Veeva Systems recently announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Crossix Solutions, the leader in privacy-safe patient data and analytics, for $430 million. Crossix will operate as an independent business unit under its current brand led by Crossix CEO Asaf Evenhaim. As part of the deal, certain Crossix employees will receive long-term equity retention grants valued at approximately $120 million in the aggregate. Crossix will remain headquartered in New York and continue operations in Israel and Belarus.
“The only change to how Crossix operates is essentially that I’m reporting to Peter Gassner, Veeva’s CEO, but the rest of the Crossix reporting structure stays the same,” Evenhaim explains. “I feel like Veeva is a very natural place that will allow Crossix to essentially innovate its mission around patient outcomes and privacy-safe patient data and analytics and take it to the next level. As a company, we had many options to move forward, but this felt very much like the right opportunity at the right time.”
The Crossix analytics platform provides technology that connects health and non-health data for more than 300 million U.S. patients to drive greater marketing effectiveness. Data includes Rx, OTC, clinical, claims, consumer, hospital, media data, and more—all of which are protected by best-in-class privacy safeguards. Additionally, Crossix also offers solutions such as DIFA HCP, which tracks and provides insights on video, mobile, and display campaigns geared toward HCPs as well as DIFA HCP Site, which measures the effectiveness of HCP websites. All of Crossix’s current solutions and services will continue to be available to its customers.
“The Crossix products aren’t going to change and we will continue to invest and even accelerate investment in those products and our customers should continue to expect the same level of innovation and customer service,” Evenhaim says. “At the same time, the opportunities to enhance and create additional value for our customer is now very apparent—and exciting.”
For instance, Evenhaim says they will eventually look to integrate Veeva’s data on field force activity into their platform. This will allow marketing managers to look at their media and marketing plan with an understanding of whether the media is working to guide patients to see physicians who have been called upon recently versus physicians who have not been called upon. On the flip side, Crossix’s patient data will also eventually help to better inform sales professionals when that data is embedded into Veeva’s products such as Veeva CRM, its data warehouse Veeva Nitro, and new data offerings with its Veeva OpenData products.
“Imagine an account manager for an oncology center like MD Anderson,” proposes Paul Shawah, SVP of Commercial Strategy at Veeva. “Today with Veeva they have a picture of what that account center looks like, the stakeholders therein, their activity, and what their plan is with that cancer center. If you layer on rich patient data from Crossix about who the types of patients are—not specific identifiable—that MD Anderson treats, and where they are in their treatment journey, you can start to get more precise in terms of who you target and what kinds of services and information you may want to bring to bear. For example, you may see a trend showing patients are stuck in a challenging reimbursement cycle and you can bring a reimbursement specialist in and try to solve those kinds of problems.”
For now, the initial focus following the merger will be ensuring that the integration of the companies and their cultures goes smoothly. Shawah says that Veeva will make further announcements about any new products or enchantments to existing products from both companies over the course of the coming months leading up to the Veeva Summit in June.
“As the medicines within the market are becoming more targeted at specific patient populations, a life sciences company’s marketing and sales efforts needs to become more precise as well,” Shawah says. “Combining Veeva’s strength in field execution and all of the activity that a pharma company has targeted at HCPs and payer stakeholders with the strength of Crossix and their patient-rich data will provide massive opportunities for us to innovate around how companies go to market.”
