SAS helps ImpactRX Provide Real Time Marketing Intelligence to Pharma Companies

SAS Solution Measures the Direct Impact of Promotion on Patient Treatment to Improve Marketing and Sales Strategies, Stay Ahead of Competitors
SAS Global Forum

In the pharmaceutical industry warp-speed access to the latest data about audience is paramount to ensure successful marketing. ImpactRx helps drug manufacturers target promotions more effectively by providing real-time intelligence on doctor’s prescribing habits. SAS, the leader in Business Intelligence, helps ImpactRX link data on how, when and why doctors prescribe various prescription medications to the drug makers’ pharmaceutical sales activity, thus demonstrating the influence of promotions on prescription-writing patterns.

ImpactRx equips the physicians with personal digital assistants (PDAs) that collect information and transmit it to ImpactRx for analysis. ImpactRx uses SAS to monitor each doctor’s compliance with both PDA usage and data input to ensure that conclusions are valid.

“We preserve patient privacy even as we examine what doctors prescribe, how patients respond to diagnoses and so on,” explains David Stephens, director of the Department of Research and Development and Advanced Analytics at ImpactRX. “We also ask doctors about pharmaceutical sales reps – do they present and detail products effectively? Are they knowledgeable? Then we package the data, do high-level analytics with SAS and sell it to pharmaceutical companies.”

For example: A large pharmaceutical company is launching a new drug into a competitive therapeutic area. If they understand what factors most influence the highest prescribers of competitive products, they can create more effective ways to get doctors to prescribe the new drug. ImpactRx’s reports show in detail what most influences high prescribers along with script-writing behaviors. They also track competitors’ launches, enabling the company to gauge the success of messaging and marketing strategy versus their own, and make rapid adjustments to improve marketing and sales strategies.

Ultimately, the ImpactRx model delivers higher-quality information, which translates into better decisions about how to gain market share.

“SAS’ speed and ease of use expedites the flow of data. That’s why ImpactRx chose it over competing vendors,” Stephens says. “SAS lets us automate our activities. And given the range of analytics we perform with SAS, I’m not sure how we’d operate without it.”

Companies like ImpactRx represent an emerging industry of their own, so various players are jostling to prove their value to life sciences companies. “Using SAS,” says Stephens, “ImpactRx stays ahead of our competition by providing drug companies with more accurate, ‘live’ intelligence to stay ahead of theirs.”

In addition to monitoring sales and prescriptions, SAS helps ImpactRx investigate specific promotional methods. So, if a doctor switches a patient’s medicine, ImpactRx can attribute it to side effects, insurance coverage, new competition or cost. Life sciences companies rely on such data to make quick adjustments to marketing strategies and halt the loss of sales.

“Our clients want the data right away; not in a month. If we weren’t using SAS, we might lose business because we couldn’t satisfy their needs.”

Today’s announcement came at SAS Global Forum, the largest annual SAS users group conference, attended by more than 3,000 business and IT users of SAS software and solutions.

About SAS

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