6 most common data searches by Definitive Healthcare biotech and pharma clients

For clients working in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, there are unique legal and clinical barriers to overcome before bringing a therapy to market. Whether a biotech or pharma firm is focused on clinical development, product launch or commercialization, their teams can find the data they need most in the Definitive Healthcare platform.

To give you insight into common tasks executed by your peers and competitors, we’ve compiled a list of the most common searches in the Definitive Healthcare platform by top biotech and top pharma companies.

1. Patient populations by region

For our clients, sizing their market starts with finding treatment-ready patients. Our biotech and pharma clients create sales territories and narrow patient cohorts by focusing on specific geographies, such as U.S. regions.

Some other ways Definitive Healthcare clients segment their markets include mapping sales territories by CBSA (core-based statistical area) and by state. CBSAs, which are regions surrounding specific metropolitan areas, allow more targeted patient selection than state-level segmentation. Clients can get even more narrow and specific by segmenting by zip codes.

2. Affiliations and relationships

Understanding the strength of a provider’s affiliation with different healthcare organizations can provide valuable insights for biotech and pharma companies as they plan their go-to-market strategies.

Using commercial claims data, Definitive Healthcare provides proprietary affiliation insights that help clients understand affiliation strength, length, and history between providers and facilities.

Beyond insights derived from commercial claims, Definitive Healthcare also uses resources such as clinical publications, conference abstracts, and grants to track and provide insight into thousands of relationships between providers and researchers.

Knowing the strength of provider-facility affiliations, along with insights on provider-researcher connections, can inform sales strategies and aid in identifying potential influencers within the organizations. Physicians with a longer and stronger history of affiliation may have more sway and decision-making power for a facility and be critical targets in getting treatments to patients.

3. Centers of excellence

A center of excellence is a specialized program within a care facility that provides a high level of expertise and resources centered on a specific medical area, such as cancer, joint replacement, or transplants. This facility is an epicenter of specialty care provision and is where clients can often find a physician influencer, key opinion leader, or other specialist.

In the biotech and pharma industry, a center of excellence indicates care delivery facilities that have high volumes of referrals and physician specialists. However, these facilities being deemed a center of excellence may vary based on biotech and pharma organizations’ goals. For example, a pharmaceutical company developing a seasonal flu vaccine would be targeting very different care centers than a firm developing a new treatment for Parkinson’s Disease.

So, how exactly do companies in the biotech and pharma industry engage with centers of excellence? Once a company has identified the centers, it needs to grow relationships with and deliver medical education to these facilities, which may ultimately influence care decisions to improve patient outcomes. Biotech and pharma companies need to facilitate the creation of centers of excellence around their product and disease area at the primary care level to influence referrals, treatment patterns, and outcomes.

4. Medical experts at hospitals and physician groups

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies often engage key opinion leaders (KOLs) for insight during drug or therapeutic development. KOLs are influencers in the healthcare space who are well respected based on proven expertise in their fields. They may be physicians, hospital executives, researchers, and more.

Definitive Healthcare tracks 15 million of these expert profiles to help pharma and biotech organizations connect with KOLs with the right expertise for their mission. Because biopharmaceutical firms often update relevant medical and scientific experts on clinical trial results and seek feedback from experts, being able to identify the most relevant experts can be valuable in the development process. Medical experts can act as consultants on how to best position a drug or therapy within the market, as well as publish articles or deliver speaking engagements to share their knowledge with their peers.

By identifying and engaging with medical experts, biotech and pharma clients can increase their scientific share of voice, understand which experts are working with competitors, and frame their message to change perceptions and care patterns, and potentially increase market share.

5. Key decision-makers

After therapy development, the key is finding the right decision-makers that control patient access to the treatment. Our clients have access to the names, titles, and contact information of physician leaders, department heads, and executives—making it that much easier to contact key decision-makers.

Often, when approaching a sales conversation, our biotechnology and pharmaceutical clients start by pinpointing the physicians treating their patient cohorts. Using tools to identify patients best suited for their treatment allows these organizations to define target patient populations and then identify which physicians are treating them.

Once the right physicians are identified, it’s easy to find their practice locations and the final decision-makers for those practices. These decision-makers might be the department head at the facility or an executive officer for the affiliated system—regardless of the position, the right data and contact information are paramount to reaching the right person.

6. Diagnosis and procedure volume

How can clients find patient cohorts without understanding diagnosis, procedure and treatment patterns? Being able to search for combinations of primary and secondary diagnoses, diagnoses and comorbidities, and treatments that patients are receiving can be one of the easiest and most effective ways to target ideal patient populations.

Clients use our medical claims database to find the hospitals and care facilities diagnosing and treating the highest volumes of patients that would benefit most from their therapies. These insights help clients analyze patient cohorts, learn how interventions have changed over time, and understand the prescribing patterns of physicians to uncover market opportunities.

Clients can also combine these claims insights with Definitive Healthcare’s data and information from clinical trials, publications, grants, and research collaborations to develop an even more robust analysis of their patient cohorts.

Learn more

Are you looking for more information on how your business can leverage these essential insights? Contact us today to start your free trial. Want even more insights on data search trends? Check out what medical device, technology, medical supply, and staffing companies are searching for.