Let’s face it – the healthcare industry has become increasingly difficult to navigate and breeds stiff competition. Faced with a global pandemic, an aging population and increased spending on healthcare, everyone from small startups to tech giants wants a slice of the market. However, each organization entering the healthcare market has unique problems that need solving to be successful.
Enter healthcare commercial intelligence. Healthcare commercial intelligence is a new category of software designed to help organizations address the complexity of product development and sales in the healthcare market. With healthcare commercial intelligence, companies can untangle the messy web of data on delivery systems, physicians, payors, patients, government organizations and more to identify the people, opportunities and organizations that are the best fit for products. Simply put, it’s all about giving today’s companies an edge with a 365-degree view of the healthcare industry… so they can optimize everything from product development, to go to market planning, to sales strategy.
Here’s why healthcare commercial intelligence is essential for anyone working in the healthcare ecosystem:
1. Find Growth Opportunities
All companies want to become a top player in their space. To grow, companies need answers to burning questions that can be difficult to find given the complexity of the healthcare market.
With healthcare commercial intelligence, companies can unlock answers to challenging sales questions such as:
– How do I increase leads for next quarter?
– How can I size the market for the products we sell to hospitals?
– Who are the key decision-makers at our target account?
Healthcare commercial intelligence gives companies the tools to be autonomous, nimble and knowledgeable by providing the insights needed to successfully grow and compete in the healthcare ecosystem.
For example, a leading electronic health record (EHR) company leveraged healthcare commercial intelligence to alter its go-to-market strategy. By leveraging a broad swath of physician, hospital and technology data, the company gained insights on overall EHR vendor market share across the country and in specific territories, identified what physicians were referring patients to their hospital clients, and discovered new untapped opportunities for expansion.
The company’s sales teams then used data-driven insights to gather the market context required to have informed conversations with current or potential clients on readmissions and patient satisfaction metrics. With healthcare commercial intelligence, the company’s sales team were more efficient and effective, resulting in more meaningful conversation with executives every single time.
2. Gain a Necessary Competitive Edge
Many companies who want to sell into the healthcare market lack the insights needed to gain a competitive edge due to the inability to access a comprehensive picture of the overall market.
By bringing together high-quality data from many sources and then analyzing the relationships between providers, patients and delivery organizations, a company can start to get a clearer picture of the healthcare market – and gain a leg up on the competition.
To understand the whole healthcare ecosystem, you need data from physicians, hospitals, patients, payers, clinics, government organizations and more. One data stream isn’t enough to unlock valuable insights on the healthcare market.
With access to data that covers the entire healthcare ecosystem, companies gain the market context needed to understand prospects’ pain points. Plus, it provides insider knowledge on prospective customers that other companies may not have access to because they either:
– Don’t understand how to analyze the data to best sell to the customer
– Aren’t using data in their sales strategy at all
– Aren’t making business decisions based on evolving or changing data
With the right healthcare data, companies gain an edge — an information advantage — to get a leg up on their competitors.
3. Identify Emerging Healthcare Trends
Predicting the future is hard. But healthcare commercial intelligence can make it easier to spot trends before they emerge.
With healthcare commercial intelligence, companies can see what has previously worked well, what’s currently trending and what trends have fallen behind.
For example, let’s get into an area that has seen a boom over the past year: telehealth.
Before the pandemic, telehealth was nowhere near as popularity it has now. Most providers leveraging telehealth in their practice were early adopters.
Fast forward to late 2020 and virtually everything is done remotely. Telemedicine use grew more than 6,000 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic and experts estimate that the pandemic drove 10 years’ worth of telemedicine innovations in roughly 12 months.
Looking at telemedicine utilization volume by all specialties and verticals shines an important light on where telehealth companies and related vendors, like remote patient monitoring and care coordination companies, should be focusing their efforts to sell into the market.
By tracking data points and claims over time, companies can identify new and emerging trends to make informed decisions on where the landscape is headed from the story the data is telling.
Looking Ahead
At the end of the day, healthcare commercial intelligence helps companies navigate the healthcare ecosystem to create new paths to commercial success. This is critical in today’s world where the industry is rapidly changing day by day as we continue to monitor COVID-19 cases, vaccine development, new therapeutics and shifting regulations. With healthcare commercial intelligence, no matter how the healthcare landscape changes over the coming years, companies know they have the expertise needed to identify where to go next.
About Jason Krantz
As CEO and Founder of Definitive Healthcare, Jason drives a client-centric approach to business strategy and manages the day-to-day operations of the organization. He has built several research-based businesses focused on providing the highest quality and most timely data in information-intensive industries. Before founding Definitive Healthcare in 2011, Jason started Infinata. The company, founded in 1999, provided online databases of information for the pharmaceutical industry under the brand BioPharm Insight.
