---
title: "Know what others can’t: Real-world data gaps holding commercial teams back"
description: Discover how real-world data gaps can hinder commercial pharmaceutical teams and learn strategies to uncover hidden market insights for better decision-making.
image: https://blog.healthverity.com/hubfs/know-what-others-cant-featured-1.png
---
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# Know what others can’t: Real-world data gaps holding commercial teams back
[By \- Paul Cariola, Senior Principal Consultant,](https://blog.healthverity.com/author/paul-cariola-senior-principal-consultant) October 9, 2026
The therapeutic market that you know is shaped by the healthcare data that you can see. But when critical medical, specialty, clinical or longitudinal signals are absent from that view, the picture (and the decisions based on it) is less clear.
Recently, HealthVerity shared its analyses during a [webinar](https://info.healthverity.com/healthverity-and-symphony-health-know-what-others-cant) where Paul Cariola, Senior Principal - Commercial Data & Insights Strategy, illustrated four commercial scenarios where connecting additional patient data signals revealed insights that the existing view did not: different competitive positionings for therapies, a larger addressable patient population, previously obscured treatment activity and an earlier opportunity to act. The lesson wasn’t that more data is always better, but knowing which additional signal can materially change what you know and what you do next.
Here are the four scenarios we covered and what broader visibility was revealed in each.
## Medical benefit for buy-and-bill therapies: Know what pharmacy share alone may overlook
### Your market doesn’t end at the pharmacy. Neither should your commercial view.
Retail pharmacy data only reveals a fraction of total activity for physician-administered, buy-and-bill and infused treatments. Exploring treatment patterns for Revlimid and Darzalex—a pair of top multiple myeloma regimens with distinct delivery models—HealthVerity evaluated how one practitioner's prescribing profile shifted between data sources. Looking strictly through retail prescription channels, the medical-benefit therapy occupied second place. Incorporating medical claim streams from clearinghouses and payers elevated that same treatment to the leading position.
**Identical physician, identical patient cohort, yet a completely altered market reality based solely on your dataset's scope.**
If the leader can change at the prescriber level, so can your targeting and competitive read.
That shift can change how you size the market and allocate field resources. Across the broader market, we observed nearly 55% more new patient activity in the medical benefit alone, activity that never appears in an open pharmacy feed. For competitive teams, the takeaway is direct: pharmacy share is not the same as treatment share, and the two can point to very different commercial priorities.
## Blocked and limited-distribution specialty drugs: Know the demand others may not see
### When a drug is blocked from open pharmacy claims reporting the visibility disappears.
As more high-priced therapies move through limited-distribution specialty pharmacy models, activity around those products is often proactively blocked from traditional open pharmacy feeds. Paul walked through an illustrative neurology example where the open claims view showed almost zero activity for a product that was clearly being prescribed and dispensed.
His point: manufacturers can block the outflow of pharmacy data from specialty pharmacies, but they can't block the medical claim submitted at administration or the closed claim adjudicated by the payer. Adding those signals to your view restores visibility into the patients and providers driving that market.
**For teams making decisions with a blocked view, the accounts and prescribers that look important may not be the ones that actually are.**
If the addressable population increases, your forecast should move with it.
### ****
## Rare disease patient identification: Find the patients others can’t
### When patient populations are small, every missing diagnosis, encounter, treatment, provider and site of care can materially change the market.
In rare disease, the challenge is finding the *right patients* rather than finding *more claims*. Patients are often seen outside the specialists most likely to treat them, and many are undiagnosed or miscoded for years. Prescription activity alone rarely captures the full addressable population, and diagnosis codes alone miss patients whose condition shows up only in the clinical record.
When the HealthVerity real-world data ecosystem was combined with the Symphony Health commercial data foundation, our analyses showed:
- Nearly **50% increase** in new patient identification
- A **75% lift** in observable medical claims activity for those patients
- Additional visibility into diagnoses, treatments and unique diagnosed patients
- Access to **10+ EMR sources** including clinical notes that surface markers missed by ICD-10 codes
**If the right patients are missing, your commercial strategy is built on the wrong population.**
For rare disease brands, that additional context means separating diagnosed, undertreated, and treatment-eligible patients so promotional and educational effort lands on the patients most likely to matter.
## Pre-launch commercial intelligence: Know the market before your brand has a history
**Your brand may not have a history yet. Your market does. Know the patients, HCPs and adoption signals others may not see before Day 1.**
Before launch, every commercial plan is built on assumptions. The HealthVerity advantage is knowing which ones you can replace with evidence before your own brand history exists.
In one illustrative example, we looked at an analog product's first year on market, the kind of benchmark pre-launch teams rely on to set expectations. The initial view captured about 1,200 patients. Connecting additional HealthVerity data increased patient visibility by 50% and surfaced a full one-third of the prescribers driving that market who were missing from the original view. For a brand still pre-launch, that means the analogs used to forecast uptake, identify early adopters and set the launch baseline may be understating the opportunity from the start.
Every missing patient and prescriber shapes something that a pre-launch team has to decide before Day 1: how large the targetable population really is, which HCPs qualify as early adopters, how territories should be drawn and what baseline the launch will be measured against. Launch windows are short, and the assumptions locked in before Day 1 are the ones that quietly cost the most to unwind later.
## What you don’t see can change what you do
Across all four scenarios, the lesson is the same: the market you know is only as comprehensive as the signals you can see. Connecting Symphony Health’s commercial intelligence with HealthVerity’s medical and clinical data reveals patients, prescribers, demand and competitive activity that change the picture, and the actions that follow.
The question was never whether you have enough data. It’s whether there’s something you don’t know that would change what you do.
Know what others can’t. Then act on it with HealthVerity. Watch the full webinar [on demand](https://info.healthverity.com/healthverity-and-symphony-health-know-what-others-cant).
[](https://blog.healthverity.com/hs/cta/wi/redirect?encryptedPayload=AVxigLJ%2BYubqTNXX87B8Y%2BlKof2xU5LqRrgAvGcIGMkYJ6%2FWTeGvZOryC1gy9QGtjopl1KET0LYtnJcPxg0GOLNTREnc%2B0WA7VyvUcRvCcuU4HVmTElHO%2Fs9l3MqLhUvZeR8ccwi5DlVZeU9R3u%2FKtOqeivAwiUvwTxUXfIPx2gquG0rJ1554gcXvsxwl%2FOkQ4Xo0qQvNjArzj9n6fgEDXulOg%3D%3D&webInteractiveContentId=223004088925&portalId=5412465)
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