For life sciences and healthcare organizations everywhere, data management is an ongoing challenge — and one that only ever seems to get more complicated. In the Latin America (LATAM) region, these organizations face all the usual challenges seen across the industry, as well as some that are more unique to the region. But the end goals (improved accuracy and efficiency of data, faster time to meaningful insights) are well within reach for anyone ready to transform their data management practices.

Among the most prevalent challenges we see in Latin America is the need to integrate multiple, disparate data sets. In contrast with organizations in the U.S., Europe and other large markets, LATAM-based enterprises typically find that data is not only siloed (across different areas of the company, as well as across entirely different organizations), but the quality and makeup of data in each of those silos is inconsistent. On top of that, any data that exists today may well change tomorrow. This is particularly true of government data, though it often happens within non-governmental sources as well. Every time the ruling party changes, there’s a very real chance that political changes will trickle all the way down to the healthcare entities that gather and track data — which means from one year to the next, everything from the data itself to the way it is formatted or classified is subject to change.

A region of diverse local needs

Of course, Latin America is not one homogenous area. In those countries most experienced in collecting and managing healthcare data, consolidation is often the biggest challenge. Meanwhile, in other nations, simply finding relevant data is the challenge. Though inevitably, once data is located, it then becomes a greater challenge to integrate that data into the larger ecosystem aligned with other existing data sets.

In such a geographically and economically diverse region, the needs of local stakeholders must be considered at every step. The healthcare experts in each region need to feel assured that the data for which they’re responsible will be put to use for local benefit, and not simply dispatched to some faraway central office.

Underscoring all these challenges is the fact that data management requires infrastructure. Staffing, obviously, is one big need that is often difficult to meet. But centralizing and managing data requires storge space, processing power and software tools as well.

Good data management extracts value and insights

The whole point of all this data, of course, is to contribute to better insights and faster decision making. But those insights do not come automatically. Breaking down silos and consolidating data to deliver meaningful, actionable information first requires understanding the business rules behind that data. And with the widely disparate types and sources of data across LATAM, expert use of business rules is essential to create an overall uniform and consolidated set of digestible information.

Access to clean, uniform data doesn’t just enable better insights — it does so across a wider range of channels. With good data management in place, business operations, R&D, sales, marketing, and every other division can all use the same information as they collectively work to achieve their shared goals.

Better consolidation and usage of data yields better insights, which means you can set your organization up for success, be competitive within your market, and stay ahead of the competition.

Key elements of data management

A good information management strategy must go beyond locating disparate silos of data and centralizing them for easier access. The fundamental goal is being able to extract meaningful business insights from that data. Achieving this requires:

• The ability to ingest disparate data, then to normalize it, standardize it, and deliver it (and do so using automated processes to a high degree)
• The capability to centralize this cleaned data for easy access by all business functions
• The ability to ensure data accuracy, and to ensure accurate usage (i.e., all teams are tracking metrics with the same master data)
• Tools to enable individual teams to work directly with the data in order to quickly glean insights without having to wait for traditional data gatekeepers
• Overall interoperability and flexibility in integrating, organizing, and governing data from all sources (internal, governmental, HCP reference data, etc.)

An investment that makes good sense

Data consolidation and centralization can deliver ROI now and can have an even bigger impact in future. The immediate returns come from enabling faster, more meaningful decisions across a wider swath of the organization. Future impact comes from having infrastructure in place to make acquisition and consolidation of the next data source (and the one after that, and the one after that…) even faster and more frictionless.

Without investment, opportunities and value disappear with siloed data. Decision makers don’t have all the information they need to react to market changes. Decision makers don’t have all the information they need to react to market changes. Marketers waste time and budget targeting the wrong audience, so they end up losing competitive advantage and squandering opportunities.

The good news is data management is an area where incremental investments now can have a long-term impact. As you build resources and implement new solutions to consolidate one new source of data, you’re installing the building blocks of the next data centralization project. And of course, in many cases there’s no need to build out infrastructure at all when cloud and data-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions are available. Different services can also be combined to create a comprehensive data management strategy tailored to your business needs.

Data centralization and delivery with local perspective

Centralization, governance, and data-management processes are all key to good decision-making because they help ensure that everyone is working from the same playbook and heading in the same direction. However, it is important to remember that centralization and delivery are most effective in combination with local experts. When consolidating data from different areas, local country stakeholders should be involved and driven by a sense of ownership of the data and its capabilities.

A trusted partner like IQVIA can accelerate your data management success while minimizing the need for infrastructure investment with solutions such as DaaS. The IQVIA DaaS solution is a hosting and data management opportunity that provides a flexible way to host, curate, integrate, organize, govern, and access all your healthcare data assets in one place. Because we know the LATAM market so well, we can guide clients not only on how to better use IQVIA data, but how to use all of their third-party data assets as well.