Pharmaceutical companies know that real-world data (RWD) is a crucial element of their decision-making processes. RWD holds immense potential, however, its true value can only be realized when it is transformed into actionable insights. That transformation from RWD to insight can be a challenging one. RWD needs context—and applying context requires additional data, expertise and resources. This is where patient-centric intelligence (PCI) comes into play. PCI is insight-ready, data-driven information that is informed by clinical context and longitudinal patient journeys. It is RWD transformed: pre-processed, interpreted, and enhanced for immediate use. PCI provides a powerful mechanism for pharmaceutical companies to quickly and efficiently gain a deep understanding of patients and their care journeys to drive meaningful improvements in market share and patient care.
The Promise and Limitations of RWD
RWD offers great potential. When wrangled, harmonized, enriched, and interpreted, it can offer a wealth of information about patient experiences, treatment patterns, and outcomes in real-world settings. This data can be sourced from various channels, including electronic health records, claims data, and patient registries. The promise of analyzing RWD lies in its ability to provide a more comprehensive view of patient journeys and to uncover insights that may not be apparent in controlled clinical trials.
One advantage of analyzing RWD is its usefulness during the post-launch life of a drug. Unlike sales data, which primarily focuses on the volume of units sold, RWD has the potential to provide a more nuanced understanding of how a drug is being used in real-world clinical practice. It can theoretically reveal patterns of use, adherence rates, and patient outcomes that can’t be captured by sales figures alone. For example, an analysis of RWD could help identify patient subgroups that are more likely to benefit from a particular treatment, or uncover potential safety signals that may not have been apparent during clinical trials. This information could be invaluable for pharmaceutical companies seeking to optimize their marketing strategies, improve patient support programs, and demonstrate the real-world value of their therapies to payers and healthcare providers.
However, RWD in its raw form has limitations that can prevent it from fully realizing this potential. It often lacks standardization, may be incomplete, and can be difficult to interpret without the proper context. The issue compounds the more complex the indication, such as metastatic cancers, rare diseases, and immunologic conditions. This can be especially difficult when deep nuance around the patient journey–such as regimens and/or lines of therapy–is required. And the sheer volume and complexity of RWD can make it challenging for pharmaceutical companies to extract meaningful insights, as the data often requires significant processing and analysis to be rendered useful. This is where the need for a more sophisticated approach to data management and analysis becomes evident, in order to transform the potential of RWD into actionable intelligence.
The Transformative Power of PCI
It’s perhaps obvious that the solution to unlocking the full potential of RWD lies in the use of software and advanced computing technologies. Given the vast amounts of complex data involved, manual processing and analysis (even in traditional analysis tools) are simply not feasible. Instead, the power of computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) should be harnessed to enable the automation, scale, and repeatability necessary for transforming RWD into actionable insights.
By leveraging these technologies, pharmaceutical companies can streamline the process of data harmonization and enrichment, ensuring consistency and efficiency in the creation of immediately useful intelligence—PCI. This process involves integrating data from multiple sources, standardizing terminologies, and applying domain-specific knowledge to create a comprehensive view of the patient journey.
Prospection’s PCI Core, for example, utilizes proprietary algorithms and machine learning models to harmonize and enrich RWD. This process involves mapping data to common ontologies, identifying and correcting data inconsistencies, and linking disparate data points to create an indicative view of the aggregate patient journey.
Prospection’s PCI Core serves as the foundation for Prospection’s suite of solutions, enabling brand managers to delve deep into patient journeys, uncover unmet needs, and craft strategies rooted in real-world insights.
Driving Market Share and Patient Care with PCI
Patient-centricity is often considered a desirable, if lofty, goal for pharmas. But it can become a reality—with PCI in play, a truly patient-centric approach can be applied. Key to this, though, is removing the barriers to accessing and interrogating intelligence. PCI makes this possible at a couple of levels.
In the first instance, it means analytics professionals can work with clean, organized and meaningful data. The effort required in making RWD ready for analysis is often considerable. Removing this burden means analytics teams can focus on answering the critical business questions that can lead to major improvement in portfolio performance.
The second transformative effect of PCI is that it means the manipulation intelligence to identify and develop insights can quickly and easily be put in the hands of the people who need to use those insights—brand teams. These people have deep market and patient knowledge, and given the opportunity to bring that to bear on analysis of real world performance of brands and the actual patient experience, the fidelity of insights can be great. Prospection AI is an example of the kind of analytics platform that is broadening access to PCI and giving commercial teams the ability to find nuggets of insight that only those extremely familiar with the market and patient landscape can.
Equipping analytics and commercial teams in these ways means pharmaceutical companies can unlock insights that drive strategic decision-making and improve patient outcomes as never before. They can identify unmet patient needs, understand treatment patterns, and evaluate the effectiveness of their therapies in real-world settings. This knowledge can guide marketing strategies, assist with resource allocation and help companies tailor their offerings to better meet the needs of target patient populations. A patient-centric focus not only benefits patients but also drives market share growth.
Companies that embrace PCI will be well-positioned to thrive in an increasingly patient-centric landscape. By putting patients at the center of their decision-making processes, pharmaceutical companies can open up new opportunities for growth and make a lasting impact on the lives of the patients they serve.
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Prospection has been providing solutions and services to pharma analytics and commercial teams for more than 10 years. Its proprietary Patient-centric Intelligence Core transforms RWD into intelligence, and powers a range of solutions including the flagship brand management platform, Prospection AI.
Contact us to learn how patient-centric intelligence can become core to your business.
