PM360 2018 Innovative Product ReferralMAP^ML from Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness

ReferralMAP^ML

Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness

Kevin Troyanos, SVP, Analytics & Data Science
kevin.troyanos@saatchiwellness.com

Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness heard a common question from clients: How can we better identify what types of providers play a role in diagnosing and treating a particular condition so that we can communicate the value of our products to the right physicians in the right context?

So, in 2018, the company developed its newest data science framework, ReferralMAP^ML, which seeks to help clients distinguish and identify diagnosis, referral, and treatment patterns of physicians at scale through techniques rooted in unsupervised learning algorithms, network analytics, and graph theory. Together, these domains provide a theoretical structure for understanding interdependencies between HCPs and the events that connect them, i.e., diagnoses and procedures pertaining to a given patient. Notably, ReferralMAP^ML can also be combined with Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness’ flagship offering TrueTarget^ML, which makes it possible to build highly accurate models that are able to predict healthcare providers’ likelihood of being a referring, diagnosing, or treating physician.

By using ReferralMAP^ML, companies can classify providers according to their role as a referring physician who issues or verifies a diagnosis, or a treating physician who ultimately writes a prescription for and/or administers the patient’s ultimate choice of therapy. The ReferralMAP^ML framework can also analyze the referral network at scale, and examine how individuals fit into specific “layers” of referral activity, i.e., what are the key drivers that distinguish healthcare providers who tend to refer directly to treating physicians from those whose pattern of referrals typically come earlier in the patient’s journey? By marrying this information with the many other dimensions that ReferralMAP^ML can examine in detail—including specialty, geography, and the network dynamics of competitors—marketers can understand how providers interact with patients in a given therapeutic category and serve both of their needs with more relevant, timelier communications.