Every business player is cognizant of the value of analytics in life sciences, but it takes winners to tap into its commercial aspect.
Commercial analytics is all about running a business efficiently to convert insights into income and data into dollars. Organizations must discover new data sources, apply data analytics in life sciences, and generate insights that can be quickly translated into action and acknowledge the value of analytics in life sciences.
Commercial analytics plays a crucial role in the life sciences industry. The ROI cycle varies significantly for patients, physicians, providers, and pharma, and each stakeholder needs to identify its strength and analyze commercial outcomes before investing.
The cost incurred in the development of a single drug is close to $350 million per company. For pharmaceutical companies, every drug's research and development phase requires huge resources both in terms of time and money, and hence they need to start right.
While dealing with such investments, life sciences organizations must answer a few basic questions such as:
- What is the risk of failure?
- What is the ROI?
- Will the drug pass all clinical phases/clinical trials?
- How long will it take to develop the drug?
This list can be more exhaustive, and the questions can be more complex than those posed. Businesses need to answer them backed by facts, exactly where life sciences commercial analytics will play a mammoth role for real world application.
Applications of commercial analytics
While implementing commercial analytics to drive customer engagement and identify profitable business endeavors, a few areas require focus. These include:
Customer segmentation and targeting
For pharmaceutical companies, it is important to identify physicians whose prescription patterns suit their drug portfolio.
Every physician is bound to follow a pattern of prescriptions, but there needs to be right mapping to the physicians. Organizations need to determine the churn rate and physician lifetime for a given drug.
Patient data analysis
Data pertaining to drug efficacy can help pharmaceutical companies estimate the lifetime value of its product.
By analyzing terabytes of patient data and putting unstructured data into defined data sets, companies can easily identify their future stars and matured investments.
Social media analytics
In today's world, the life sciences industry cannot turn a blind eye to social media and the opinions that are shared on social media platforms.
The sentiments of a population can reveal the groundbreaking truths about a drug. Unbiased traction for a newly launched drug can be measured by analyzing social media, a direct medium for understanding customer voice.
Analysis of marketing channels
Every organization uses unique ways to market its products or services, and every marketing channel has its own pros and cons. In the age of fast-paced digital marketing, are the traditional channels keeping pace? Are they still relevant? If so, what is the cost to the business? Answering these questions enables investors to prepare channel-based go-to-market strategies.