Historically, pharmaceutical manufacturers leveraged retail pharmacy prescriptions to identify which physicians they could engage with education and outreach. As conditions, diagnoses, treatments and mechanisms of delivery have become increasingly complex, different engagement approaches are needed that are more robust.
Today, physicians might only be treating a handful of patients meeting the criteria for a specific therapy. That means you need to be able to engage with that physician before a treatment decision is made. This requires comprehensive, timely and accurate diagnosis data, not just sourced from the traditional clearinghouses, but also amplified and validated through novel approaches. While standard trigger programs help commercial pharmaceutical teams discover physicians of interest, these legacy approaches are challenged with long lag times and false “new” patient alerts that have resulted in lost opportunities, wasted promotional dollars, and data that is too late to influence a physician’s prescribing decision. HealthVerity recently hosted a webinar introducing Precision Event Alerts to address these challenges. If you missed the webinar, which is available on demand in HealthVerity Marketplace, here’s a recap:
Optimizing outreach
To meet the challenges of today’s pharmaceutical market and optimize physician outreach efforts, we determined three key elements were needed:
- More patients - With physicians treating a limited number of patients meeting the specific criteria of complex therapies that are extremely costly, but potentially lifesaving, every patient matters. You want to ensure you find the most patients possible for a return on investment.
- Faster insights - It is paramount to deploy outreach efforts before a physician makes a prescribing decision. That means speed is of the essence, however, with legacy solutions that provide weekly alerts, our analysis found the lag time between when a diagnosis was actually made and when you receive the alerts is 18 to 22 days.
- Higher precision - Physician alerting or trigger programs are meant to discover new patients, however, our research found that with legacy solutions, 12% to 40% of alerts are not actually new patients. Accuracy is important in verifying that a patient is truly new.
More data provides more patients
Most legacy solutions utilize either open clearinghouse claims or lab results data to discover patients with a specific diagnosis. With the nation’s largest, fully interoperable healthcare data ecosystem, HealthVerity Precision Event Alerts synchronizes open claims and lab data with other sources that offer diagnosis insights to ensure we discover all of the potential patients meeting your criteria.
In an analysis we conducted comparing this synchronized approach to utilizing just open claims data, we found:
- 12.98% more diabetes patients
- 6.96% more diabetes providers
- 26.50% more patients with transthyretin amyloidosis (ATTR), a rare cardiovascular disease
- 19.46% more ATTR providers
Quest and Labcorp together represent the majority of the outpatient diagnostic testing market. As a result, any model that uses only one of the two is inherently missing an equivalent amount of patients as it is capturing. HealthVerity is the only company that synchronizes data from both Quest and Labcorp upfront, along with other top lab providers, offering best-in-class coverage of the diagnostic lab market, as well as biomarkers.
These analyses determined that by synchronizing sources from our vast data ecosystem, HealthVerity Precision Event Alerts can deliver 15% to 40% more alerts than legacy solutions.
Mobilize outreach efforts in half the time
These additional patients are only of value if they are discovered prior to a treatment decision. Where other solutions may rely on weekly feeds that are compounded by significant processing time, HealthVerity has feeds that are as frequent as daily, with automated routines to accelerate delivery. As a result, what could take 18 to 22 days with a legacy solution could be cut in half with HealthVerity Precision Event Alerts.
Higher precision yields greater accuracy
Now that we’ve discovered more patients at a faster rate, the next key element is to ensure that they’re actually new patients. Existing patients are likely already on a therapy and outreach efforts could be wasted if you receive a false new patient alert.
To determine if a patient is new, most legacy alerting solutions look back 12 to 24 months in open clearinghouse claims. Open claims are what a doctor submits to a clearinghouse for billing purposes, that the clearinghouse then routes to the appropriate insurance company or payer for processing. Closed claims come from the payer and are the actual adjudicated claim, providing rich, patient-centric data. The benefit of open claims, and why they are often leveraged in alerting solutions, is a short lag time of days, up to a week (HealthVerity receives open claims daily), whereas closed claims have a lag time of up to three months.
While the short lag time of open claims is beneficial, the challenge is that not all clearinghouses share their data, creating gaps in the view of the patient’s healthcare journey. HealthVerity conducted an analysis using strictly open claims to validate new patients for three different conditions compared to validating new patients using both open and closed claims. Using both open and closed claims had significantly higher accuracy rates:
- 46% more accurate for diabetes
- 17% more accurate for colorectal cancer
- 12% more accurate for ATTR
By leveraging both open and closed claims, HealthVerity Precision Event Alerts can provide an average of 20% greater accuracy, significantly limiting false alerts, minimizing wasted sales calls and saving your marketing investment.
Next-generation physician outreach
As therapies become increasingly complex and personalized, new approaches for physician outreach and engagement are needed that find the most patients, in the shortest amount of time and with the greatest accuracy. Our analyses found that traditional trigger programs are missing the mark. Discover how you can receive 15% to 40% more alerts with 20% more accuracy in half the time with HealthVerity Precision Event Alerts:
