At Avalere Health, we are constantly looking to progress our organization’s services, processes, and platforms to improve our interdisciplinary offering for clients.

In 2023, we are continuing to expand our offering to meet our clients’ evolving needs in fast-paced and shifting market landscapes. Here, Jon Koch, CEO, outlines the initiatives we look forward to advancing in support of clients innovating in healthcare, from leveraging digital technology to drive valuable connections with patients and healthcare professionals to enhancing our real-world evidence offering and leveraging our proprietary applications to uncover true product value.

What innovative solutions is Avalere Health developing to connect our clients with clinicians across the globe?

Jon Koch: We’re continuing to expand our partnerships with leading networks of global clinicians in dermatology, hepatology, and oncology, to deliver actionable insights that meet the needs of our clients in fast-moving, complex, and data-rich areas. By partnering with the leading clinical experts in each disease area, we provide our clients unbiased insights and expert analysis, answering critical questions for clinicians and patients to ensure products and portfolios are compelling to stakeholders and truly meet their unmet needs. An example of this is FIDE, an independent network of leading dermatologists, which has just expanded to add new faculty members with unrivaled access to impartial clinical insights in chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU).

The move follows the success of FIDE’s programs in psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, alopecia areata, vitiligo, and hidradenitis suppurativa. FIDE’s new CSU subscription will deliver regular updates on the immediate and longer-term implications of recent innovations and new data, allowing biopharmaceutical companies to align their understanding of these developments with the impartial views of leading practicing physicians in real-time.

Alongside expert partnerships, our consultants have developed an artificial intelligence and machine learning tool to quickly find and prioritize thought leaders, driving efficiency and speed to help clients rapidly identify and connect to thought leaders in categories and topics of interest. The application is particularly pertinent for clients entering categories for the first time, on a steep learning curve with a new asset, or for those working in less-conventional therapeutic domains with multiple stakeholders involved.

What tools and platforms are we developing to specifically support leaner biotechs?

Jon Koch: Across the biopharmaceutical industry, there is a significant appetite for tools, data, and technology to uncover product value and drive efficient and effective launches. We have developed a suite of cloud-based technology and tools, which enhance our expertise in supporting biopharmaceutical clients. For example, our consultants employ proprietary tools for market modeling, forecasting, and sum-of-parts enterprise valuation to drive decision-making for financing, new business unit formation, buy-side and sell-side licensing and M&A, alongside informing go/no-go decisions for clinical-stage projects.

We’re also honing our offering for leaner companies who do not have the necessary launch resources and/or functions by developing a cloud-based tool to provide a single view of comprehensive launch activities. The tool drives best practices, facilitating fast decisions and identifying potential concerns before they become issues, along with building consensus cross-functionally and socializing tactical plans.

In addition, we are seconding select consultants to directly join biotech teams, ensuring they have on-demand access to deep expertise and a broad array of services to drive efficient and successful launches.

How are we leveraging digital innovation to uncover product and portfolio value for our clients?

Jon Koch: With the rapidly evolving health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) and market access landscape, we are now on the cusp of significant acceleration in the use of digital applications to explore value options, gain strategic advantage, and provide innovative HEOR and market access solutions. It’s inevitable that digital applications will be increasingly used within HEOR and market access. To this end, we’re enhancing our technology to unite biopharmaceutical teams with structured and robust approaches.

Our applications span the product life cycle, from preclinical to reassessment, and range from simplifying advanced HEOR modeling to driving a systematic and robust assessment of market access risks and opportunities, enabling clients to adapt to evolving payer expectations and delivering high-quality multiple health technology assessments and other payer submissions. By evaluating how digital technology can better enable processes and prioritize activities, clients can fully unlock and optimize product value and elevate competitiveness.

What digital services are we enhancing to drive greater connections between patients and healthcare professionals?

Jon Koch: The long-held aspiration of the right customer, the right message, and the right channel at the right time is no longer just a topic for conference presentations and panel discussions. The tools, partners, technology, data, and capabilities now exist to engage the right audiences in the right ways.

Marketers now face two great challenges in leveraging these tools to drive connections with patients, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders: First, realizing the power and potential these tools bring to bear and second, incorporating these tools into business strategy—rather than relying on the tools to drive strategy.

As an integrated marketing agency of record, we are investing in enhancing our ability to connect and wield these tools and technologies in a manner that “pulls it all together”” in service of a client’s specific brands and needs. This includes using technology to help clients find, quantify, and value customers. For example, we are leveraging our proprietary omnichannel measurement offering to consolidate, synthesize, and analyze how our efforts are reaching, engaging, and motivating customers to change their beliefs and behaviors. We are applying those learnings to further optimize targeted messaging and overall digital experiences.

We’re also increasingly leveraging this technology and other innovative tools to rapidly identify the healthcare professionals associated with the expert providers, caregivers, and supporters connected to the likely candidates for a particular product through our go-to-market launch toolkit, so they can execute with the greatest confidence and that no patient or consumer will be left behind and that they will realize the business outcome they expect.

How are we supporting our clients with real-world evidence and real-world data?

Jon Koch: In complex therapy areas, such as oncology and rare diseases where innovative treatments are developed using surrogate endpoints, healthcare professionals, payers, regulators, and policymakers are looking for more robust data to make decisions. As a result, we are capitalizing on our deep expertise in medical communications and value, evidence, and access to generate robust integrated evidence for our clients. The evidence generated for regulatory approval alone is often insufficient for demonstrating the benefit of a new therapy. Our integrated approach involves working cross-functionally with biopharmaceutical teams to uncover evidence gaps, better shaping registration trials to ensure the needs of as many stakeholders as possible are met.

Our clients can now leverage expansive real-world data through the addition of consulting firm Avalere to our group, Avalere Health in June 2022. This includes the MORE2 Registry, comprising data on more than one million physicians, more than 622,000 clinical facilities, 369 million unique patients, and more than 76 billion medical events, along with a 100% sample of Medicare Fee-for-Service claims data. These data provide invaluable insights for our clients, ensuring they can better analyze disease progression, understand patient populations and their behaviors, compare metrics, and drive better health interventions.

There are endless opportunities to leverage these data along with our cross-functional expertise in policy; value, evidence, and access; medical communications; strategic consulting; and scientific marketing to provide innovative strategies and solutions for our clients that meet the evolving needs of their stakeholders.

*A version of this content originally appeared in the Med Ad News, 2022, Healthcare Agency Roundtable.