Oliveira:

That’s really great. You can keep track of the changing healthcare landscape and also really drill down into all of these specific accounts.

John Feilmeier:

Exactly.

Emily De Oliveira:

Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for sharing your perspectives on that. And speaking of the changes and challenges in the healthcare industry, there’s been a lot of changes. We have COVID-19, we have supply chain issues. We have changes in how patients are seeking care. So how have your companies really used Definitive Healthcare’s intelligence to adapt to these changes? Bonnie, would you like to go first?

Bonnie Cooper:

Sure. I mean, for Fisher Healthcare and for Thermo broadly, COVID had a huge impact for us. Our reps were not able to see customers. Customers were short staffed, customers got sick. Some of our manufacturing plants, people were ill. We couldn’t make product, we couldn’t receive product. It was stuck as a large distributor. We were right in between everything. Customers want this, we can’t supply it, or yes, we do have it, but where is it and how’s it going to get there? So I think COVID had a huge impact on all of us as consumers of healthcare, which I think I mentioned before, we are more apt to really want to understand why we’re getting tested, what we’re getting tested for and how that’s going to change for us? And so I think to a point that John brought up too, we got very focused, who is doing COVID testing, what is it that they’re buying? And we supported and created a platform for genetic testing that was also applicable to COVID.

When surveillance started to occur, we were really trying to find those customers that were going to be able to do surveillance. We used the Definitive data to identify where COVID testing was being done and by whom, and that was really the biggest thing to John’s point is, who’s doing this? Is it in the IDN? Is it the PhD in the university sitting next to the hospital that’s doing it? Is it a new independent reference lab who invested in this capital equipment to do this test? So we ran a lot of data during that time to see where it was and who it was. And we would’ve never been able to do that because we were really not having face-to-face with any customers and we were not in the loop on the rapid changes that they were doing to adapt to COVID.

Emily De Oliveira:

Yeah. Care delivery has certainly changed and who’s doing what, that is a really big challenge to overcome. So that’s really interesting to hear how you were using the data to really navigate those changes. I’m curious to hear from Bill, what trends your company have experienced?

Bill Pentz:

Absolutely. Well, and I smile because although our companies are different and the size of our companies is certainly varied on the phone, we have very similar challenges.

John Feilmeier:

Yeah.

Bill Pentz:

And both Bonnie and John have alluded to some of the challenges we’ve experienced. Specifically to how we’ve adapted. So with COVID-19, we’ve seen as a pharmaceutical company, we are interested in with patients and physicians appropriately. Site of care has changed. A lot of virtual engagement. So to John’s point on knowing who’s in the office and finding their contact information, if I’ve got a sales force out there, they can prospect a little bit in-person, COVID 19, there’s no prospecting anymore. They’re a strike force. My prior company, fewer than 30 people, my current company, fewer than 20 people in the sales force. So they need to be extraordinarily efficient with their time and with their targeting data.

Related to specifically the contacts, we had trust and validity on a daily basis that Definitive had the best contact information. Where can we find folks? If not the primary site, there’s a fantastic primary flag, but if not, here are some alternate sites we might find them and how you get in touch with them contact wise, whether phone, whether email, et etcetera. So I think because it was in lockdown, we used the real time contact data to update our CRM. Always give our sales reps a resource that they could trust to make it as efficient use of time trying to find people and have those appropriate engagements. It also helped us adjust on, if you will, appropriate targeting. So targeting back to something Bonnie said about using the claims data. As the world shut down and I’ll use in our world, the two worlds I’ve had at this company, the diseases that we supported with our products, it’s not like COVID took it away. It complicated how patients were cared for, but the diseases themselves still exist.

We have to find those patients because they are well served by these products. And so we really monitored, if you will, almost like an early alert. So on a monthly basis, when we knew the refresh would happen, we’d go in, find the appropriate ICD 10 codes that applied to those specific products, whether my old company, at the current company, and then got that into the hands of both our sales and marketing team, so that they could come up with very personalized, pointed messaging at the right point of care for the right patient. And so for us, in summary, it was essentially allowing a strike force sales force to be efficient with their time pointed with their efforts and no more fumbling, if you will, through the ether, as they tried to find the right people.

Bonnie Cooper:

Yeah. And I just want to add one thing to that Bill, because you brought up such a good point. These customers were so overwhelmed and so distracted where you literally could send 10 emails, but these people were so busy. So just finding that one person creating that short contact that you could find the information in Definitive with the title and put the pieces together really helped, I think, versus sending an email blast to 20 people who were swamped.

Bill Pentz:

Completely agree. And to that point is finding the, sometimes we’d start with the account and drive down to the people. Sometimes we’d start with a person, drive up to the count and then down.

Bonnie Cooper:

Exactly.

Bill Pentz:

Trying to find that complimentary appropriate selling approach to find the right people.

John Feilmeier:

Do the same thing.

Bonnie Cooper:

Yeah. It’s totally different when you can’t walk in and knock on the door.

John Feilmeier:

Yes.

Bonnie Cooper:

Or leave a card, doesn’t work that way.

John Feilmeier:

Be smarter.

Emily De Oliveira:

John, you’re nodding in agreement, are you experiencing similar-

John Feilmeier:

Yeah. It’s amazing that we are from very different industries, but yet it’s very similar in how we use Definitive. I’m going to go in just a little bit different direction than Bill and Bonnie by saying this, we doubled down on our activities and our capacity with Definitive during the times that we were down for almost 18 months, a year. And we added features onto our dashboard. And what is, I don’t want to bore everybody to tears about how our industry works, but within a hospital, acute care facility, you could be purchasing, the hospital could be purchasing off of group purchasing organizations, a GPOs purchasing plan. And I’ll just use the example of Premier. They could be doing that, but they could also subcontract out their food service with a company like Aramark, who’s one of the largest contract food service companies in the world.

We have reps that would walk into an account and say, “Well, but you’re buying off of the Premier agreement.” “Yes, but I’m being operated by the Aramark agreement.” And we made it so that it’s much easier for when we knew at some point that the world would get somewhat back to normal is that our folks are much better and well educated on how it is and who our customers are. And again, with Definitive, I don’t know any other resource that can do all of that for us. And so we got smarter, better, stronger, bigger, stronger, faster over the COVID period where we weren’t able to be out in the field. We had to do it and got smarter at doing it and you guys really helped us do that.

Emily De Oliveira:

That’s fantastic. Well, thank you all for sharing your perspectives there. My next question is beyond the self-service platform, what other aspects of Definitive Healthcare have been valuable to you? John, would you like to go first?

John Feilmeier:

So this kind of all still goes back to, I’m manager of national accounts, I’m a sales guy. And so sales to me are where it’s at. That’s what I do and that’s what they pay me to do. And one of the things that we also work with another company that helps us track every case that goes out of not only our plants, but also through our distributors, US Foods, Cisco, Gordon Food Service. They’re some of the largest food distributors in the world so we ship our food to them and they end up shipping it then to the end customer, which is the hospitals and any really healthcare facility that has our food, our snacks, our cereal, our plant-based proteins, any of the items that we sell. So with that piece there is, again, we doubled down and got smarter about how it is that we can find our tracking.

We have another company that helps us track every case that goes so we were able to marry up the information that we get from Definitive with that cases. And now we make sure that if I sold a hundred cases, by God, I know exactly where those a hundred cases went. If we’re down, for some reason, we go and talk to our customers and find out what’s going on. And if we’re up big, that’s great and we could continue to sell them there. So we married Definitive’s information along with another software company that helps us track our shipments of product. And again, it just made us, I use the word, I’m an ex-athlete, it made us bigger, stronger, faster at what we do.

Emily De Oliveira:

Oh, great. And Bonnie, would you like to go next with your thoughts?

Bonnie Cooper:

Sure. I think the biggest impact for me has been Tina. So Tina has developed a really good relationship with those of us that are at Fisher Healthcare that are using Definitive. And she’s like my sounding board. I’ll wake up in the middle of night and go, “Ah.” I call Tina, because I got to ask her about every oncologist who submitted this CPT code for genetic sequencing for some type of cancer. So a lot of times I’ll spend some time on the phone with her and we will just brainstorm through things and she’ll be live and trying to show me what she’s done. And a lot of times she can create some customer reporting for me that I ultimately do use. And very much like John, we were also utilizing our GPO relationships to get out into that non-acute market. A lot of the times I’ll say to her, “Can you just run me every oncologist in Premier in the Northeast?

John Feilmeier:

Yes.

Bonnie Cooper:

To get very specific, to turn that over to our sales organization. So I think she’s had the greatest impact on my experience at Definitive.

Emily De Oliveira:

Great. And for those who don’t know, Tina is one of our customer success managers. So if anyone in the audience has not reached out to their CSMs or AEs about their business challenge, something we definitely recommend. They can give you a lot of great information about how they can best help within the platform. Great. And so Bill, would you like to share your perspective as well?

Bill Pentz:

Certainly. And I know we want to talk about things beyond the self-service, but I will say for the small company clients, the self-service is a huge benefit. And one of the reasons why we chose it. There are other data sets out there that many companies utilize that then ask you to subscribe to their front end, if you will, and that’s an additional cost. For a small company we’re back to that value, it’s huge because a small team, we still have to do all the things the big boys and girls have to do. I need to be able to teach my users, be it field force, marketers and others. They need to fish. I can’t just give them fish. They need to fish themselves. So it’s a huge bit.

But on top of that, I will say our CRM setup, we’re starting from scratch. And so we’ve used Definitive data, a lot of the CRM oriented data, the relationships between people and locations, the address information, all of that nuts and bolts old fashioned email and phone Rolodex type stuff has been huge as we start from scratch. Like Bonnie as well, the customer success managers have been absolutely fantastic. And I will say at my prior client or my prior company, when we were a client for the first time that played in a great deal to us engaging a second time around. There are many times admittedly rare diseases are nuanced. We’re not special. We’re just a little bit different than some of the margin diseases. And it’s a lot of nuanced analysis where we’ll scratch the surface on the self-service, but then we need ad hoc behind the scenes. It’s linking a bunch of different tables together and the CSMs have been nothing but spectacular.

I’ll admit I’ve sometimes sent them on wild goose chases and they’ve been fantastic at entertaining my wild thoughts, but ultimately, similar to Bonnie too, they’re not just order takers. One of the things for me, for any person that I work with is I want to partner and that partner sometimes needs to push back on me. I’m looking in the wrong direction, or I could be a little bit more efficient with my analysis or request and they don’t hesitate to be a partner, not just an order taker, but somebody that really helps guide me along the way.

Emily De Oliveira:

Oh, that’s great to hear. Well, I think we have time for one more question and that’s around the impact. So what has the impact been for you and your company using Definitive Healthcare? Bonnie, would you like to go first?

Bonnie Cooper:

Sure. Again, I think I said it a couple times. I think the biggest impact for us was to define this non-acute space. Where was this testing being done? Who was doing it and where was it going to grow? I mean, where was this growth going to happen as we follow the patient through their clinical journey and to disease states to a rapid diagnostic test, to something that you do over the counter, where is all this testing going? So it was always, we could start by claims data. We could search on a CPT code. I could search on an IDN and then get all the affiliates that are with it. Drilling down to point of care practice managers, here we have a whole new title in healthcare, who are those people? What are they called? So I think that’s really been the biggest impact is, I spend a lot less time Googling and a lot more time finding.

John Feilmeier:

Yeah.

Emily De Oliveira:

Well that’s great. And John, what is your experience?

John Feilmeier:

Well said, Bonnie. Less time Googling and going into LinkedIn and trying to find who the point of contact is,

Bonnie Cooper:

Oh my gosh.

John Feilmeier:

It is archaic now to our company and we were, I think, one of the first food service companies to ever use Definitive in the way that we use it, because my background before lent us to know who they are. And I want to give, a) a quick shout out to my personal customer service, Katie. Katie does an awesome job and she’s always there for us. So I want to give a quick shout out for Katie and then, Emily, to answer your question, it would be nearly impossible for us and the folks that worked for me to be able to track the sales and an IDN accurately without Definitive period.

And I’ll say this, if I was a rep and I had ABC IDN that was in the Northeast and I now acquired 50 more hospitals within the Northeast, boy, I look like I’m the greatest salesperson in America. I’ve just doubled and tripled my business. I should get a big bonus and a company car and blah, blah, blah. Well, that other person who’s got that now looks like they’ve completely lost. And so the swings and the shifts of our business is huge. And so you don’t want to falsely look at any of the people that work for me and I’m, again, a salesperson. I look at sales results and say, “Wow, this person has done just the most unbelievably. They’ve tripled their business. And so what happened to this person here? You’ve lost all of your business over here.” They haven’t, they’ve been integrated and merged together. So it would be nearly impossible for us to measure the sales success of our people without Definitive being able to track where these mergers and acquisitions occur and where they are.

Emily De Oliveira:

That’s fantastic.

Bonnie Cooper:

And then multiple name changes every other…

John Feilmeier:

Oh, that’s another one.

Bonnie Cooper:

Yeah. Wait, that used to be St Joe’s blah, blah, blah. Now it’s not.

John Feilmeier:

Yeah. 100%. You have to be on top of it because it changes so rapidly and if you don’t, you’re going-

Bonnie Cooper:

The only consistent thing is the address anymore.

John Feilmeier:

Oh.

Emily De Oliveira:

Absolutely. And Bill, I’d love to hear your perspective here too.

Bill Pentz:

Certainly. No, I appreciate it. Very similar in other, and I’ll focus on something I would say was an unexpected benefit and impact of the Definitive Healthcare, both at my prior company and here at Marinus Pharmaceuticals, which is typically the commercial team operates a bit in a vacuum, particularly in large companies, large pharmaceutical companies, commercial data stays within the commercial health, if you will. At both the prior company and at Marinus Pharmaceuticals, what I’ve really enjoyed is as we’ve presented some commercial insights, it’s prompted colleagues in other non-commercial departments to ask questions on how they might be able to use the data. So this involves things like our clinical ops folks. We talk about COVID-19 negatively impacting commercial efforts of sales. It’s also really been a royal pain when it comes to accruing trial patients.

Well, by using the Definitive data and using some unique searches, we’ve uncovered physicians that we didn’t know were treating patients that we might have a trial for. And that provides an avenue to explore potentially a clinical trial relationship with our clinical ops folks. We’ve also had business development get a sense of what we were doing on our current product that’s now been approved and said, “Hey, are there some overlap analyses. If we’re exploring a potential business opportunity or business development opportunity, we want to look at other products or other disease states that are out there, let’s start taking a look at the overlap of claims between treaters, institutions, et cetera, because what we don’t want to do is buy two products that have nothing related to one another. We want to make sure there’ much overlap as possible, and that’s difficult in a rare disease. And so I’d say the impact, while I may not be able to measure it in ROI dollar for dollar, what’s been really fun to watch is seeing colleagues that typically don’t have access to commercially oriented data using it to solve business challenges of their own within their departments.

Emily De Oliveira:

Fantastic. Well, I really want to thank you all for joining today and sharing your incredibly valuable perspective. So thank you so much. And I want to also give a big thank you to our audience for joining us today. We have some amazing master classes coming up soon where you can get even more value out of Definitive Healthcare, but first, stay tuned for our first ever Apex Awards, starting in just a few moments. So sit tight, I’m going to pass the mic to our CMO, Justin Simon, and we hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.