Iain Shield, Digital Value Communications Consultant, was among the team representing Mtech Access at the Digital Pharma Advances Conference in London on 29th January 2020. Here he shares some key reflections from the Data Insights & Customer Engagement discussion panel.
One especially thought-provoking session raised a number of important points and challenges familiar to Mtech Access. The Data Insights & Customer Engagement discussion panel saw industry and healthcare experts explore the question ‘How do you deal with quantity of data?’ The panel discussed how there are a lot of healthcare data available, contained in numerous and sporadic data sets, yet the question remains… ‘how can we present these data in a meaningful way with actionable insights?’
Yet, before we start thinking about how to manage the information out there, we need to consider our end customer – healthcare professionals. During the above session, the panel challenged the audience to ask themselves: “What does my customer want? Can my customer draw valuable insights from this data? Are the insights relevant?” These questions resonated with me on several levels, as they have been at the forefront of our minds and at the heart of the development of our pioneering health economy intelligence platform, Connected Insights.
Firstly, when creating Connected Insights, we asked: “what do our customers want when engaging with the NHS”? We spoke to our clients first to understand their true priorities and desired functionality from a dashboard tool. After all, how can you know what is of value to the customer if you don’t ask them from the outset?
Our clients responded, saying they wanted to engage and build relationships with healthcare professionals. To do this, they required a tool that delivers relevant actionable insights of value to their customers, that helps resolve real challenges, and prompts further conversations.
These were certainly topics covered by the discussion panel at the Digital Pharma Advances Conference, with panelists asking the audience to consider:
- Will the data in question bring value and help resolve challenges?
- Are the data sufficiently flexible to enable detailed analysis to draw relevant insights?
- Does your data satisfy the customer ‘pull’? i.e. Does it answer their questions?
- Is the data compliant? Is it compliant for all countries?
The key takeaway for me was the point raised around focusing on the customer ‘pull’, in other words focusing on what the end customer wants to know. This is what we at Mtech Access have sought to achieve with our Connected Insights platform. The dashboard draws together disparate data sources and is used for illustrating challenges in meeting local expectations, ultimately enabling market access teams to present data and insights that are of direct relevance to the customer’s environment. Market access teams report that the platform is an excellent conversation enabler, yielding partnering discussions with the NHS.
As an example, with the introduction of Primary Care Networks (PCNs), we created a Connected Insights dashboard that utilises primary care data to enable quick and easy benchmarking of respiratory disease prevalence. The visual overview as well as the ability to drill down to individual PCNs and practices to see detail concerning respiratory disease prevalence enables discussion, and enables questions like “how is my area doing vs my comparable peers?”. Our Director of NHS Insights and Interaction, David Thorne, explains further:
“We are approaching a point we have all wished for with the ability to examine granular patient experience across a longitudinal pathway of care, and to link resource use to that. A key aspect is the integration of the unrivalled primary care datasets. This is a massive improvement upon data describing episodic secondary care transactions. But how do we ensure it is information rather than a mass of data? How do we enable use beyond data specialists? And how do we ensure accurate comparative analysis? Our PCN has been offered population health analysis that does not facilitate crucial peer comparisons with the most similar PCNs. Mtech Access’ Connected Insights tool has been developed with all of those issues to the fore.”
David is a former NHS Director of Performance and Informatics and now also a non-executive Director of a PCN.
Click below to view an interactive demo version of this PCN dashboard, populated with example COPD and asthma data.
In this demo, we highlight one example of the way Connected Insights can be used to bring datasets together to help market access teams deliver value to healthcare professionals. Mtech Access have received encouraging feedback from brand and market access teams who have used their own bespoke Connected Insights dashboards in discussions with their customers:
“This is singularly the most effective and interactive tool I have used in 24 years in pharma” – Key Account Manager, Top 20 Pharma Company
Contact Iain Shield (iain.shield@mtechaccess.co.uk) to find out more about the Connected Insights platform and how a dashboard could help you utilise data to communicate unmet need, deliver value, help resolve challenges, and build stronger relationships with healthcare professionals.
