The launch of a product is a major achievement in itself, a cause for celebration—and many times, relief. For one diagnostics manufacturer, this feat was rivaled only by another big win a decade later: newly acquired business intelligence acumen that would light the path to quantify market potential.

ZS’s client has a mission to identify and screen more patients for early detection and help save lives. As the project got underway, the client confronted burning questions: What’s the size of the total market and penetration for my product? How’s the landscape evolving, and does my product address changing needs? What do target customers look like? What are their current preferences within the category that could help inform how to capitalize each opportunity most effectively?

ZS’s strategic experts and decision science team acquired the data needed to construct, from the ground up, a robust, comprehensive view of customers, like health systems. At the same time, ZS outfitted its client with the end-to-end analytics capability to discover opportunities for growth in the market.

The chief obstacle was a lack of reliable and complete information. The client’s data didn’t cover the vast majority (70%) of the diagnostics market, rendering a distorted view of market size and other vital metrics. 

“Owing to the success of using third-party, physician-level data sets to build market share last year, the leadership team has decided to invest more and build patient-level analytics capabilities as our next step,” said the client’s project lead.

Though the client’s appetite to invest in much-needed data was evident, there was no existing technological blueprint to map newly acquired third-party data to the client’s data lake and all the raw, unstructured data it contained.

This dilemma has been compounded by evolving in-house analytics capabilities that have made it difficult to extract information on which business decisions could be based. Such gaps not only clouded visibility to customer segments but also made coordination across the channels (including field force, marketing, payers, health systems) inefficient. 

ZS looked into new sources of data and mapped that intelligence to the client’s own data to produce a comprehensive picture of health systems and payer pull-through opportunities. This comprehensive, multidimensional view equipped the client—for the first time—to understand the specific needs of provider organizations and enable an effective payer pull-through program.

On a macro level, ZS defined the overall diagnostic market for its client, bringing newfound clarity to guide strategic priorities. On a more granular level, ZS helped refine an algorithm that made it possible to identify and track alternative diagnostics in a category, such as those procedures prescribed as a routine wellness screening versus ongoing “surveillance” to monitor a known health condition. This deeper detail yielded insights into current trends and future opportunities for growth.

Having identified high-value clinicians at the client’s customers, ZS created a comprehensive pull-through program to inform, educate and provide ongoing support to those physicians writing orders for competitor products. ZS defined appropriate key performance indicators and developed custom dashboards the client used to measure and monitor the effectiveness of field force efforts across organized customer groups, like health systems and payers.

At a macro level, the organization was able to better understand market potential and gauge market penetration better at a more local customer level. This exercise equipped them to develop much more targeted and tailored strategies and tactics, leading to a 10% sales lift among top customers and a 1.4x market share gain in one year.

Getting ahead of the disease is crucial no matter where people are in their journey. ZS’s client invested in identifying the patients in the United States who aren’t regularly screening and built a robust patient-level intelligence system to develop an understanding of the end-to-end patient journey. This intelligence system opens an array of opportunities to understand the 360-degree view of the patient journey, enable business use cases for market sizing, define growth and targeted marketing strategies, create better patient compliance and strive toward advanced analytics for physician and patient data domains.