Despite significant advances in healthcare across its many facets, it’s clear that there is much more to do to improve the patient journey. Troublingly, more than 40% of patients receive care that does not align with evidence-based guidelines.
This has significant repercussions for patients of course, and it also results in a staggering missed market share opportunity for pharmaceutical companies—US$40 billion per year in Japan alone*. Beyond this, macro patient journeys show that regional disparities persist in access to healthcare, quality of care, and outcomes. There’s no doubt that a transformative approach is needed to elevate patient care and, as a result, improve commercial performance.
The Power of Patient-based Metrics
It’s a given these days that pharma commercial teams are data-driven, but we often see an over-reliance on sales data as a primary input into strategic and tactical planning—and a unit sale does not provide any context around the patient experience.
Unlike insights based on transactional sales data, insights derived from patient-centric metrics provide, obviously, a patient-focused perspective. This is particularly true when trying to apply sales data as an input when dealing with complex disease areas like immuno-oncology and other regimen-based therapies.
Patient-claims data has traditionally been used by medical affairs as well as health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) teams, but we now see leading pharmaceutical companies making extensive use of this patient-centric data within commercial teams. Patient-based metrics provide leading indicators such as patient initiations, net switch, mean persistence, adherence rates, and time to hospitalization. They can also take into account the complexity of regimen-based therapies and stage of treatment. These indicators combine to give a unique and powerful view of the events of significance in a patient’s experience and can be used to compare the behaviors and outcomes of different patient subpopulations.
Ultimately these metrics provide a comprehensive view of the patient journey. Are patients being diagnosed early? Are they receiving the right treatments or regimens at the appropriate stage of treatment? Are they adhering to treatment guidelines? Unlocking these insights is crucial for uplifting patient care and enhancing patient outcomes, directly translating into market share growth.
To begin a transformation that improves the quality of patient treatment and outcomes, commercial teams need to be using patient-centric intelligence (PCI). Sales data alone will never move the needle.
Analytic Solutions Landscape in Japan
In Japan, pharmaceutical companies have been on a journey to become more data-driven in their brand management and commercial strategies. However, there is still significant potential to optimize the use of data, particularly patient-centric data, to uplift patient outcomes while also boosting market share.
Historically, pharmaceutical brand teams in Japan have relied heavily on sales data and metrics in planning and tracking brand performance. Yet, as we’ve seen, this provides an incomplete picture. Sales data lacks the context and insights into the patient journey that are essential for identifying opportunities to improve patient care and adherence to treatment guidelines.
In recent years, leading Japanese pharmaceutical companies have started to incorporate more real-world data and analytics into their brand planning and strategies, including use of patient claims data. However, this remains a largely manual process of accessing and analyzing data, limiting the nimbleness and scalability across brands and therapy areas. As a result, third-party solutions have become a means of addressing such constraints.
Various analytics and consulting companies leverage data to provide patient insights. In Japan, we observe three types of vendor solutions:
1. Analytics Dashboards – Local companies relying on proprietary databases, which limits the breadth of patient insights across the value chain, delivered in dashboards with rudimentary functionality.
2. Analytics Consulting – Global companies offering highly customized analytics services, which are highly resource-intensive to set up, slow to adapt to changing market dynamics and difficult to standardize and scale to other brand teams. A range of datasets may be used including longitudinal patient data.
3. Patient-centric Intelligence – Prospection stands out by providing a unique mix of data breadth, depth of insight powered by AI functionality. A self-service, on-demand, data-agnostic patient analytics platform that is quick to set up across the entire portfolio.
As pharma companies in Japan look to capture full market share potential, they need solutions that provide comprehensive patient journey insights to continuously refine brand strategies and uplift the quality of patient care. The future requires patient-centric analytics.
The Power of a Dedicated Patient-centric Intelligence Platform
Powering the award-winning Prospection AI platform is Prospection’s Patient-centric Intelligence (PCI) Core—a proprietary healthcare analytics engine with a decade of artificial intelligence (AI) training on diverse, global datasets of ~500 million de-identified patients. The PCI Core is data-agnostic, allowing for a comprehensive view of the healthcare ecosystem. With harmonized and enriched longitudinal patient data flowing from the PCI Core, Prospection AI elevates analytics fluency for brand teams and commercial leaders, offering fast, on-demand, and self-service access to patient insights. This provides life science teams supporting the commercialization of a brand:
- Speed and Ease of Deployment – Prospection AI, powered by award-winning ProGPT, allows users to access patient insights faster. Deployed in just two weeks, it can expedite the transformation process and show fast ROI.
- Customization for Brand Teams – The platform is configurable, so it can be set up to align with brand teams’ market maps and brand plans, ensuring a tailored approach that fits the unique needs of each organization.
- Scalability Across Therapy Areas – With pre-built standard reports based on experience across 100 indications and 40+ companies, Prospection can scale and deploy across multiple therapy areas swiftly.
- Localized Insights in Japan – The platform provides regional, prefecture, and facility-level patient journey insights in Japan, facilitating tactical planning and tracking execution and performance on patient outcomes.
The Journey Needs to Start Now
The industry still has much potential to optimize patient outcomes. The motivation to do that is powered by a desire to elevate patient care, and pharma’s path to success starts with PCI. PCI drives a more complete understanding of the patient journey, and helps teams identify opportunities to improve care-and-share. Remaining stuck in a model that relies primarily on sales data means an incomplete picture, and improvement will remain elusive. Investing in configurable, self-service analytics platforms, like Prospection AI, can accelerate improvement, by giving teams fast access to patient journey insights across brands and therapy areas.
With the power of AI-driven analytics scaled across the organization, pharma leaders can gain the PCI they need to advance patient care, boost adherence to treatment guidelines, and capture the full market share potential. Ultimately, a dedicated patient-centric approach is the key to continuous improvement in patient outcomes and commercial performance.
*Prospection analyses.
Contact us today and learn more about how Prospection AI and award-winning ProGPT can help commercial teams adopt patient-centric intelligence to drive improvement for their business and deliver better outcomes for their patients.
