What Type of Patient Metrics Can Data Aggregators Provide to Manufacturers, Specialty Pharmacies?

John Giannouris, vice president, Specialty Pharmacy Services, ValueCentric, discusses data collection and analytics services that aggregators can offer manufacturers.

“There’s a lot of different metrics that we can provide to manufacturers. So, at ValueCentric we track a product from the time it leaves the manufacturer, or their dock, or their 3PO, to when it gets to a distributer or a specialty pharmacy or a PAP provider, all the way through when it gets finally shipped to a patient or to an infusion therapy provider or an alternate side of care. With all that data that we collect along the way, there’s analytics being done. So, you could do something as simple as: how is the product being ordered? Is it being over-ordered? Underordered? Are there certain distributors that have inventory above a level than is expected? So, you can start all the way to kind of the left in tracking the product and doing some metrics against the product, and as you move to the right and start moving into the patient journey, you can start tracking adherence metrics, compliance, persistency, time to fill, medical possession ratio, therapy gap days, to name a few.

So, that’s some of the metrics we can provide as data aggregators. The key is, if you’re an aggregator, and you have an analytics platform, the manufacturer could get those analytics right through the data aggregation platform that you’re already providing. So, they don’t necessarily need to come up with the metrics and the calculations and move all this data into their data marts and data warehouses. The data aggregator can provide it from them directly from the data, and it’s more timely. At ValueCentric, we process data as it’s received, so we can quickly update a metric within 3 hours after all data’s received, or within 3 hours after the first data set is received. Where as, when it’s data you’re providing, you’re cutting data at a certain point in time, that data then needs to go over to the manufacturer. The manufacturer then needs to run it through their processes, and then they’re looking at data maybe 2 days later, versus 3 hours later, for example.”