Medidata shifts its Commercial Data Solutions unit
Two years after its purchase by Medidata, the Shyft Analytics unit will operate as the Commercial Data Solutions (CDS) team at Acorn AI. Outsourcing-Pharma (OSP) recently spoke with Bruno Lempernesse (BL)—senior vice president of Commercial Data Solutions and real-world evidence for Acorn AI by Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company—about CDS what the division’s capabilities might mean for clinical trial professionals.
OSP: Please tell us about Shyft Analytics.
BL: Shyft Analytics, a cloud-based data analytics provider for life sciences companies, was founded in 2004. Its Data Analytics Platform, designed for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, transforms massive amounts of complex health data into high quality clinical and commercial insights.
The Shyft platform integrates healthcare data from commercial distribution networks, data vendors, and multiple third-party systems into its cloud platform. It then translates the data into customized insights and analytics to clinical and commercial clients.
In 2016, Medidata and Shyft first formed a commercial partnership to increase access to healthcare data in clinical trials by providing insights to life sciences companies to help identify specific patient populations for studies across therapeutic areas, supporting customer efforts to design more effective protocols, improving study participant recruitment, and uncovering the best treatment paths in clinical practice for patients.
Shyft was acquired by Medidata in 2018, and since that time Shyft has contributed to Medidata’s vision of bridging the gap from clinical to real-world data (RWD) and commercialization. We are applying these capabilities to expand Medidata’s existing suite of products beyond clinical trials into commercial launch, data management and insight generation.
It was recently announced that Shyft is now part of Acorn AI, by Medidata, which is changing the commercialization paradigm, connecting R&D activities and commercialization in new ways. The platform provides industry leading capabilities to combine clinical and real-world insights, enabling customers to accelerate their therapies as scientific breakthroughs continue to create more precise drugs that target specific patient characteristics.
OSP: What does this shift (no pun intended) to the Acorn AI by Medidata brand signify to customers and potential clients?
BL: We established the CDS team to focus on connecting R&D, commercialization technologies, and services. As part of Acorn AI, by Medidata, CDS includes all of the solutions and support developed by Shyft Analytics.
Our new organization signifies Medidata’s commitment to delivering leading applications, services, technology solutions, and proven data science capabilities. The combined platform and brand unification is powered by the largest global pool of research and real-world data (RWD) sources; it gives customers and potential clients the ability to better analyze clinical, real-world and commercial data to achieve their goals—all under one company umbrella.
OSP: Could you please provide a little more detail about what CDS will be offering its clients—specifically, what services and capabilities make it stand out from the competition?
BL: The CDS team at Acorn AI, by Medidata has the technology and expertise to support life science companies throughout the entire commercial drug lifecycle. CDS has more than 15 years of experience in commercial data management, and through the investment we make in STRATA and LUMEN, our end-to-end data management platform and insights solution, and QUANTUM, our Real-World Evidence (RWE) platform, CDS ensures customers are operating with the latest life sciences data management and insights technology; this includes Commercial Data Warehousing, Master Data Management, Report Development, Commercial Launch Roadmap, Data Procurement, and RWD analysis.
CDS also provides solutions to optimize field sales call planning and outreach by moving beyond traditional healthcare provider (HCP) segmentation and applying advanced analytics for greater accuracy. CDS uses prescription, distribution, and claims data to improve targeting, Market Access and reimbursement, treatment adherence, and targeted HCP messaging.
All this is built on CDS’s robust, flexible, and scalable commercial data model, which ingests data from over 300 different sources, integrating, aggregating, and normalizing any kind of life sciences data into a flexible, scalable data warehouse that can drive performance and insights across the enterprise. This data model supports a “bring your own tool” framework, enabling users to create customer reports through a client-preferred business intelligence tool.
With faster, more accurate insights, CDS allows customers to find more patients, remove barriers to treatment, and maximize adherence.
Acorn AI’s CDS team combines the high-quality data sources with Medidata’s proprietary suite of tools and processes to make better sense of RWD. Using diagnosis codes, treatment analogues and demographic information through QUANTUM, data scientists and researchers can find pockets of untreated or undiagnosed patients by conducting a complex line of therapy analyses.
Acorn AI’s network of partnerships facilitates data acquisition as an independent party, which matches customers’ key questions to the most relevant data.
