Mu Sigma Targets Pharma Cos with Novel Algorithm Solution to Highlight Trends in Prescription Pattern

Bangalore, India, November 08, 2013 --(PR.com)-- Mu Sigma, a company providing decision sciences and analytics, has developed an algorithm to highlight trends in prescription patterns. The novel solution uses statistical control limits to ascertain the physicians at risk. It is a real-time actionable alert on physician performance, which helps pharmaceutical companies’ sales force take proactive measures to garner the orders.

In its roll out to the pharmaceutical company of a leading brand, it was found that the sales representatives with access to the solution had 40 percent fewer physicians with declining sales and nine per cent higher target achievement. The algorithm based solution also helped to proactively identify physicians who were at risk of switching to a competitor drug.

According to Mu Sigma, pharmaceutical manufacturers spend billions of dollars on their sales force who call on physicians to influence prescription behaviour. The sales teams however lack insights into leading behavior of these physicians, which may be indicative of potential decline in prescription of their products.

Sharing a case study of a pharma major, which Mu Sigma could not divulge the name, indicated that so long its client maintained dashboards to capture prescription trends for each brand at a physician level. These were used by the sales leadership to track competitive market share and sales against internal plan for each product in every territory on a weekly and monthly basis. It would trigger inquisitive questions from the sales managers to analyze cause for decline in prescription patterns at a physician and territory level.

Assessing the situation, Mu Sigma realized that the analysis from trends observed in the dashboard was post-facto and did not provide the sales and marketing team with enough time and details to influence and retain physicians who were at risk.

During the process, Mu Sigma discussed with the pharma company to explore market factors such as change in managed care access, disruptions in the form of a new sales representative calling on a certain physician and leading indicators of prescription patterns to proactively identify physicians who needed to be targeted for retention. It listed all potential leading indicators of decline in physician prescription patterns. The identification of physicians at risk was enabled by developing an algorithm to highlight trends in prescription patterns.

It went on to enable an intelligent system to proactively identify physicians at risk arrested decline in sales by more than 40 per cent. With this the pharma company sales team could aim at physicians whose activity could potentially decline. Further, the solution helps to reduce instances of false alerts by factoring in relevant physician profile attributes and business or market events that could explain the trends, the case study highlighted.

“We work with over 100 Fortune 500 clients across 10 industry verticals, pharma being one of them. With our interdisciplinary approach of business, applied math, and technology, coupled with cross-industry best-practices learning, we helped one of the global pharmaceutical manufacturers and healthcare products companies identify and target physicians who were at risk of switching to a competing drug and prevent reduction in corresponding prescriptions,” said Deepinder Singh Dhingra, head of Products & Strategy, Mu Sigma.