How to prove the value of your product with real-world data

Healthcare buyers place a premium on results. When patients’ lives and well-being are on the line, provider stakeholders—including clinicians, executives, and procurement teams—can’t afford to make purchasing decisions on branding or name recognition alone.

Companies selling into healthcare can demonstrate the value of their drug or medical device using real-world data (RWD), i.e., data sourced from healthcare settings and encounters outside of traditional research environments, such as clinical trials.

Real-world data can be most easily found in the places where care encounters are recorded:

Electronic health records (EHR) featuring patients’ detailed health information
Medical claims and prescription drug claims that document procedures, diagnoses, and prescriptions for reimbursement purposes
Patient registries built around disease- or condition-oriented cohorts
Healthcare surveys and questionnaires that capture patients’ experiences
Wearable devices and health tracking apps that monitor biometrics and other health parameters

Through analysis, RWD related to a particular product, service, or therapy can be turned into insights that highlight clinical impact, performance with specific patient groups, return on investment, and other critical value-adds. Insights derived from RWD are referred to as real-world evidence (RWE).

Want to start putting RWD and RWE to work in your marketing and sales strategy? Follow these steps to build credibility, demonstrate safety and efficacy, and highlight the value of your offering.

Identify the outcomes that matter

The various stakeholders at a target organization may be working together toward common goals, but each will have their own unique priorities. Successful outreach starts with identifying and understanding the buyer personas at the organization you’re targeting. Once you know who you’re dealing with—and what outcomes they’re seeking from your organization—you can craft a value proposition that ties RWD related to your product to their desired outcomes.

Clinical stakeholders like chief medical officers, service line leaders, or independent practitioners tend to focus on care-related outcomes. Readmission rates, detection time and accuracy, time to diagnosis, clinician documentation time, and patient and clinician satisfaction are all metrics of concern to these buyers.

Financial stakeholders including chief financial officers and procurement specialists are more likely to seek cost-savings opportunities from vendors. They may be most concerned with outcomes related to cost per episode of care, service line utilization, length of stay, minimizing unnecessary procedures and tests, and reducing penalties and claims denials.

Operational stakeholders like chief operating officers, department heads, and staffing managers often prioritize efficiency-related outcomes in their buying decisions. These may include productivity gains, backlog reductions, turnover reductions, workflow improvements, and patient throughput optimization.

Rather than attempting to sell your product or service as all things to all buyers, hone in on two or three outcomes associated with your point of contact’s buyer persona, then benchmark your offering against performance offered by their existing solution (or their competitors).

Build credibility with the right sources

With some target outcomes in mind, you can begin to source the RWD to make the most compelling case for your business. The following data sources are widely used across healthcare and provide a good starting point for your efforts.

All-payor medical and prescription claims

Every diagnosis made, procedure performed, or prescription filled in a healthcare setting produces a claim for reimbursement by a private or public payor. From these claims, you can derive insights into care costs, utilization patterns, readmissions, and adverse events—all relevant outcomes for financial or operational stakeholders. They can also help clinicians understand associations between certain medications, procedures, and diagnosis within specific populations.

While claims processed by government payors like Medicare and Medicaid are publicly available, they’re not often packaged for intuitive analysis. And private payor claims will always need to bought from a clearinghouse or third-party vendor.

If claims data is relevant to your business and its buyers, you can save time and effort by sourcing all-payor claims data (that is, aggregated claims from public and private sources) from a vendor offering data cleansing and de-identification, workflow integration, and analytical tools that help you reduce the time between analysis and insight generation.

Electronic health records

Used by nearly every U.S. hospital and physician group, EHRs contain valuable data on patient outcomes, demographics, medical history, diagnoses, immunizations, laboratory values, and other qualitative observations. If you’re interested in supporting a claim related to the clinical impact of your offering, EHRs likely have the data you’re looking for.

The downside? It’s probably not an option to acquire this data in-house. Because of the sensitivity of EHR data, getting access to it usually requires a direct partnership with a provider (ideally an organization or clinician already using your product or service) or purchasing de-identified, aggregated data from a vendor. If your sale is contingent on a pilot program with a provider, be sure to ask about the feasibility of tracking this data throughout the course of the pilot.

Patient registries

If your target patient cohort is limited to a particular disease, condition, or service line, patient registries associated with specialty societies or organizations can deliver high volumes of relevant, centralized data on those patients.

But as with EHRs, you’ll need to partner with the organization managing the registry in order to get access to the data within—and, likewise, you’ll need to carefully de-identify any protected health information (PHI) before using it to develop insights related to your product.

Healthcare surveys

Patients’ perspectives and experiences are of particular significance to clinical and operational leaders looking to improve care delivery. Most provider organizations issue surveys to patients to capture insights into perceived wait times, clinicians’ bedside manner, and other qualitative, subjective areas.

If you want to demonstrate your product’s impact on patient experiences, you could partner with a provider already using it—or incorporate it into your pilot program with a prospective buyer—compare survey results before and after adoption, then package those findings into your value proposition. It could also be worthwhile to conduct a survey of clinicians and patients yourself (or with the help of an external agency) to develop insights into factors not typically covered by providers’ in-house surveys.

Wearables

In a world increasingly shaped and connected by the Internet of Things, wearables provide an invaluable source of objective, parameter-focused data into patient biometrics. Wearables—such as fitness trackers, glucose monitors, and sleep trackers—are favored by consumers and clinicians alike for their ability to give patients greater control over their own health, while granting their care teams improved insight into behaviors and health metrics outside of the doctor’s office.

Whether you partner with a wearable developer to acquire this data or collect it using your own wearable device, it can offer a high-resolution look at the effect of your product on patients before and after traditional care encounters.

Translate RWD into RWE

You understand your buyer and their targeted outcomes, and you’ve acquired data from some combination of the sources above. But your buyer doesn’t need raw data—they need to know what that data says about your offering.

To effectively demonstrate the value of your drug or device, you’ll need to translate real-world data into real-world evidence through analysis, then package it into a propositional asset that your prospective buyer is most likely to find useful.

Start with the facts: Based on the RWD you’ve gathered, how does your product affect the 2-3 outcomes you’ve identified?
Explain the framework of your RWE: What were the statistical methods used, what are your benchmarks, which populations are you targeting, and what are the limitations of your data?
Highlight quantitative and qualitative evidence: Where possible, pair hard financial and clinical metrics with testimonials, case studies, and quotes from influential clients.
Provide comparisons: How does your offering perform relative to market standards, competitors’ offerings, or your prospects’ historical performance?
Establish ROI: Even if your buyer isn’t in a financial function, a simple ROI model built on the organization’s baseline performance, RWD-based outcome improvements, payor reimbursement rates, and local cost inputs can give you a bottom line to focus on during procurement conversations.
Disclose data sources, vulnerabilities: Where did you get your RWD from, how did you protect PHI, and how do you handle gaps or shortcomings in the dataset?

The best mode of delivery for your RWE will again depend on your particular buyer and position within the sales process. A one-page highlight sheet featuring testimonials and an infographic might be appropriate for a 10-minute introductory call, while a multi-page impact report, case study, or multimedia presentation could be better suited for interactions further down the funnel.

What it all means

Clinical trials are the gold standard, but they’re far from the only source of useful insights into the performance of your drug or device. Real-world data can help you demonstrate the holistic value of your product in a way that trials alone cannot. By understanding your buyer and their desired outcomes, you can gather relevant RWD and transform it into RWE that tells a compelling story about the impact of your drug or device.

Definitive Healthcare provides cleansed, curated, and de-identified real-world data from a variety of sources covering the entire U.S. healthcare market. What access to reliable, up-to-date RWD and powerful analytical tools within your existing workflow? Sign up for a demo today.