The HCP/HCO landscape is constantly evolving. Healthcare networks are merging and acquiring specialty group practices. Hospitals are establishing satellite clinics and urgent care centers, and physicians are changing their affiliations and hospital privileges. From large structural changes to contact details, nothing about your customers is static.

It’s no wonder that many pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies feel two steps behind with their territory coverage models. When field alignments are performed once – or at most twice – a year, commercial organizations cannot keep pace with the many changes in the marketplace. Compounding the frustration is the fact that extensive information about prescribers is available, from new prescriptions (NRx) and Drug Distribution Data (DDD) to communication preferences. What is preventing companies from using all this data to regularly refine deployments of their valuable field resources?

Sales operations would perform more realignments if the legacy systems were less cumbersome. Many applications are difficult to use and struggle to handle the complexities of allocating sales representatives across various medication brands and geographies to interact with multiple stakeholders in HCOs.

IQVIA has a new approach to aligning field resources in a dynamic customer environment, OCE Optimizer. This cloud-based solution empowers commercial organizations to create and adjust territory alignments as often as needed to ensure effective customer coverage with balanced workloads and adequate resources to address market opportunities.

This ground-breaking solution delivers functionality for life sciences companies to:

• Draw from current customer profiles. Information on your customers that reflects the latest reference, sales, interaction, and other available data.
• Visualize alignments. See the geographical impact of alignments using sophisticated mapping.
• Build alignments intuitively. Workflow-based rules lead you through the setup, analysis, and decision steps, simplifying the whole process.
• Conduct what-if analyses. Evaluate and compare different alignment scenarios to make informed tradeoffs about HCP/HCO coverage.
• Identify the root-cause of changes. When a field professional questions a change to an account alignment, explain the rationale behind it.
• Accept suggestions from the field. Reps, who are closest to the situation on the ground, share insights on proposed alignments.
• Sharpen alignments with AI. Ada artificial intelligence (AI) both makes the complex of today’s alignments more manageable and proactively spots areas of risk, imbalance, and upside.

There are countless practical applications of these responsive field alignment capabilities. When machine learning algorithms identify one or two physicians in a large cardiology practice whose prescriptions lag, sales operations can guide more focus on those HCPs within an otherwise strong customer. When an academic medical center announces a major investment in nephrology or hematology, sales operations nimbly allocates sales and medical individuals with specialty experience to start covering that institution.

The recent COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated that pharmaceutical companies face acute situations that demand new thinking about customer-facing resources. A versatile, easy-to-use alignment tool is essential when redeploying hundreds or potentially thousands of reps to a virtual coverage model in which geography and driving distance are suddenly much less important factors.

OCE Optimizer delivers technology for companies to take full advantage of their commercial resources and channels by planning individualized and orchestrated customer interactions. Learn more about OCE Optimizer HERE.