I sat down with Zephyr Health's William King for our Pharma Innovators Series, a monthly article that profiles a leader of one of our partner companies. The abbreviated interview was posted on our blog; below is the full text of our interview.
1. What was your experience at J&J that led you to Zephyr Health?
What became clear to me during my career at Johnson & Johnson was how data, and the connection and extraction of value from that data, would be the next frontier for the healthcare industry.
I was struck by the staggering amount of data the company was purchasing and producing. Most of this data was disjointed, and it took tremendous resources (time, people, and money) to make sense of it, so that we could make better business decisions. With 80% of health data being unstructured, the obstacle was not about getting the data — J&J had tons of it — it was about managing it, creating connections, and extracting valuable insights.
My focus when I started Zephyr Health in 2011 was to find that signal through all the data noise —that is, weakly connected or disconnected data — that would help companies make confident decisions faster across the entire product lifecycle. I wanted to focus on “insights,” hence we created this new category of solutions for the life sciences industry: Insights-as-a-Service.
2. What is the Zephyr Health elevator pitch?
Zephyr Health helps the sales, marketing, and medical affairs teams at life sciences companies –pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, and diagnostics – engage the right physicians, accounts, and institutions using insights from global health data with Zephyr Illuminate™.
It’s not just the physician deciding if a company’s therapy or device will be used. Payors, patients, and integrated delivery networks are all playing an increasing and important role in determining the success of a life sciences company’s product.
Our leading Insights-as-a-Service solution integrates hundreds of disparate data sources to create precise and predictive insights so that, from pre-launch to product maturity, life sciences companies can make confident decisions faster with data-driven targeting and deep customer profiles.
3.What trends do you see among your clients in managing and leveraging information?
The established “go to market” approach that life sciences companies have used for many years is rapidly evolving (or needs to!) with the changes in the healthcare system. One of the most important changes is having more stakeholders involved in therapeutic decisions.
It’s not just the physician deciding if a company’s therapy or device will be used. Payors, patients, and integrated delivery networks are all playing an increasing and important role in determining the success of a life sciences company’s product.
In order for life sciences companies to engage with this expanded group of stakeholders, they need more data and insights regarding these players and the way in which they interact. This demands enhanced use of data-driven insights to instrument the business.
By having equal access to data, the conversation around big data and data insights shifts immediately from volume (the number of records) to value (what you can do with them). Such a move would add stability and relative ease to data storage as well.
In many instances the marketing and sales teams have each pursued increased use of data and technology independently, but these silos, and this disparate view of the customer and the marketplace, must change for companies to be competitive. It’s becoming more and more essential that they have a holistic view of their engagement with a customer (healthcare provider or healthcare organization), and data is the central connecting thread for this.
In fact, that’s one of the greatest benefits we bring to our customers. We use innovative technology to connect a large number of data sources across the entire organization to deliver a comprehensive view of a company’s engagement, activities, and stakeholder behavior, including that of physicians, institutions, and even patients. This allows us to provide actionable insights for all teams –medical affairs, marketing, and sales.
4. Take me to 2020. What's the NEW new thing?
When I think about the future, I think about the true democratization of healthcare data. Data consistency and data access are common challenges facing healthcare systems today; data is siloed and no single company or healthcare system has a complete view of the data held on an individual, a provider, or an institutional level.
I imagine a world in 2020 where healthcare data is managed in a distributed fashion and then shared in a way that provides ease of access, with maximum security. This means a patient could update her healthcare record in real-time to report side effects or share her complete medical history with a new physician or when visiting a new hospital. Physicians and payers will similarly be able to update communication preferences, specialties, or prescribing histories in real-time and share this information with relevant stakeholders.
By having equal access to data, the conversation around big data and data insights shifts immediately from volume (the number of records) to value (what you can do with them). Such a move would add stability and relative ease to data storage as well.
Think of the internet: there is no single point of storage. Websites and files are stored and cached across hundreds, if not thousands, of sites around the world. With the right levels of security, the same approach to storage and ease of access could be taken with healthcare data.
5. How interested are your clients in collecting, managing, and leveraging their digital marketing efforts? Where are the gaps?
They are very interested! In fact, more and more life sciences companies need to think about their customer outreach programs across all channels, digital and analog (i.e., field reps).
Digital marketing and technology advances have taken customer-centricity to an entirely new level and given marketers multiple terabytes of data—some user-generated, some market-generated—with which to customize and personalize these efforts.
Being able to capture prescribing trends, referrals, and relationships between healthcare providers and healthcare institutions is not just for the research and development teams. It’s equally important for those in strategic go-to-market roles and those working directly with healthcare professionals specialized in a disease or treatment area.
Pharma can learn from many other industries, where having real-time data helps you personalize and improve personal and non-personal marketing efforts.
6. What do you find attractive about the DMD product portfolio?
By now you’ve figured out that I’m passionate about data and what it can do to improve our industry! DMD’s Audience Identity Manager℠ (AIM) data can help solve many of the problems we’ve discussed— engaging with the right providers and payers, and ensuring we have the data that tells us what to engage them with, from both a content and a channel perspective.
I get very excited when I think about how AIM, when combined with the hundreds of other diverse data points we are connecting in Zephyr Illuminate, can bring some exquisite insights to life sciences teams.
William King is the founder and Executive Chairman of Zephyr Health, the Insights-as-a-Service leader harnessing the power of global health data to help Life Sciences companies engage the right physicians, accounts and institutions. He is passionate about creating innovative solutions to advance efficiency, strategy and tactical problem solving for healthcare companies. William holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Denver. He currently resides in the Bay Area with his wife and three children.
