Axtria Blogs

Customer valuation is critical to pharmaceutical brand strategy as it informs several key decisions such as messaging, resource allocation, services offering allocation, etc. In simple / well established therapeutic areas, customers can be valued based on prescription volumes. However, often the competitive space presents complexities such as multiple classes of medication, combination therapies and an evolving product landscape. The disease state can present complexities such as comorbidities, multiple closely related diagnoses, potential off-label prescribing etc. There can be complexities that arise out of data availability, or lack thereof: for instance, launching into a market where competitors are distributing through Specialty Pharmacy. Further, depending on the therapeutic area, customers may be physicians, group practice accounts, hospitals or even Integrated Health Systems. In such cases, simple techniques may not be adequate.

At the annual PMSA conference 2015, Axtria’s Sudeep Saha and Celgene’s Jennifer Maurer will share an approach that demonstrates how to use patient-level data in a robust way to estimate market opportunity and product penetration in the field of Oncology.

The pharmaceutical marketing landscape has been changed significantly by the emergence of various types of “health systems”, variously known as ACOs, IDNs, IHNs, etc. These organizations create varying degrees of centralized control and decision-making for pharmaceutical or device and diagnostics products. Pharmaceutical companies have generally responded to this emergence by creating (or increasing) the role of Account Managers, calling on key decision makers at these health systems.

Incentive Compensation today continues to be a critical function in sales operations, and is one of the key levers for driving field force effectiveness. Expectations from incentive compensation team leaders have now become more demanding. Priorities are changing at a rapid pace, with new customer types, new selling models, advent of new technologies and new data sources. They need to contemplate, data restrictions, cost pressures, and emerging global captive CoEs (Centers of Excellence). IC team leaders today need to be aware of best practices that drive high impact.

After an overwhelming response to the Axtria’s presence last year, we are pleased to announce Axtria’s Gold Sponsor support for this year’s Pharmaceutical Management Science Association (PMSA) Annual Conference. Axtria’s Principals have supported the PMSA for two decades, including over 15 presentations / symposia / poster contributions over the past decade alone. The annual PMSA conference is attended by industry thought leaders, and highlights the latest thinking in life sciences analytics and business challenges facing commercial operations.

The focus of healthcare, globally, has been on treatment of disease and taking care of the sick. The approach has been reactive i.e. treat the sick. This approach basically leads to intervention only when the health of any person reaches a critical stage, with clinical intervention and hospitalization being the outcome. On top of this the healthcare system is constrained by spiraling cost driven by inefficient care system. This unsustainable economic impact of cost of care is driving the focus towards proactive health and care management.

In the light of the crisis, the mortgage industry has been under tremendous pressure to manage its business in a more data-driven manner. There are both operational as well as regulatory imperatives to understand the borrower better, maintain procedural controls, and improve transparency.

Over the years, financial systems and networks enabling banks’ business operations have grown in scope, scale and complexity. To manage internal processes such as customer acquisition, existing customer management and collections processes ; and risk strategies such as ‘Authorization, CLI / CLD, Payment Hold’ etc., the banks have adopted newer enterprise grade platforms such as Visionplus (First Data), TS2 (TSYS), TRIAD (FICO), Blaze Advisor (FICO) and Strategy Design Studio (Experian).

As the world is crawling out of the global economic crisis, several efforts are underway by regulators as well as international organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Bank of International Settlements, to institutionalize stress testing as an integral part of bank’s functioning. The intent is to better understand system-wide risks that can trigger widespread economic and financial instability. US Fed, therefore, has mandated an annual Comprehensive Capital Adequacy Review (CCAR) exercise for all banks to submit their capital plans for multiple scenarios (Baseline and Stressed scenarios).

Processing claims quickly and accurately is one of the biggest challenges payers face today in healthcare industry. Huge volume of claims notwithstanding, multiple and incompatible systems requiring significant manual hand offs have made the timely disposal of claims the single biggest burden on operating costs of payers. Add to it the problem of incorrectly filed claims that payers need to handle, leading to choking of band-width on account of re-processing; the problem suddenly becomes even more acute. With state specific regulations penalizing such delays, it has become a matter of survival for payers to figure out the optimal trade-off between analysis one claim warrants versus time it takes to get it through the system.