The term “shutdown” has become somewhat synonymous with the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses across essentially every industry were forced to close for much of the past year. Schools were absent at every academic level. Riding a bus or a train, or flying on an airplane, became akin to "telling stories of yore." For a short time, we couldn't even see our doctors (at least in person). No vacations. No need to pump gas. The world had stopped, people will be told for generations.

Just don't tell those who work in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. They won't believe it — not when evidence will show that not only did drug research and development not end, but, rather, it increased. Clinical trials in 2020 actually exceeded 2019 output, even when considering that there was temporary disruption among trial starts in March and April.

Throughout this unprecedented time, the experts at IQVIA have worked in tandem with the tireless clinicians, executives, sales representatives, and other professionals who have helped the world recover from COVD-19 — just like we have for nearly 40 years.

As a leading global provider of advanced analytics, technology solutions, and clinical research services, IQVIA creates intelligent connections across healthcare that help to keep those professionals who keep healthcare thriving as informed as possible.

In this installment of our ongoing Information Solutions Blog Series, we're sharing insights from some of our most engaged partners about the benefits they’ve experienced through our collaboration.

Note: In consideration of our interviewees' privacy, the following comments derived from recent Q&A sessions are not directly attributed to an individual or company.

How would you characterize IQVIA’s role as a partner?

“The way IQVIA has been able to adapt to our needs as its customer [has been critical]. To illustrate this, our small company recently commercialized our first product. Our infrastructure and footprint are much smaller than traditional ‘big pharma,’ but it is evident that the organizational structure at IQVIA is built to support me and my needs, [as well as] my company’s needs.

At the foundational level, we don't believe that we can be successful in our sales force without IQVIA. We count on IQVIA to [help us] make a huge impact in the marketplace. Additionally, IQVIA brings tremendous insight into our daily business functions from the perspective of analytical insights and market insights that help us see how the virtual world has evolved. IQVIA improves our ability to focus on our strategic needs, while helping us to move forward successfully with our operations and goals.

Specifically, IQVIA has been especially significant in bringing insight across the development and commercialization phase of our products. They understand not only our sales representatives, but also the operations behind our sales and the necessary insights into our customers. This is a crucial benefit as change accelerates in this industry. From a technology standpoint, IQVIA brings us data and knowledge across our entire business — information that we're too small to gather ourselves. IQVIA will definitely be vital to our success as digital technology continues to advance.”

How has IQVIA benefited your company’s “journey” from predictive precision engagement?

“Different types of customers will want varying degrees of involvement with their underlying analyses. At our company, we want to be ‘in the trenches’ with underlying data and be able to analyze those data in meaningful ways. Part of my role as a physician is to support a scalable model and to be able to answer our customers’ questions with underlying data in a way that I can assume control over the analyses. The advantage is that we then have the ability to incorporate analyses into our company’s medical background.

Our relationship with IQVIA for predictive analyses allows us to scale analyses through cost-efficient, time-efficient access to data assets and data reports. This support will be crucial as we scale and find economies of scale and efficiency.”

How does IQVIA serve your company in a problem-solving capacity?

“IQVIA has been extremely helpful in helping us identify the tools that we need for specific solutions.

We embarked on a plan to identify key opinion leaders to support our enterprise in-house, but we did not know where to get high-quality scientific publication data. Then, we discovered I2E Linguamatics, an IQVIA application that delivers text-mining capabilities across a range of areas and turns customer queries into information needed for specific tasks. After weeks of talking to different stakeholders, this program’s value was realized within minutes of our introduction to it.

The support we have received from I2E Linguamatics and IQVIA has been incredible. We gain an [incredible] amount of insights, and we feel that IQVIA learns from us as we collaborate. The more we interact, the more entrenched I2E Linguamatics becomes within our network. That's a partnership mindset as opposed to a sales mentality.

The future is going to be data driven; there will be more entry into the market for data and data-analyses types of services from competitors. IQVIA has been able to address our information needs for various data-dependent analyses expediently, which has made all the difference in the success we’ve seen in our large, bold-move goals.”

How has IQVIA improved your company’s insights?

“IQVIA has really stepped up with market-knowledge reports that have provided a better quantitative look at the overall environment and helped us evaluate our performance compared to other businesses. We know what's happening within our therapeutic and our physician specialties relative to other businesses, and we did find some variance that helped put our focus on the organization and products into perspective.

We gained a quantitative look at the business and qualitative feedback from our field intelligence for an overall context of business performance for our executive leadership. IQVIA has been reliably strategic in helping us to analyze our business and has provide insights into relevant growth opportunities despite marketplace challenges.”