Making the Most of Customer Master Data

Oct 02, 2023 | Avinash Shikaripur

Customer master data is a strategic asset for biopharma field teams, but its value extends well beyond sales use cases. Biopharmas big and small are using it across marketing, compliance, market access, and medical affairs teams—and building a more robust 360-degree view of the customer as a result.

“Our strategy is to take information and turn that into quality data sets that can be used to provide insights to our leaders,” says Kathi Scherzberg, director of data management and reporting at Organon. “We’ve built a self-service environment where users from different teams can access the same data in one tool, helping ensure we have a single version of the truth.”

Here are two ways to make the most of your master data strategy and the tech stack supporting it.

Stay on top of hierarchies and affiliations data

As health systems continue to grow and consolidate, having up-to-date hierarchies and affiliations data is another crucial area to consider. With many organizations providing a wide range of care, it can be challenging to pinpoint the providers in therapeutic areas that are relevant to the products you sell. That’s where the option to flatten hierarchies can help.

Using OpenData and a master data management (MDM) solution like Veeva Network MDM, field teams can easily identify relevant HCPs and proactively monitor their movement in and out of health systems. This is also a capability that can greatly benefit market access teams.

“Working closely with the Veeva OpenData team, we were able to create a flattened hierarchy table with the ability to implement our own business rules that mirrored exactly what the market access team wanted,” says Walid Fayyoumi, former head of data strategy and management at a leading biopharma.

Hierarchy Explorer is one particular tool that market access team finds helpful, as it allows them to explore top-level HCOs from a top-down approach. This Network MDM widget displays all levels of the HCO, making it easy for them to visualize the hierarchy and search through it to find new targets.

Ensure strategy alignment across stakeholders

Whether you’re implementing a new master data strategy or making incremental changes to an existing one, all stakeholders who rely on the data need to be aligned around business priorities, use cases, and rollout plans. It’s also important not to forget about the basics—from understanding data coverage and data attributes to the data change request process and vendor support.

One way to do this is through an MDM governance council that brings together all leaders across commercial, market access, medical affairs, IT, finance, and legal. “We discuss how MDM is changing any tools, policies, or standards that need to be implemented and ensure everybody has a say in the decisions being made,” explains Fayyoumi.

This alignment is especially important when mastering data beyond a single domain, whether that’s customer, product, employee, or more.

To learn more about the importance of connected data, read this story on how it can be used to develop a unified HCP target list for launch.