In the last five years, six companies have joined together to create what IntegriChain is today: pharma’s only comprehensive data, consulting, and business process platform for Market Access. In 2016, we had a vision to create a truly integrated platform and service organization.  We were, and remain, convinced that sticky access challenges like high script abandonment rates and the ballooning gross-to-net bubble require new approaches, from strategy to systems and operational execution.  At the heart of our vision, we’re working to more closely integrate the commercial, operational, and financial dimensions of access.  

Since 2016, we’ve taken great strides to integrate the applications, analytics, and datastores of the ICyte Platform, and that work continues.  We are simultaneously focused on unifying our operational delivery and support.  We know that our customers will only see the full benefit of the ICyte Platform if we’re able to support use cases that require data and know-how from multiple parts of our organization.  We also recognize that our customers expect operational synergy in their day-to-day interactions with our teams.  

In my new role as President and Chief Operating Officer, I’m charged with fully extending our vision for unification to the customer-critical operations of IntegriChain.  While my role may be new, our team was already well underway in evaluating how best to integrate IntegriChain’s teams and processes for data management, customer support, and customer value realization.  Let me share a brief summary of where our team is focused in 2022 across all three of those areas.

 

Data Management Advances

Nearly every part of our work with our customers involves data.  As an aggregator, we steward and integrate channel and patient service data.  As a rebate adjudicator, we leverage payer- and channel-reported data to manage a wide range of contracts.  We leverage all of those data sets and quite a bit more from 3PLs and/or ERPs to calculate government pricing, forecast GTN liabilities, and manage GTN accruals.  Both our strategic consulting and operational consulting teams use data from ICyte and third-party data providers to support customer pricing, contracting, channel, and patient service decisions.  

First, for nearly all data driven business processes and applications, source data issues are the biggest source of toil and delays.  That is certainly true in our industry, and at IntegriChain specifically.  We continue our quest at the highest level to create data management processes at IntegriChain that are efficient for our customers and proactive in identifying issues with source data availability, quality, and usability.  Our service commitment has long been that we should be the one to inform you when there is a problem with the data that we depend on to do what we do.  Problems happen – that’s inevitable when we’re dependent on such a complex landscape of data providers.  But it’s our job to detect those problems and communicate them effectively so that our teams and your teams know what work can reliably proceed.  Look for updates from us throughout the year on how we’re adding tooling, investing in new communication processes, and speeding up how the most common issue types are detected, investigated, resolved, and communicated.

Second, we believe that a customer should never send us the same data set from the same source system in multiple ways.  The various Market Access functions that we support can often require shared data inputs.  Processes like government price reporting and gross-to-net accrual management all depend on gross sales data.  So do our channel data aggregation capabilities.  When a manufacturer chooses us as their partner for all three of those areas, it should never be the case that the customer has three different interfaces from their 3PL or ERP to our ICyte Platform.  Consolidating data interfaces is one of the key pillars of ICyte’s value as a unified platform.  That’s why we’re standardizing key aspects of how we implement data interfaces into ICyte: one data source, one data interface, one landing spot.  

Third, master data unification is essential to ensuring that data can be used across ICyte’s applications, analytics, and related consulting services.  Full unification of ICyte’s master data is a complex technical undertaking that will require several quarters to fully execute.  But there are several areas we’ve already identified and prioritized in our product roadmap, such as payer and plan information, point of care, and class of trade.  To speed up that process, we’re taking an innovation pod approach, bringing together domain and technical experts from disparate parts of our business that depend on the same master data elements.  For example, we’ve brought together our Channel master data experts with our Government Pricing domain experts to evaluate what changes need to happen for the two service lines to share a common care class of trade for each point of care. Watch for more updates on this in the coming weeks.

In my next blog post, I’ll cover the improvements in Customer Support across multiple IntegriChain teams along with our advancement in customer value creation – all core to our mission to unify IntegriChain’s customer-critical operations.

 

As always, I am dedicated to serving the Market Access needs of our customers. Over the coming months, my leadership team and I will be hitting the road to meet with customers of all shapes and sizes. We want to share our vision and our progress for unifying service delivery, but more importantly, we’d like to listen and learn from you: what are the challenges you face today and tomorrow, how can we help you solve those challenges, and how can we better serve you as a customer? If you’re interested in talking with us, let your Account Director know.