Patient-level longitudinal data has an established role in the commercial operations of all successful life science companies. Uses vary from prelaunch market assessments and understanding, to operational post-launch decision support. All areas of commercial activity in life sciences benefit from the use of longitudinal patient data (PLD).
In this brief paper we outline two areas of PLD where the Tudor Health methods and techniques provide benefits unavailable from legacy data providers:
- Institution-level data capture – the collection of data from target institutions, many of which are not accessed by legacy data
- Monthly data readouts – providing data immediacy not available from legacy data
Institutional Level Data
- Target institutions rather than individual HCPs
- KOL influence over HCPs at the same institution shows up in data from all patients
- hard to reach institutions
- In Europe all PLD is difficult, and we reach into specific target institutions
- Provides institution-based targeting support
- In USA EMR data does not cover over 60% of all IDNs
- Commercial benefits include
- Improved data granularity
- Improved coverage of critical treatment institutions (especially in rare and long-tail diseases)
- Improved marketing and salesforce targeting
- Greater scope for advanced analytics and modeling
- Integration with primary research and other data sources
- Forecasting
- Market simulations (potentially using synthetic data models)
Monthly Data Readouts
- Provides immediate readout of current data
- Legacy systems produce data 3-4 months old
- Claims data can be up to 9 months old at readout
- TH data are 2-4 weeks old at readout
- Detailed data management requires
- sophisticated systems
- detailed quality assurance (including AI tools used during data capture)
- near real-time analytics
- Commercial benefits
- Improved tactical response rate
- Enhanced insight generation
- Flexible advanced analytics
Institutional Level Data
For over 35 years the life science industry has been driven by the desire to target individual prescribers. Whether seeking to gain insights into their behaviour or, more importantly, to modify their behaviour through sales activity, the desire to target individual prescribers has been the most significant driving force in commercial operations in life science companies.
In the insights industry this has led to many (most) research being conducted via a target list of HCPs provided by the client. List matching has been a major requirement for many years, but it has become increasingly difficult to achieve, and it is now not unusual to find that insights panel companies can only match <10% of the client target list to membership of their panel.
At the same time, in most countries, patient management and prescribing decisions have become increasingly led by protocols, policies, and standards of care that have led to institutional standard practices that whilst they may not be fixed, certainly drive the decision-making of most HCPs in the institution.
At Tudor Health we decided to explore how this shift, that is being seen in all countries with developed healthcare systems, could be utilized to improve the value of patient-level data. Instead of asking our clients for a target list of named physicians, we have started asking our clients to identify their target institutions. We have found a number of reasons why this is so much better than targeting individual HCPs.
- Top of the list is that, in Europe, GDPR laws make it effectively impossible to generate insights that are linked directly to a named HCP. When producing results that can be linked to an institution this is not an issue.
- Many diseases are treated by teams of HCPs and their EHR systems provide comprehensive patient records from all HCPs involved. This means that gaining insights from one of those team members gives access to the full information, even if some of the care was provided in a different location.
- Getting KOLs to take part in insights projects can be a significant challenge, but the impact of the KOL can often be measured in the ways in which their team members manage patients. In other words, you don’t need the KOL, you need one of the HCPs at the KOL institution.
- Institution-level data allows for institution-level targeting by the marketing and sales teams of the client company. In Europe this is critical to sales force effectiveness.
- Tudor Health data is derived from the patient record but is not a direct data extraction. This makes it possible to reach institutions whose EHR data are not available commercially. In the USA this means that PLD is accessible from the 60% of integrated delivery networks that use Cerner, Epic or Aetna (among others) for their EHR software.
So, what are the commercial benefits to our clients?
- Commercial benefits include
- Improved data granularity
- Improved coverage of critical treatment institutions (especially in rare and long-tail diseases)
- Improved marketing and salesforce targeting
- Greater scope for advanced analytics and modeling
- Integration with primary research and other data sources
- Forecasting
- Market simulations (potentially using synthetic data models)
Monthly Data Readouts
Fast access to data has always been a high priority for life science companies and they have become familiar with data latency – results arriving months after the events that are recorded. Immediacy of data makes a huge difference to the value derived by the life science company.
Legacy data frequently has latency of 3-4 months and it can be as much as 9 months for fully checked claims data in the USA.
Tudor Health has modified data capture and analysis, using advanced analytics methods for improved quality control and data delivery. The result is that data can be read-out to our client within weeks of its collection.
This approach requires highly sophisticated data capture and management systems. In our case, this includes using AI during data capture to complete significant quality control during data capture, alongside near real-time analytics and transfer to dashboards and output files. In effect, Tudor Health has taken the best of traditional data capture methods and added the latest technology to produce high quality data in a much shorter time.
So, what are the commercial benefits to our clients?
- Commercial benefits include
- Improved tactical response rate
- Multi-layered dashboarding gives relevant access to all end-users
- Enhanced insight generation
- Flexible advanced analytics
- Relevant KPIs
- Integration with primary research and other data sources
- Forecasting
- Market simulations (potentially using synthetic data models)
- Near real-time synthetic data generation
