The golden Compass

The golden Compass

MedAdNews: The brief for Veeva Compass says that it offers, “a more complete view of patients, HCPs, and the market” than legacy data products. How does it do this? What is different from previous data products? How did Veeva achieve this?

Ed Park: Veeva Compass is a suite of modern data products focused on building a patient-centric data network. Having this type of data provides a more complete view of all patient healthcare interactions — whether seeing a family practitioner, picking up a prescription at a pharmacy, or being referred to an oncologist. This is a shift from legacy data products, which has solely been focused on retail prescriptions. The treatment dynamics have changed with an increasing number of prescribed brands now delivered as in-office administered therapies, injections, and infusions. The patient-centric approach from Compass provides a balanced view of capturing prescribed brand events, whether in an oral or non-oral form.

A patient-centric approach requires a strategic approach to building a modern data network. This means looking at all types of sources where a healthcare interaction between a patient and healthcare system can be observed. Compass incorporates both open (e.g., clearinghouses, switches, etc.) and closed sources (e.g., pharmacies, payers, etc.) within its data network, resulting in a more complete view of the overall healthcare landscape.

Compass data is brought together by Veeva’s privacy-safe, patient-identity linking technology called SafeMine. Then the data is surfaced and made available to life science customers through the Compass portal. This is an industry first for delivering data; lifescience customers have unlimited access to the entire Compass data network to support a brand of interest. It removes the legacy data providers’ arbitrary restrictions, so companies have the freedom to explore, learn, and adapt. The Compass portal also provides customers the ability to take advantage of daily data. Speed is critical to respond to patients’ changing needs, and biopharmas can stay up to date on all steps in their journey in a timely manner.

Compass reshapes not only how a medical and pharmacy data network is constructed, but more importantly, how the data is quickly made available to achieve the end goal of getting treatments to patients in need.

MedAdNews: The brief also mentions, “a single source of truth.” What do you mean by this?

Park: “A single source of truth” refers to the Veeva Compass data being the single foundation for the entire Compass suite. By not building on the legacy approach of a retail-oriented view, Compass gives a more complete picture of the patient, HCP, and the market. Since Veeva Compass Patient is the foundation for Veeva Compass Prescriber and Veeva Compass National, projected prescriptions and procedures at the HCP, HCO, ZIP, State, and National levels for retail and non-retail products, there is a consistency across the entire suite. This keeps it simple so customers don’t need to stitch together several solutions and prep data to a proper format to get the answers.

Whether the data and analytics team is using Compass Patient for a specific patient journey or the commercial operations team is using Compass Prescriber to build territory alignments — all users are working from a single source of truth, the Compass data network.

In contrast, existing legacy data products could be built from retail pharmacy or manufacturer shipment or payer data — all different types and formats of data — resulting in inconsistencies that create inefficiencies and potential negative impact to top-line revenue.

MedAdNews: On your website Mike Rifflard of ANI Pharmaceuticals says he was able to accelerate his brand’s product launch because of Compass. How was that achieved? What steps in the launch process were faster as opposed to an older data offering?

Park: ANI Pharmaceuticals received its PDUFA date more quickly than the team anticipated and had to drive precision engagement for a niche patient population in 75 days.

The ANI team had to quickly identify appropriate patients and HCPs that would benefit from ANI’s product. Initially, ANI had looked at its existing prescription and medical claims data to inform field force sizing and identify customers. But this ultimately raised deeper questions that the dataset couldn’t answer. Questions like, “Why are we calling on this provider?” and “Why are we interested in this person in this location?”

With immediate, unlimited data access via Compass Patient, ANI was able to quickly understand the prescriber base, patients and HCPs locations, and the full patient journey in a matter of weeks, not months. This gave ANI the freedom to explore, learn, and adapt without having to re-scope a new dataset, set up adjusted update cadences, and potentially lose time.

As the field team was being set up ANI was able to pull timely insights through Veeva CRM MyInsights to the frontline sales team. This helped to better prioritize HCPs and new prescription writers that were most relevant in treatment decisions. A process that would typically take a month to compile, process, and share the information with the field was now happening in a day. The native integration between data and software was critical in setting up daily alerts.

MedAdNews: What inspired the development of this new offering?

Park: With so many exciting and meaningful treatment advancements for the lifescience industry, the data innovation to support them was lacking.

Delivering a complete view that reflects the changing healthcare industry via a focus on patient-centricity meant Veeva would need to build a modern data network. To monitor and measure these changing dynamics, Compass portal makes timely data readily available, removing the anchor of legacy data that can slow progress.

Veeva recently entered the projected data market, driven by the same guiding principles that reflects today’s new medicines. Compass Prescriber and Compass National are projected prescriptions and procedures for retail and non-retail products, an industry first.

MedAdNews: It was a little surprising to me that unlimited data access is one of Compass’ differentiating characteristics. What limits to access existed for previous data offerings, and how is Compass able to remove those limits?

Park: Legacy data providers require lifescience customers to pre-determine the framework (e.g., market basket definition) of the dataset they are purchasing for a determined period of time. This requires biopharmas to anticipate and predict all the key business questions and use cases they are looking to answer for the future from the start.

Veeva removes this artificial barrier and provides unlimited data access through the Compass portal. By changing the data delivery model, biopharmas can access what they need, when they need it. Instead of having to anticipate all key business questions or use cases upfront, they can efficiently generate insights for the brand of interest without having to purchase additional data out of the set time frame. This not only saves costs, but allows companies to focus on generating insights as quickly as possible to help get treatments to patients faster.