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Overcoming Blind Spots for a Successful Launch Strategy

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Launching a drug can be a make or break moment for a biotech or pharmaceutical company. Whether launching a new drug or moving into a new indication, commercial teams must demonstrate incredible agility and a robust understanding of the treatment landscape in order to succeed.

And yet, there are still instances where commercial teams are relying on limited information. The traditional approach to commercial strategy within headquarters and the field has most often been to rely on legacy data aggregators and expensive third-party consultants, a piecemeal approach that is not only time-consuming and expensive, but often leaves commercial teams with insight gaps that can force unnecessary assumptions of their market. With the Healthcare Map™ as its foundation, Komodo Health creates higher fidelity insights, illuminating the exact  patient populations you are trying to treat and the clinicians making those treatment decisions.

Unanswered Questions Leave Room for Failure

For one biotech company bringing a second-line therapy to market for the treatment of breast cancer, the commercial team’s field representatives knew they needed a clear picture of the clinicians they would be approaching. The company’s therapy is indicated for patients at a very specific moment in their treatment journey, meaning it would be critical to understand both competitive therapies and who was administering them, as well as the intricacies of patient diagnosis patterns.

The legacy data aggregators they looked at could show basic prescribing data but left many questions unanswered:
  • With many oncology drugs prescribed off-label or across indications, what is the true market share within this specific indication?
  • Looking at aggregated data, which line of treatment was a given patient in when they received a new therapy?
  • What about medically administered infusion therapies offered by competitors, which are not published to normal data aggregators?
  • Which HCPs are prescribing which therapies at what point in a patient’s treatment journey? What specific conditions are they prescribing them for?
  • How are relevant patients moving between providers via referral?
  • Which healthcare providers have the most influence within their industry and therapeutic area? Who are the most potent targets for field teams to focus on?
Over-reliance on legacy aggregator pill-tracking data alone would prove insufficient for a successful launch. And, because many of the second-line therapies for breast cancer of this category are also prescribed for other uses, the team also wouldn’t have been able to accurately visualize the patient populations they should be targeting. Within this therapeutic area, as in the oncology and rare-disease spaces more broadly, therapies are often used across multiple indications; therefore, it would be critical to understand patient diagnoses when evaluating competitive therapy market share.

Essentially, if they went the traditional route, these sales representatives would be going into those essential first conversations with clinicians and KOLs with major blind spots. Equally dangerous, they would be entering these crucial discussions with inaccurate assessments.

Bridging the Gaps with Robust Patient-Level Data

With that in mind, the biotech turned to Iris from Komodo Health.

Like all Komodo Health software, Iris is built on the company’s proprietary Healthcare Map of 325 million real-world patient encounters. Pulling not only prescription data, but a range of diverse, real-time, patient-level, de-identified data sourced from across the healthcare landscape, the Healthcare Map captures 2x to 3x more clinical encounters than legacy data aggregators, making it the most comprehensive single source of insights on U.S. patient journeys available.

Driven by this data, Iris provides a deeper understanding of the treatment landscape, provider behavior, and patient pathways within a therapeutic area compared to any other solution for commercial teams. In other words, Iris fills in those critical gaps left by legacy data aggregators.

For this biotech, Iris captured a deeper view of the competitive therapies within the market already. Using the software, the field team was able to drill down precisely into which patients were using specific therapies for a second-line treatment of this type of breast cancer, which providers were prescribing which treatments at different moments along the patient journey, and how those physicians were sharing those patients – even across different HCOs.

Crafting a Clear and Focused Product Strategy

The biotech used Iris as a guide to develop strategic – and, ultimately, effective – call plans for engaging with the healthcare providers best positioned to prescribe their therapy. Because of the platform’s flexibility, all levels of the company’s sales team were able to use Iris, some tactically and some strategically, to create a differentiated approach.

And this insights-driven approach paid off. Komodo’s methodology captured roughly 60-70% more patients and clinical signals tied to these patients, compared to the biotech’s legacy data aggregator. This made for a successful launch of their therapy, even within a competitive and complex marketplace.

With granular resolution of prescribing behaviors and greater visibility into market share at the patient level, Iris can support powerful pre-launch planning, messaging development, and sales force optimization, acting as the keystone in that critical moment of a drug’s launch.

Learn more about Iris here.
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