Is Bad Data Costing You Your Edge? Incomplete, Inconsistent, and Inaccurate Data is Holding You Back.

Kelly Sborlini, Vertical Market Lead - Life
Sciences, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Provider information fuels the marketing and sales efforts of life sciences organizations. It helps you focus your outreach efforts and uncover additional sources of revenue.Knowing which providers to approach and where to find them are critical pieces of information. The wrong records result in costly mistakes and missed opportunities. So it makes sense that the data on which you rely must be of excellent quality. The problem is gathering, managing and continually updating provider data is easier said than done.

Data quality erodes quickly

The journey to a data-driven marketing strategy starts with quality data. But provider information, especially demographic details like names and addresses, is continually changing. Other data attributes, such as affiliations, status and sanctions, also change frequently. As you well know, what’s true today may not be true next year, next month or even next week!Not only does your organization’s provider information degrade over time, it may also have gaps. Inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete data causes operating inefficiencies the true cost of which you may never even know.

A deluge of data

For life sciences organizations looking to data to drive business development, the good news is the quantity of data is far greater than ever before and the rate at which it’s being produced is much faster. The challenge is how to manage it all.Big data is voluminous and complex in terms of its breadth of sources and diverse, often unstructured, formats. Gathering, processing and integrating new data with existing information is no easy feat. The old data must first be standardized and cleansed using sophisticated data enhancement algorithms. The new information can then fill gaps and augment existing provider profiles with additional data points. Finally, you must have the tools and processes in place to continually monitor, cleanse and update provider data to ensure that high quality is maintained.

Market intelligence may be elusive

Once data is clean, complete and ready for use, its real value lies in your ability to analyze it. But transforming raw data into refined market intelligence and extracting actionable insights is a task that exceeds the expertise of many life sciences organizations. In fact, most companies don’t come close to leveraging the full potential of data and mining the informational gems it holds.

How a data partner can help

Life sciences organizations are understandably focused on their core business. Most are not equipped to keep up with the volume and complexity of available data. They don’t have the resources to continually monitor all of the correct industry sources or accurately match records across those sources. And they lack the technology and expertise to fully analyze the data once they’ve gathered it.A third-party information management company is often the best solution. The right partner has advanced technological and data science capabilities to collect, manage and analyze data from disparate sources. Most importantly, look for a partner that has the ability to help harness the data in actionable ways to improve targeting and ultimately generate sales.If your life sciences organization is seeking to build a competitive advantage, quality data and the means to discover the precious secrets it holds is an essential ingredient to success; choose your data technology partner wisely.