PM360’s Innovations Issue was established six years ago to serve as a comprehensive guide of the year’s most innovative Companies, Divisions, Startups, Products, Services, and Strategies. PM360 received more than 100 total submissions this year and picked the best in each category.

Here are our selections for the most innovative products of 2017.

Audience Identity Manager (DMD)

Audience Identity Manager

DMD

Anthony Luttenberger, Chief Commercial Officer
aluttenberger@dmdconnects.com

DMD’s Audience Identity Manager (AIM) technology reports the physician-­level website activity that pharma marketers need in order to connect with their target audience in a meaningful way. Specifically, AIM reports the name, NPI number, specialty, practice location, and individual browsing behavior of each “tagged” HCP who visits a participating medical website.

AIM technology has two main proprietary components: AIM Tag and AIM Reader. Opted-­in HCPs are assigned an AIM Tag through an email. Participating companies install an AIM Reader, consisting of a few lines of JavaScript, on every web page they want to track. When a tagged HCP visits a participating website, the AIM Reader recognizes the visitor and reports their identity data in real time, or updates it to a data file for later use.

Since AIM distinguishes between physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and nurses, marketers can implement digital strategies that address the interests and needs of distinct target audiences. By using behavioral data gathered over time, pharma marketers can easily recognize content gaps, identify effective and engaging content, and continually improve the types of content delivered to meet the changing needs of individual HCPs.

The AIM platform currently powers two products:

  • AIM Web: Reports exactly which individual HCPs are visiting your websites and what content they consume when they get there.
  • AIM Journey: Extends the audience identity capability across the online medical ecosystem. It makes it possible for pharma marketers to know what kinds of medical websites their target HCPs visit—including pharma, publisher, and association website categories—and the types of content they consume on those sites.

DMD has more AIM products in the pipeline to further help marketers take the guesswork out of visitor insights.

Confirm Rx™ Insertable Cardiac Monitor (Abbott)

Confirm Rx™ Insertable Cardiac Monitor

Abbott

Justin Paquette
Director, Public Affairs
Neuromodulation Division
Heart Failure & Cardiac Arrhythmias Division
jpaquette@sjm.com

The Abbott Confirm Rx™ Insertable Cardiac Monitor (ICM) is the world’s first smartphone-compatible ICM that helps physicians identify difficult-to-detect cardiac arrhythmias, including atrial fibrillation (AF). Since CE Mark approval, adoption of the device has been strong and implants have occurred in 10 countries across Europe. The device was also recently approved for use in the United States. The Confirm Rx ICM is designed to continuously monitor a patient’s heart rhythm and transmit information via Bluetooth to the myMerlin™ mobile app. From there, the device’s information is automatically transmitted to a patient’s physician, allowing physicians to follow their patients remotely and accurately diagnose arrhythmias.

In addition to patient convenience, the device is slimmer than currently available ICMs. The Confirm Rx ICM also offers intuitive one-touch indication-based programming, and remote monitoring via the Merlin.net™ Patient Care Network, making the technology convenient for clinicians involved in procedure and follow up.

While traditional remote monitoring has required bulky handheld or bedside transmitters, which limit patient mobility, the interactive myMerlin mobile app, available in more than 35 languages, replaces these passive transmitters and empowers patients to participate in their own care. The myMerlin app lets patients:

  • Annotate symptoms to give their doctor more insight.
  • View their transmissions and symptom history.
  • Record specific symptoms and send them to the clinic without having to wait for a nightly sync with a traditional transmitter.

The app also transmits information automatically at a time set by a patient’s clinic, ensuring patients do not have to record every symptom they experience for the device to assist their physician in arriving at a diagnosis.

With the launch of the Confirm Rx ICM in European CE Mark countries and across the U.S., Abbott has established a new paradigm in the connectivity of cardiac devices.

ConnectSource™ (Cardinal Health)

ConnectSource™

Cardinal Health

Brian Flaherty, Vice President, Sales
brian.flaherty@cardinalhealth.com

As the pharma industry becomes more accountable for delivering improved outcomes, drug companies are looking to engage patients with programs to support them in their treatment. However, without a direct connection to patients, it can be difficult for pharma companies to know when and how to best support patients. Many companies look to their hub services partners for help gathering insights into the patient journey because hubs are one of the few entities that interact with patients, providers, payers, and pharmacies simultaneously. However, hubs have historically struggled to deliver the actionable data and insights that pharma companies seek.

To address this need, Cardinal Health partnered with Deloitte to build a proprietary cloud-based technology platform, leveraging Salesforce, for its patient services hub. Known as ConnectSource, the platform enables Cardinal Health to collect critical data through its patient programs and then provides analysis and insights back to its pharma clients so they can effectively engage patients and make more informed decisions about commercial strategy.

Delivered through Cardinal Health Sonexus™ Access and Patient Support, the benefits of ConnectSource include:

  • Streamlining processes such as benefits investigations, prior authorizations, and appeals to ensure patients get on therapy faster.
  • Providing transparency into treatment trends and critical issues, such as when patients are falling off therapy, so clients can make smarter decisions about how and when to engage patients and providers.
  • Enabling integration with other hub and specialty pharmacy data sources, so clients can gain a 360° view of their product.
  • Maximizing efficiency by reducing redundancies.
  • Ability to track ROI of patient support programs.

ConnectSource launched in spring 2017, and since then approximately half of Cardinal Health’s hub services clients have successfully migrated their patient services programs to the platform, including several top 10 pharma companies.

DIFA HCP™ (Crossix Solutions)

DIFA HCP™

Crossix Solutions

Dan Stein, SVP, Product Strategy
daniel.stein@crossix.com

Crossix Solutions launched DIFA HCP™ in September 2017 after more than two years of development. An expansion of the marketing-leading DIFA digital measurement platform, this cloud-based analytics and optimization interface is specifically designed to validate that pharma brand campaigns are reaching target HCPs and driving Rx impact. Crossix’s DIFA HCP extends beyond traditional measurement approaches and addresses the existing challenges in HCP campaign measurement by:

  • Capturing HCPs across multiple devices. DIFA HCP merges the HCP’s many identities (work, home, name changes, new affiliations and institutions, address changes) and devices (mobile phone, tablets, desktops, EHRs) into one profile and connects that with their single digital identity, including media activity by device.
  • Measuring more than just endemic publishers. Currently, media buyers and marketers rely disproportionately on endemic websites. However, working with just those properties severely limits the ability to reach HCPs at scale across the full digital landscape. Now, marketers can measure campaign performance across consumer-focused publishers that HCPs visit as well.
  • Delivering timely analyses. As opposed to traditional measurement that requires waiting until the campaign ends, DIFA HCP provides more frequent analyses to optimize campaigns much earlier and more often.
  • Providing actionable media granularity. Key metrics are provided at the overall campaign level, as well as at the device, publisher, and placement group levels, to enable actionable and meaningful optimization opportunities.

Crossix plans to continue to invest in HCP campaign measurement to provide clients with a more complete view of HCP activity, more robust and accurate campaign measurement, and ultimately, greater confidence in campaign decisions.

Drug Ratings (SERMO)

Drug Ratings

SERMO

Peter Kirk, CEO

J.R. Hermann, SVP of Commercial
jr@sermo.com

In May 2017, SERMO, the global social network for physicians with more than 800,000 members worldwide, announced the new “Drug Ratings” tool. Integrated into the network, Drug Ratings is the first and only global peer-to-peer prescription drug review system sourced exclusively from verified licensed physicians. Drug Ratings gives physicians a clinical decision support tool in which they can research, rate, and share their direct experience on the efficacy, safety, tolerability, accessibility, and adherence of specific drugs in real time.

To date, doctors have had manufacturer information, peer-reviewed studies, and clinical trial data—now they have access to the voice of their peers. By enabling physicians to hear about their colleagues’ real-world experiences, they gain a deeper look at treatments before they prescribe to support better treatment decisions.

In October 2017, SERMO released data from a new poll of more than 2,000 global physicians who have used SERMO Drug Ratings. According to the poll:

  • 73% think colleagues’ reviews are more credible than the information they receive from the pharmaceutical industry.
  • 57% have already changed their perception of a drug after reading peer ratings and comments.
  • 80% believe peer ratings and comments will change their perception of a drug in future.
  • 77% plan to use Drug Ratings when researching what drug to prescribe a patient.
  • 84% believe peer drug reviews will lead to better outcomes by enhancing physicians’ understanding of how a drug works in the real world.

The Drug Ratings database has more than doubled in size since its initial release and now contains more than 440,000 drug ratings from global, licensed physicians.

feedkast (watzan)

feedkast

watzan

Charles Benaiah, CEO
charles@watzan.com

At the conclusion of this year’s annual American Society of Hematology (ASH) conference, the people at watzan noticed hematologists on Twitter calling for a new type of news app that would specifically meet the needs of clinicians. watzan accepted the challenge and developed feedkast, an app and website tethered to a user’s personal email that, in simple terms, serves as a newsreader for HCPs.

A user can create a “feed.” Think of it as a channel. Users tell the app what they want. For instance, stories could be based on “type 2 diabetes” or “#t2d.” They could come from a single source, like “NEJM.” Or they could be tweeted by a KOL, “@MTMDPHD.” The platform even lets users get pretty complex in their requests. For example, they could ask for multiple myeloma stories from the Journal of Clinical Oncology or lymphoma news from Memorial Sloan Kettering.

Once someone sets up a feed, anyone can follow it. feedkast shows you who’s reading the stories. It also shows who they follow, who follows them, and the feeds they follow. So, at a glance, HCPs can build a community to bring them their best reads.

Additionally, feedkast is a turnkey email marketing machine. It’s constantly grabbing great stories. It can then identify the ones that interest a specific HCP and email those directly to their inbox. It also offers the opportunity for pharma to learn from this data or intersperse their brand messages.

Just months after its launch, Eisai, GSK, Janssen, Lexicon, and Shire are already using it. In Janssen’s case, they have seen an 88% spike in email open rates since implementing data from feedkast about which email to send to targets.

Fusion (Lash Group)

Fusion

Lash Group

Dyisha Reliford, Director, Marketing Strategy & Market Development
dyisha.reliford@lashgroup.com

Now more than ever, manufacturers must clearly articulate the business and economic value of patient support programs to internal and external stakeholders. In October 2017, Lash Group, a part of AmerisourceBergen, announced the launch of Fusion, the most comprehensive technology ecosystem in the patient support services industry. More than a CRM platform, Fusion combines dozens of best-in-class technologies with configurable workflows to support patients throughout their treatment journeys.

Fusion also features a proprietary, advanced data model that enables Lash Group to provide a personalized and seamless experience for patients, providers, and manufacturers—ultimately improving patient access to life-saving therapies and enhancing patient engagement and outcomes. Developed in conjunction with a network of technology partnerships, Fusion helps manufacturers:

  • Accelerate Speed to Therapy: Fusion creates workflow efficiency, automates the decision-making process, and streamlines administrative tasks, allowing for faster and more seamless access to treatment. Fusion leverages emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) for benefit verification and multichannel communication capabilities to remove common barriers to therapy.
  • Improve Patient and Provider Engagement: Patient and provider experience are important factors to the success of a product—the quality and level of service they receive impacts brand loyalty and trust. Combined with the company’s well-trained associates, Fusion technologies, such as Computer-Telephony Integration, create a simpler, more intuitive set of interactions, allowing patients and providers to access the right information faster and receive a more personalized experience.
  • Generate Actionable Insights: Fusion generates actionable insights through strong quality data management, real-time reports and dashboards, targeted analytics available through mobile devices, competitive intelligence, and a more holistic view of the patient experience at a moment’s notice.

Heart for Heart (Sudler & Hennessey)

Heart for Heart

Sudler & Hennessey

John Marchese, EVP, Managing Director
john.marchese@sudler.com

Atrial Fibrillation (Afib), the most common heart rhythm disorder, affects an estimated 33.5 million people. It is the second leading cause of stroke. For example, every 15 seconds someone suffers an Afib-related event. One third of people with heart disorders are unaware that they have a condition, leading to annual totals of 750,000 hospitalizations and 130,000 deaths, with those numbers rising over the past two decades. Medical costs for Afib patients are greater than $6 billion in additional medical spending per year.

So why should patients live in fear of stroke, heart failure, or worse when there’s a solution literally at their fingertips?

Heart for Heart is the world’s largest, anonymous crowdsourced heart health initiative with the goal to gain a million heart measurements to help better understand the characteristics of hearts around the world.

After downloading the Heart for Heart app, users place their finger on the camera lens on their smartphones in order to measure their heart rhythm and heart health. By empowering everyone with a smartphone to test themselves for Afib in 90 seconds for free, an unprecedented amount of data will be available to researchers to study the condition faster, easier, and less expensively to ultimately create better treatment outcomes and save lives. In the same way one can donate money to assist in the development of research, Heart for Heart is asking the world to donate just 90 seconds to help advance heart research.

In My Eyes AR/VR App (Regeneron and Intouch Solutions)

In My Eyes AR/VR App

Regeneron and Intouch Solutions

Natalie Mancuso, Sr. Product Manager, Ophthalmology Marketing, Regeneron
natalie.mancuso@regeneron.com

Brent Scholz, VP, Executive Creative Director, Intouch Solutions
brent.scholz@intouchsol.com

Regeneron and Intouch Solutions partnered on In My Eyes, a fully immersive virtual and augmented reality experience to allow people to see what life is like with a retinal eye disease.

Research shows that the onset of retinal diseases can be daunting for patients and their families. Many are confused about their diagnosis, anxious about treatment, and fearful they may lose their vision. They also feel doctors tend to talk clinically without fully understanding the daily struggles they face. The companies recognized that empowering patients to better convey what the struggle is like would foster better communication and empathy among these audiences.

Together, they partnered with experts whose work has been featured on Lost, Breaking Bad, and Westworld to custom-build a specialized four-camera rig and film scenarios from a full 360° perspective. After the footage from each camera was stitched together, they implemented graphic effects that accurately resemble the real-life impairments of various eye diseases. Finally, they programmed the app to support the immersive environment, so users could turn their head in any direction and interact with their surroundings as if they were really there, progressing through each story.

The app is broken into two distinct sections: Story Mode and Live Mode. Story Mode features three virtual reality videos that put you in the shoes of different retinal disease patients. Live Mode incorporates augmented reality through the phone’s camera system for real-time effects in the user’s immediate surroundings. This is the retinal industry’s first app to combine both technologies into one experience.

In My Eyes has received rave reviews from patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals alike. Engagement statistics show that users average more than four minutes and seven-page views per visit.

Life Science Analytics Cloud (Saama Technologies)

Life Science Analytics Cloud

Saama Technologies

Crystal Black, Director, Marketing Programs
crystal.black@saama.com

Saama Technologies received its first Series A funding a little over two years ago to focus its considerable analytics background and assets on the life sciences industry. In September 2017, Saama launched its Life Science Analytics Cloud. The suite includes five modules that cover the entire clinical development continuum:

  1. Clinical Development Optimizer: The data lifecycle management solution delivering cleansed, aggregated operational, and clinical data for better trial effectiveness and cost.
  2. Trial Planning Optimizer: The clinical trial feasibility solution that optimizes enrollment, investigator identification, site selection, and patient burden.
  3. Cohort Builder: The cohort generation solution that identifies patient populations based on inclusion-exclusion criteria.
  4. Market Analyzer: The commercialization analysis solution providing insights into the market share performance of pharma products.
  5. Patient Pathways: The patient journey tracking solution enabling the evaluation of treatments, disease progression, outcomes, and total economic cost.

Saama’s suite of analytics integrates multiple sources of structured and unstructured data. Unlike other vendors, the cloud-based solution has pre-built capabilities for intelligent data ingestion, integration, and analysis, which can be leveraged to generate real-time business insights within weeks. Saama’s clients benefit from faster time-to-market, reduced costs, and better patient and business outcomes.

Saama’s unique innovative technology facilitates streamlined and automated data collection through web services-enabled sources and organizes incoming data by subject area to further funnel into a common data model. In addition to industry standard metrics, Saama includes custom sponsor-defined metrics that can be applied to any level of the trial portfolio being evaluated, through site hierarchy to enact targeted analytics.

Matchback Attribution (Semcasting)

Matchback Attribution

Semcasting

Matt Hedberg, GM Professional Services
mhedberg@semcasting.com

Over the last year, Semcasting created a solution that allows pharma and insurance marketers to determine exactly what percentage of their highly targeted, online audience their digital campaigns reached. Semcasting’s Matchback Attribution Solution is based on deterministic matching where every impression served is subject to being matched back to the audience targeted, sites visited, and purchases made. This process is facilitated by Semcasting data that can identify a medical practice (by name, location, and specialty) and match back the impressions served in a campaign to anonymous sales at the local pharmacy. This can also be accomplished by resolving impressions and engagement to a practice by NPI (National Provider Identifier) number.

In the healthcare insurance market, the attribution model for encouraging insured patients to sign up for a brand-name drug prescription program may involve caregivers, pharmacies, and consumers who have different health insurance packages. While the goal is to encourage the use of branded or generic drugs, changing the distribution model starts with creating demand within the target audience. Using Matchback, individual campaigns to caregivers and physicians can be run with campaigns that are targeted based on their insured patients. Different digital messages for select drugs, in different trade areas, would allow the insurer to test for the right combinations. The digital audience that receives impressions and the digital dollars spent in each trade area for each program type would be compared against physicians, specialties, and the lift in sales of generics prescribed over brand name drugs.

Ultimately, with high-quality consumer and business campaign data, the ability to do first-party match backs and deterministic attribution limits risk and helps to improve digital ROI.

NeuroBlot Personalized Memory Test (XVIVOS Biosciences)

NeuroBlot Personalized Memory Test

XVIVOS Biosciences Inc.

Saumel Ahmadi, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer
contact@neuroblot.com

Approximately 50 million people live with dementia worldwide, and this number is expected to increase to 130 million by 2050. Diagnosis is typically made in the late stages of disease, and therefore a diagnostic test which could detect early onset of cognitive decline is urgently needed. XVIVOS Biosciences Inc. has developed a personalized digital memory test called NeuroBlot, which aims to replace the current standard of pen-and-paper memory tests that are delivered as a first-line diagnostic tool for detecting dementia.

NeuroBlot is a personalized memory test that scans an individual’s social media accounts (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) to create memory tasks and assess cognitive capacity based on the person’s unique content from multiple media formats (e.g., text, images, video, audio). NeuroBlot is currently in the prototype stage, with the aim of being a product that will be used by the healthcare provider to assess individualized cognition for screening patients with mild cognitive deficits. The company envisions the use of the product in various clinics (especially dementia centers and family physician practices), where they will dispense this self-administered test to the patient.

To ease the integration of the product in the clinic, XVIVOS Biosciences’ technical team will integrate the scores of this test with the most commonly used electronic health record (EHR) software. On the patient end, patients can self-administer this test anytime and the latest scores of the test will be updated in the physician’s EHR. Ultimately, this unique cognitive assessment generates actionable insights for primary care providers, and could reduce the long-term financial burden on the healthcare system by identifying at-risk individuals prior to late stages of disease.

Personology™ (Omnicom Health Group)

Personology™

Omnicom Health Group

Jo Ann Saitta, Chief Digital Officer
jsaitta@omnicomhealthgroup.com

Doctors aren’t just doctors—they’re people and consumers, too. That’s why Omnicom Health Group (OHG) developed a new data-driven solution called Personology, to better understand and connect with doctors on a deeper, more personal level.

Personology reimagines the status quo with integrated physician- and consumer-level data and analytics that enables OHG and their clients to market the way modern brands—like Uber and Airbnb—do.

OHG partnered with one of Omnicom’s consumer analytics units to build Personology. The depth of experience in consumer data sets and its expansive data management platform allowed OHG to apply a consumer data-driven approach of “look-alike” modeling to the healthcare space. By combining their consumer analytics unit data with a proprietary database of more than one million U.S. clinicians, Personology has generated rich, textured personas for multiple physician specialties, and personal profiles of doctors based on their online habits and behaviors.

Personology can be used to better engage healthcare professionals in both their professional and non-professional journeys, and allows for designing and executing personalized, one-to-one communications through simple platforms that work around the globe. And since medicine is an “always-on” profession, Personology’s “always-on” platform allows for communications at the right time, with the right message, and via the right digital channel.

In a recent program powered by Personology, the valuable insights into customer behavior resulted in a 71% increase in effectiveness of digital channels like social, while eliminating ineffective channels and decreasing annual spend by 10%.

Relationship Analytics (Zephyr Health)

Relationship Analytics

Zephyr Health

Leilani C. Latimer, VP Global Marketing, Partnership & Commercial Operations
pr@zephyrhealth.com

Zephyr Illuminate is an easy-to-use SaaS platform that connects hundreds of data sources—internal, vendor, and public—to create precise, predictive insights in an end-to-end solution pre-built for life sciences companies for use from pre-launch to product maturity. In September 2017, Zephyr Health expanded the capabilities of Zephyr Illuminate to include Relationship Analytics. These new capabilities are designed to meet the needs of life sciences professionals looking to understand and capitalize on healthcare provider’s (HCP) and organization’s (HCO) relationship networks for more effective stakeholder engagement and decision-making.

Relationship Analytics puts an HCP’s or HCO’s relative network into medical and market context based on type, importance, and strength of relevant connections. It bridges the gap between disparate data and actionable next steps by unlocking new insights on timely and relevant factors influencing HCP and HCO behaviors. With these new insights, life sciences companies can quickly measure and compare relationships such as: Physician and account referral potential, co-authorship and co-investigator potential, speaker bureau attendee’s potential, and more.

Although fresh on the market, customers are already reporting sizable benefit. A top medical device company was challenged with identifying physician practices that would have a high volume of patients suffering from a specific heart disease, and who may benefit from their life-saving procedure. Using Relationship Analytics, the company easily determined overall referral potential and influential networks for targeted physicians. The insights saved time on pre-call planning, as well as aided in personalizing messaging to enhance patient referral to the implanting specialists. As a result, patient referrals were increased exponentially and target accounts revenue was 33% higher than the national average.

ROAM Pull-Through Analytics Suite (MediMedia Managed Markets)

ROAM Pull-Through Analytics Suite

MediMedia Managed Markets

Lee Termini, President
lee.termini@iconplc.com

Sales reps are required to speak intelligently to the clinical and market access components of the products they promote. However, variance in payer management and patient populations means that different physicians—even those located in the same postal code—may need different information to begin treating patients. And yet sales reps must deliver relevant information and resources that best align with the needs of individual physicians and their respective patient populations. This is how MediMedia Managed Markets (MMMM), an ICON plc company, defines Pull-Through, a term that describes more than simply delivering information about recent formulary wins.

MMMM’s ROAM (Resource Optimization and Access Maximization) Pull-Through Analytics Suite leverages client-provided secondary data to give an integrated, data-driven approach to maximizing appropriate utilization in a user-friendly digital dashboard. All data is integrated in-house using MMMM’s proprietary approach that maximizes match rates. The offering consists of two key quantitative models: A predictive opportunity model and a motivational model.

The predictive opportunity model is customized for each product based on a combination of market dynamics, epidemiology, and business objectives. The output allows manufacturers to quantify business opportunity (i.e., potential increased appropriate utilization) beyond the typical standard metrics (e.g., prescription volume, ICD-10 claims, sales). Because the model determines the potential size of an opportunity relative to its actual size, the focus is less on improving underperformance and more on driving the national average.

The motivational model accounts for individual physician practice dynamics and behaviors to determine the most relevant information (i.e., messaging) and resources sales reps should deliver to physicians. Factors such as channel mix, payer mix, diagnosis behavior, and treatment history help inform interactions with individual physicians to ensure they are subject to only relevant discussions.

Seismic (Seismic)

Seismic

Seismic

Jeff McDonough, Vice President of Inside Sales
jmcdonough@seismic.com

A common problem for life sciences firms in need of a sales enablement solution is the level of disconnect between sales and marketing teams. In fact, SiriusDecisions estimates that between 60% and 70% of collateral created by marketing goes unused by sales reps, which costs enterprise organizations an average of $2.3 million each year.

Seismic is a leading global marketing and sales enablement solution that improves close rates and delivers larger deals for sales while increasing marketing’s impact on the bottom line. Seismic automates the creation and personalization of sales materials and distributes them to the sales rep at the right time in the sales cycle and at any location through Seismic’s mobile apps. And through LiveDocs technology, which automates the creation of personalized sales materials within seconds, marketing can rest easy knowing that sales reps are only using the content that has been updated, compliant, and on-brand.

Since Seismic integrates into Outlook and Salesforce, sales reps never need to leave familiar platforms. And through Seismic’s LiveSend capabilities, the sales rep sees what parts of each piece of content the buyer interacted with, when, and if the buyer shared it with others in his/her organization, producing more informed and more effective future conversations. Seismic also feeds those analytics back to the marketing team, allowing for data-backed iterations of the content, making content even more effective in accelerating sales cycles and closing deals.

In May 2017, Seismic added a new feature, NewsCenter, which facilitates real-time flow of information from other areas of the organization to each individual sales rep, ensuring that the entire sales force has the information they need to have effective, knowledgeable conversations with buyers at any time.

Solomon (CMI/Compas)

Solomon

CMI/Compas

Paul Kallukaran, Executive Vice President, Analytics & Data Sciences
pkallukaran@cmicompas.com

In 2016, CMI/Compas developed a suite of tools called Solomon. These tools aid in the non-personal promotion planning process to right-size and efficiently spend brands’ investment, as well as to set specific exposure, awareness, ROI, and revenue-based goals.

Initial goal setting is done by accounting for various audience, market, message, and brand factors. Once these goals are set, the suite’s Media Mix Channel Optimizer allows CMI/Compas to optimize clients’ NPP spend against their business goals using optimization and simulation models. This tool, along with years of media expertise and market research, enhances media plans by looking at the probability an HCP will engage with a specific media channel and the historical impact the channel has on Rx behavior. CMI/Compas is also able to project expected changes in awareness based on factors including audience size, recall, exposures, and channel investment.

Utilizing their Media Vitals research, CMI/Compas also knows which media channels HCPs are most likely to engage with. That enables them to project a probability of exposure, which impacts awareness and ultimately helps influence HCP behavior. By forecasting these changes to Rx writing, the company can provide a range of incremental awareness, revenue, profit, or ROI that the brand can potentially get from NPP investments. This allows CMI/Compas to adjust budget allocation by channel in order to garner the highest returns based on brand goals.

The company can also adjust the media allocation to concentrate on the most effective channels for each segment and have a greater focus on segments deemed most valuable to a brand.

Spire for Health (Condé Nast)

Spire for Health

Condé Nast

Jennifer Mormile, Chief Industry Officer Health
jennifer_mormile@condenast.com

Spire is Condé Nast’s proprietary data platform that uses a combination of machine learning and big data techniques to find the right audience, optimize a marketing campaign for performance, and provide actionable consumer insights.

Spire combines Condé Nast’s extensive first-party contextual and behavioral data—adding more than one trillion new data points every month—with proprietary second- and third-party data and machine learning to execute campaigns based on correlations between consumers’ actions and receptivity to an advertising campaign.

This July, Condé Nast launched Spire for Health to offer this same level of targeting and optimization for pharma clients. Condé Nast Spire uses the world’s largest set of healthcare information to allow its partners to execute audience-based campaigns, and continually optimize and refine to drive KPIs.

The benefits of Spire for Health include:

  • Access to Rx claims data to build predictive models for precise health targets.
  • Robust targeting capabilities, including the ability to target by demo, geo, device, contextual, behavioral, online and offline purchase behavior, and consideration.
  • Extension of Spire across Condé Nast’s more than 175MM social audiences to extend or grow the model.
  • Interactive campaign dashboard that includes metrics such as content consumption, demographic and geographic data, new patient starts, patient conversions/switch, doctor visits, and retention.

Across all categories, Condé Nast has served more than one billion impressions through Spire—demonstrating ROI as high as 3:1 with an average 30% lift in sales.

Synthetic Control Arm (Medidata Solutions)

Synthetic Control Arm

Medidata Solutions

Erik Snider, Senior Director of Corporate Communications
esnider@mdsol.com

Can big data and analytics enable researchers to estimate the result from a randomized clinical trial (RCT) before investing in it? Medidata Solutions, a global provider of cloud-based solutions and data analytics for clinical research, recently released a new scientific solution called Synthetic Control Arm (SCA). Clinical trials of experimental drugs require controls, and concurrently randomized controls are the gold standard for judging drug efficacy and safety. However, the ability to run a “gold standard” trial depends on the specific patient population, the disease itself, or even the trial sponsor’s resources.

For severe disease settings, it’s often considered unethical to require patients to receive placebo or standard of care when new experimental therapies are available. However single arm trials are problematic since their interpretation may be inadequate or misleading. SCA can greatly enhance the interpretation of experimental data-utilizing historical patient-level trial data to create a well-matched control arm.

This past June, Medidata presented new evidence to support the use of SCAs at the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting. Medidata selected from its archive which now includes more than 5,000 clinical studies with clinical data aggregation rights for de-identified analyses to create an SCA for a particular Phase I/II single-arm trial in acute myeloid leukemia.

Comparing the outcomes of this well-matched SCA to that of the uncontrolled, experimentally treated subjects greatly enhanced the scientific interpretability of the experimental data and allowed researchers to quantitatively estimate the effect of the new experimental product. Furthermore, it is believed the adoption of SCAs will decrease current clinical development failure rates, estimated to be close to 90% from Phase I to regulatory approval. SCAs can also help: Enhance the understanding of disease sub-groups; aid the selection of new endpoints; and enhance go/no-go investment decisions before expensive RCTs.

TrueTargetML & LapsePredictML (Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness)

TrueTargetML & LapsePredictML

Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness

Kevin Troyanos, SVP, Analytics
kevin.troyanos@saatchiwellness.com

Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness (SSW) developed two unique solutions that apply machine learning approaches to predict (1) which physicians are most likely to try, adopt, or remain loyal to a specific medication in the future; and (2) the likelihood that patients will persist and remain adherent to their prescribed medications.

TrueTargetML harnesses the potential of machine learning for the purposes of predictive HCP marketing. Machine learning algorithms can simultaneously pore over millions of data points and paint a detailed picture of which patterns, behaviors, and demographics are most relevant to predicting future behaviors. Marketers can then use these insights to make hyper-specific behavioral predictions, literally pinpointing the HCPs most likely to adopt a new treatment or therapy—and ultimately craft marketing strategies and tactics on the basis of those predictions. TrueTargetML has now been used by more than 20 brands. In one case, SSW found that more than half of communications in one channel were being executed against practitioners who, according to the specific model trained for that brand, had almost no chance of adopting the brand in question—an insight which enabled the client to direct their budget where the potential was much greater.

LapsePredictML uses machine learning to improve pharma’s ability to tackle non-adherence. The first step to building LapsePredictML required SSW to develop probabilistic models that faithfully represented patterns of patient non-adherence in the real-world. Then they trained multiple algorithms to make predictions about the likelihood of patients persisting with their medications based on a range of different inputs such as the patient’s payer type, geography, and out-of-pocket costs. Now, LapsePredictML is able to lay important groundwork by informing the development of data-driven, individualized communication strategies whose end goal is to combat medication non-adherence.

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