Petko Tinchev, CEOTypically, as the pharmaceutical products approach patent expiration, pharma companies experience immense pressure to roll out new medicines. The process of launching a new drug comes with multifold challenges that include an increased cost of research and commercial efforts to bring the products to market. Data, both primary market research, as well as existing sales, demographics, clinical and reimbursement data, is already helping companies make the drug development and drug go-to-market more efficient. Still, most pharma companies are very far from utilizing the full potential of these datasets – the data itself is often messy and unstructured, and the companies do not have the necessary analytics capabilities to unlock actionable insights and recommendations. The challenge for the pharmaceutical companies now is to use these unstructured data sets to work collaboratively and create a real-world evidence framework for pharmaceutical development and go-to-market through effective data utilisation. According to Petko Tinchev, the CEO of GemSeek, “The data challenges can be solved effectively by using advanced analytics. It can help companies to navigate across the entire value chain covering early research and development, go-to-market & optimization of sales & marketing efforts of drugs already on the market, generating substantial increases in sales and optimizing costs.”
One company making great strides in using data in the pharmaceutical and healthcare space is GemSeek.
An innovative insight and analytics firm located in Amsterdam, Netherlands, GemSeek is on a mission to help F500 pharmaceutical companies to harness data and insights. The company’s proprietary products and solutions help companies understand what drives prescriptions, how to improve sales & marketing and how to boost patient acceptance and compliance. An industry veteran in project management, opportunity assessment, business consulting, and business modelling across different industry verticals, Tinchev states that while primary market research offers an underlying reason for a clinician or a patient’s preference of one pharmaceutical brand, a ‘bigger data set’ (big data) offers visibility into the final purchasing decision of the patients. He states, “Combining market research with big data can “shorten the cycle of insights collection and allows for agility in drug development and go-to-market”, as combined datasets can offer a better insight into what clinicians and patients care about.
In addition to deploying advanced analytics, pharmaceutical companies need to be more patient-centric, focus beyond the pill and be able to work within niche markets. Tinchev elaborates on his company’s partnerships with pharmaceutical companies as they try to create prescriber’s pathways. GemSeek has worked with pharma clients to help them in mapping and optimising their offline and digital promotional activities. The strategy was to achieve the highest ROI with an increase in prescriptions, based on the individual preferences of every single healthcare professional in client’s CRM.
GemSeek combined all relevant activity data (CRM, promo, marketing communication, digital media, etc.) of each engagement touchpoint (meeting, rep visit, detailing, and e-mail) and used primary research to measure the impact of all HCPs’ physical and digital touchpoints on drug prescription. The outcome of the models determined the best mix of communication and marketing activities (including content, timing, and methods) while identifying targeted marketing initiatives, which lead to higher conversion. GemSeek acquires in-depth knowledge of the usage and attitudes among the target audience and executive stakeholders, as well as evaluates brand positioning and market opportunities through its key opinion leaders’ (KOL) panel. The panel spans across Pharma, healthcare, and MedTech arena that the company engages with regularly.
Narrating the positive outcomes of such optimized marketing approach, Tinchev recalls GemSeek’s engagement with one of the largest pharmaceutical companies for evaluating the client’s marketing spend on a drug that is approaching the end of the patent life cycle. By combining internal sales and marketing data with external sales, marketing and competitive development data, Gemseek was able to create a ramp-down curve on the client’s marketing spend and recommend to reduce that amount by 50 million EUR for the last two and a half years of the patent lifespan.
With such success stories, GemSeek is now poised to bring the next wave of optimized patient interaction to the healthcare sector.
