Diagnostics manufacturer maps market potential with data intelligence
Impact by the numbers
The launch of a product is a major achievement in itself, a cause for celebration. For one diagnostics manufacturer, this feat was rivaled by another big win: Newly acquired business intelligence acumen that would light the path to quantify market potential.
ZS’s client has a mission to identify and screen more patients for early detection and help save lives. As the project got underway, the diagnostics manufacturer confronted burning questions: What’s the size of the total market and penetration for my product? How’s the landscape evolving, and does my product address changing needs? What do target customers look like? What are their current preferences within the category that could help inform how to capitalize each opportunity most effectively?
ZS’s strategic experts and decision science team acquired the data needed to construct, from the ground up, a robust, comprehensive view of customers, like health systems. At the same time, ZS outfitted the diagnostics manufacturer with the end-to-end analytics capability to discover opportunities for growth in the market.
The challenge
The chief obstacle was a lack of reliable and complete information. The diagnostics manufacturer’s data didn’t cover the vast majority (70%) of the diagnostics market, rendering a distorted view of market size and other vital metrics.
“Owing to the success of using third-party, physician-level data sets to build market share last year, the leadership team has decided to invest more and build patient-level analytics capabilities as our next step,” said the client’s project lead.
Though the diagnostics manufacturer’s appetite to invest in much-needed data was evident, there was no existing technological blueprint to map newly acquired third-party data to the client’s data lake and all the raw, unstructured data it contained.
This dilemma has been compounded by evolving in-house analytics capabilities that have made it difficult to extract information that the company could base its business decisions on. Such gaps not only clouded visibility to customer segments but also made coordination across the channels (including field force, marketing, payers and health systems) inefficient.
The solution
ZS looked into new sources of data and mapped that intelligence to the diagnostics manufacturer’s own data to produce a comprehensive picture of health systems and payer pull-through opportunities. This comprehensive, multidimensional view equipped the client—for the first time—to understand the specific needs of provider organizations and support an effective payer pull-through program.
On a macro level, ZS defined the overall diagnostic market for the diagnostics manufacturer, bringing newfound clarity to guide strategic priorities. On a more granular level, ZS helped refine an algorithm that made it possible to identify and track alternative diagnostics in a category, such as those procedures prescribed as a routine wellness screening versus ongoing “surveillance” to monitor a known health condition. This deeper detail yielded insights into current trends and future opportunities for growth.
Having identified high-value clinicians at the client’s customers, ZS created a comprehensive pull-through program to inform, educate and provide ongoing support to those physicians writing orders for competitor products. ZS defined appropriate key performance indicators and developed custom dashboards the diagnostics manufacturer used to measure and monitor the effectiveness of field force efforts across organized customer groups, like health systems and payers.
The impact
At a macro level, the organization was able to better understand market potential and gauge market penetration better at a more local customer level. This exercise equipped them to develop much more targeted and tailored strategies and tactics, leading to a 10% sales lift among top customers and a 1.4x market share gain in one year.