One of the challenges facing pharmaceutical brand and commercial teams is that there is plenty of real-world data (RWD) to inform decision making—for product launches, brand planning, or ongoing brand management and growth—however, getting access to insights can be cumbersome, complicated, and often limited to a select few team members.
While many life sciences organizations are advancing their patient-centric intelligence (PCI) capabilities—and even moving rapidly along the data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) maturity model—brand managers and leadership are still limited in their ability to interrogate data and get answers directly. In fact, they often have blind spots when it comes to understanding the impact that the patient care journey has on market share (care-and-share). This is because of the unidirectional nature of data analytics within their organization—insights are often transactional not relational. This limited flow of critical business information can hinder their ability to proactively shape strategies based on a comprehensive understanding of the connection between care-and-share.
Pharma Insights: Overcoming Subject Matter Expertise and Resourcing Constraints
Life sciences organizations need modern ways of equipping their brand teams with timely, relevant information that helps them make better decisions around their brand strategy and tactics. Business teams have a multitude of hypotheses; they now need to be empowered to get answers in an instant…no matter how basic or sophisticated their questions are.
If done right, it means getting the right patients on the treatment at the right time to improve care outcomes…and, thus, improve market performance.
So, what’s getting in the way of this contemporary vision of insights democratization? The current internal infrastructure that’s overly reliant on sought-after analytics subject matter experts, putting a strain on resource capacity and the ability to deliver timely insights at scale.
Expertise
- Raw data has limited to no utility without troves of experts to help extract insights from it
- Siloed data analytics and business teams means a layer of translation is required to extract appropriate insights
- Where analytics and reporting tools are available, they are difficult to use and require a considerable amount of analytics expertise
Resourcing
- Internal resources (business intelligence (BI) and analytics teams) for making data useful are limited and often have competing priorities
- Lower priority brands may not have budget or importance to use internal analytics teams; higher priority brands may have limited ability to conduct insights exploration with internal analytics teams
- External consulting services, though readily available, are costly—often budget-breaking—and have significant lead-time overheads
Over the last few years, solutions have emerged to help solve for expertise and resourcing challenges, including:
- Data transformation at scale – The quality and readiness of data to be brought to bear on problems has been dramatically improved, with harmonization and enrichment reducing the effort required by analytics teams to prepare data for analysis.
- Insourcing of analytics expertise – BI and analytics teams have grown, both in size and also in prevalence – it’s not only the larger companies that have these now.
- Software-as-a-service insights solutions – Business units have adopted enterprise-wide solutions that give business teams access to pre-configured insights dashboards.
But, the use of data at the coalface—by the teams who manage brands or look to educate providers on best courses of action for patients—has remained in its infancy. Executives have embraced data, supported its acquisition, funded analytics teams, and been able to report upward that RWD is in play—that PCI is a part of their data-driven strategy.
However, many leaders we speak to acknowledge that the application of this data to business problems is limited. This is not because of the data itself; it boils down to the complexity of software analytics tools for business users and the limited data literacy of commercial teams due to an inability to delve deep into data exploration themselves.
Addressing the Challenges: Embracing Generative AI
As we look at overcoming the hurdles of expertise and resourcing in the pharma industry’s quest for actionable insights, a powerful ally has emerged—ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) leveraging generative AI. This technology, one you almost certainly have heard about, presents significant opportunities, especially in healthcare.
Nearly two years ago, Prospection introduced the latest version of its health analytics decision-making platform. Building upon more than 10 years of success providing real-world evidence (RWE) insights for pharma customers, this evolution of our core product was conceived with a clear objective in mind—to enable pharma commercial teams to extract rapid and substantial value from their real-world data investments.
With a rich history of providing healthcare analytics software and consultation services, we deeply understand the daily challenges faced by pharma brand teams. We recognized the consistent need for answers to questions about patients, providers, treatments, and market dynamics for specific conditions. Our most recent efforts have focused on simplifying this essential requirement— ‘I have a question, I need an answer!’—significantly expanding access to PCI, regardless of an individual’s data fluency. Here’s where the game-changer enters the scene—our integration of LLMs, particularly the GPT assistant, has propelled us into the vanguard of a transformative shift in what it means to be a data-driven business.
We recently gave a webinar demonstration of our GPT tool. Here’s a short snippet that shows how a GPT-powered assistant can transform the way people interact with data.
Unlock Value with Prospection AI: A Brand’s Single Source for Patient-centric Intelligence
Many pharma commercial teams are ramping up data science and analytics projects to innovate by exploring generative AI as well as predictive and prescriptive capabilities. While AI can certainly be innovative, we see the more pressing and addressable opportunity is saving the organization time and money on finding and understanding the critical insights that illuminate patient care’s impact on market share.
“… the more pressing and addressable opportunity is saving the organization time and money on understanding the critical insights that illuminate patient care’s impact on market share.”
AI—armed with user-friendly GPT that’s linked to brand-specific Key Business Questions—helps to bridge a gap, bring a unified understanding of the business, and elevate commercial data fluency and insights accessibility.
This is what our new, self-service intelligence platform—Prospection AI with Award-winning ProGPT—does. It is the pharma brand’s single source for PCI, unlocking insights into the following in seconds: key performance indicators, market share and size, business growth, business loss, patient adherence and persistence, patient journey and potential intervention points, healthcare providers/facilities of interest, and more.
Prospection AI is purpose-built to be the shared hub for brand teams, analytics teams, and commercial executives, giving each what they need…when they need it.
Speed Critical Insights for Brand Teams
- Quickly and easily navigate patient and market intelligence via the Critical Insights hub, with self-serve access to dozens of Key Business Questions configured for your brand
- Further refine and explore Key Business Question insights with the highly trained, award-winning ProGPT assistant
- Enhance commercial team members’ proficiency using data for enhanced business decision making
Free Up Time & Effort of Analytics Teams
- Enable analytics teams to win time back by supplying commercial teams with self-serving, standard insights
- Focus analytics teams on challenging, high-value analytics projects
- Augment analytics capabilities with out-of-the-box, no-code tools to customize reports according to unique business questions and needs
Realize Full Value of Patient Data Investment
- Open up access to insights with easy-to-use, outcome-focused reports and insights
- Align analytics and commercial teams around the same patient-level data and build a culture of data-driven decision-making
- Enable agile decision-making with timely and actionable insights for commercial teams
Security and Transparency: Key to Embracing GPT
While the potential of GPT-powered solutions is promising, we know that organizations will choose platforms that adhere to stringent data protection standards, offer robust encryption methods, and maintain compliance with relevant regulations. Prospection has been at the forefront of such security measures, and in our adoption of GPT within Prospection AI, we’ve engineered it so that the benefits of PCI are harnessed quickly and easily without compromising data integrity.
Prospection’s implementation of ProGPT uses OpenAI’s GPT4 in a private and secure environment to interpret a query and then configure the data visualization that best demonstrates the answer to the question. With this approach, only de-identified, aggregated real-world data is interfacing with GPT in a closed setting–data that has been harmonized and enriched via our proprietary Patient-centric Intelligence Core, including with lines of therapy and regimens.
As well, questions to the ProGPT assistant are private and not shared across an organization or more broadly. Within the context of a specific chat, ProGPT will take into consideration the details of the whole conversation in order to deliver better answers. This, however, is as far as its ability to “remember” goes—conversations are secure and forgotten.
Time for Action: AI to Innovate and Optimize
Adopting a single-source PCI platform equipped with user-friendly GPT technology—such as Prospection AI with ProGPT—marks a significant step forward for pharmaceutical commercial teams to bring a unified understanding of care-and-share. This transition not only signifies a commitment to enhancing patient care but also optimizing commercial performance. Giving brand teams the ability to query data on demand—using real language—helps turn data into actionable and accessible insights in seconds, allows for precise marketing strategy refinement, and enables better tracking and targeting of activities. At every point in the journey, the value of PCI, amplified by the capabilities of GPT, becomes increasingly evident. It’s a critical point where patient well-being and business success come together seamlessly and quickly. As the pharmaceutical landscape continues to change, those who embrace the AI revolution to both drive innovation and optimize time and resources are leading the way.
Prospection’s ProGPT AI assistant recently won the Better Future Design Award for healthcare innovation. Prospection AI with ProGPT is currently available to select customers. Contact us to get on the waitlist.
Attend our November 1 (AEDT), Navigating the Future webinar to learn more about AI, analytics maturity and the future of data-driven brand management.
Kirsten Mann is Prospection’s Chief Product Officer, and has worked in tech for more than 25 years across the disciplines of product management, user experience and product development.
