How Inspirata, Inc. uses Definitive Healthcare to map the market and create strategic account plans

Episode transcript

Hi everyone, and thanks for tuning in to an episode of “Customer Corner.” This is the Definitive Healthcare series that gives you a look into how companies are using the platform to grow their business. I’m Emily De Oliveira and I’m a senior product marketing manager. And on today’s episode, I’m joined by Emil Mladenov, vice president of marketing at Inspirata. Emil, thanks for joining today.

Absolutely. Thanks for hosting me, Emily.

To kick off our conversation, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and your company?

Yeah, sure. So I’ll start with the company. We are a healthcare technology company focused on oncology informatics. I myself am a member of the executive team and I’m the head of marketing and lead generation, also responsible for market research and competitive intel. I lead a team of digital and traditional marketers but I also have a team of sales development reps or SDRs as we call them. And they bridge between marketing and sales and qualify inbound leads and schedule appointments for the sales team. So in a nutshell that’s what we do.

Well, thanks for that introduction and I’d love to hear more about Inspirata. Can you tell me more about your software solutions?

Absolutely. Before I do that, I want to provide a little bit of context about the NLO Engine or the natural language processing engine that we have that drives what we do in the world of these solution areas. We do have time tested proprietary industry-leading NLP Engine that we use to parse patient data from different sources and to transform it into machine readable and searchable discrete terms. And that helps us in our solution areas. So we have clinical trial matching, cancer registry reporting, and digital pathology is these three areas. On the clinical trial matching side, we use the NLP Engine to take all this information about patients from different sources and be able to manipulate it and to apply it to our different algorithms. And then on the other end, we look at databases that have clinical trials information and we extract information about inclusion and exclusion criteria. And again, we use our engine to parse that into searchable discrete terms. Then we marry the two, we apply some additional AI to determine the most relevant patient trial matches and then we provide that information back to our customers, our providers so they can make decisions about who they want to enroll potentially in the clinical trials. On the cancer registry side, we apply the same NLP Engine to identify reportable cancer cases that are required by central registries in different states and to abstract additional relevant clinical information that may be needed for these types of reporting. And on the digital pathology side, we have the only FDA cleared vendor agnostic digital pathology workflow solution. And we provide the most comprehensive workflow and whole slide imaging management solution for digital pathology.

And now I understand that multiple functions of your organization is using Definitive Healthcare. So how is Inspirata using our platform for marketing?

From a marketing standpoint, I guess one of the most obvious use cases is for us to verify contacts in our CRM by looking at your contact data in Definitive Healthcare. We also like very much the sophisticated relational structure that your team of analysts has created over time to account for often various complex relationships between different organizations in the healthcare space. I mean, I’ve been in this space for years now and some of my colleagues have been in it for even longer. And we still sometimes have a hard time really accounting for the relationships with the affiliate organizations within a large healthcare system. So we like the fact that Definitive Healthcare has created parent IDNs, IDNs in individual hospitals with specific unique identifiers, unique IDs. And we kind of replicate the same structure in our CRM to account for that. That has helped us, helped us a lot. We did have a fairly large strategic project to clean up and did up our database this year and we really started appreciating that relational structure that Definitive Healthcare provides by doing this project. We also leveraged the various firmographic data points about our target accounts that we can take from the system to do different types of segments to estimate addressable market sizes, estimate some new opportunities so to do more of the strategic planning, if you will on the marketing side. So yeah, these are I think the main three areas where we benefit a lot from Definitive Healthcare.

Yeah, well that’s a great example of how you’re leveraging our affiliations intelligence to just understand the interconnectivity between organizations. And we’re just thrilled to hear that the data has really helped you to better understand your TAM and prioritize the biggest opportunities. And I’m also curious to learn more about how Inspirata is using Definitive Healthcare for sales intelligence. So can you share more about that?

Yeah, in a similar fashion, we take, again, the target accounts, financials, firmographics even information about a different install base related to different software or even devices that they may have to take a deeper dive into each of these accounts and get the full picture of what may be going on there. And then we use that to create detailed strategic account plans. So this is typically done after a deal progresses beyond a specific milestone. So, you know, after the first initial stages when we determine that this is well qualified and is progressing well as an opportunity for us, then we allocate more time and we create these strategic account plans and then we have internal discussions to ensure that we are best positioned to serve that account and to provide the right offering to them and hopefully close the deal successfully. So that’s one use case. Another one is for the sales executives to, I mean, I mentioned clinical trial matching earlier so we, for that particular solution areas, we are trying to target accounts for whom what we offer on the prescreening site will make sense. The automation there will make sense. What that means is that we’re looking for target accounts that have significant volumes of clinical trials that they’re running. Because if they only have a handful of clinical trials, that’s not a problem for them most of the times. They wouldn’t have, even if they have to do this manually, they’re not necessarily feeling the same kind of pain point. They’re experiencing the same kind of pain point that some of the larger players in the clinical trial space will do. So we want to determine, we want to allow the sales executives to, you know, refine their targeting to really pinpoint the hospitals and the economic medical centers, the cancer centers that are running, not only a relatively good amount of clinical trials but more specifically, cancer clinical trials. ‘Cause that’s where we specialize. So that’s another use case. And then lastly, you know, from a purely organizational and administration standpoint for heads of sales, just being able to look up different, you know, being able to slice and dice different territories within the US and Canada and understand what would be equitable territories to be assigned to different sales reps. That’s information that’s being able to, you know, go into Definitive, run these types of analysis almost in real time without a lot of additional research that you need to do online is very helpful. So once in a while, we’d like to kind of go through our territory assignment and make sure that, you know, if we had some turnover, we are allocating the sales territories based on where the people that we have on the sales team are located physically. But we also make sure that they have relatively similar opportunities in front of them. And that’s why we need to look at the accounts that fall in these territories and what they represent for them as an opportunity. So that’s another use case. So I think those are the main ones from a sales side.

Well, that is great that everyone from sales reps to sales leadership is leveraging Definitive Healthcare to help with things like territory mapping and targeting and just having more meaningful sales conversations. So thanks for sharing your perspectives on how you’ve been using the platform. My last question for you is what has the impact been since using Definitive Healthcare?

Well, one of the aspects that we really appreciate is that it’s just allowed us to be more informed and strategic in everything we do. You know, it’s one thing to basically agree that we wanna have a formal approach and create these strategic account plans that I mentioned earlier. It’s another thing when you have to start researching all this information and if you don’t have it at your fingertips and you have to go to different sources, it’s sometimes prohibitive from a time perspective as a salesperson specifically. I mean, not so much on the marketing side because we kind of have, I mean, it’s not that we don’t, we are busy as well and we are time, you know, always juggling several projects at the same time. But this is what we get paid for at the end of the day, to segment, to understand the market, to analyze the market. But from a sales perspective, your incentive is to spend more time prospecting, to call your customers, to call the accounts, and not so much to do research. So having a database that allows you to do that fairly quickly and in a centralized manner, I think it’s a great benefit for us. So that’s been, we’ve noticed an impact that, you know, there’s less of an excuse for them nowadays to not create these strategic account plans because they have the information in front of them. And it’s a little bit related to that, but I would consider this a separate impact and it goes both on the marketing and sales side, it’s the ability to compare apples to apples across the different accounts because each of these hospital systems and entities that we look at in Definitive Healthcare may have slightly different ways of reporting these things. And if we go separately to their websites, oftentimes we may have to apply some sort of judgment on our end to decide how to interpret their information versus the information we see on someone else’s website versus at Definitive Healthcare, you have a team of analysts who are doing this for us. You know, obviously not, again, not all the information is exactly apples to apples but at least there’s been some normalization, there’s been some standardization of that information and it’s very helpful for us.

Yeah, that’s wonderful that Definitive Healthcare has really provided a standardized way to look at the whole market and has just had a valuable impact on your organization. So Emil, I really enjoyed learning more about Inspirata so thank you so much for being here today.

You’re welcome. Thank you. Thanks for hosting me.

And I also wanna thank the audience for watching this episode of “Customer Corner.” If you’d like to share your story on the show, you can reach out to us at marketing@definitivehc.com and you can visit our website to learn more about how other companies are using our platform to create commercial success.