Zephyr Health links up with Decision Resources Group for enhanced sales tools

Zephyr Health (San Francisco), which has been marketing its Illuminate analytics platform for a couple years now, has a “strategic data and analytics partnership,” as the companies put it, to combine Zephyr’s cloud-based platform with the Fingertip Formulary service of DRG (Burlington, MA), a data service that keep formulary information up to date across multiple payer and reimbursement organizations. The result, says Zephyr CEO Lance Scott, is a more powerful method to “pull through” pharma sales from prescribers. “Field sales teams will be alerted when there is a beneficial formulary change for products they market,” he says. “They will then be able to communicate this changed status to prescribers,” who presumably will be more inclined to prescribe the drug. For its part, DRG updates its formulary data on a continuing basis, and provides a variety of user tools to the data.

Scott says that Illuminate already does a good job of identifying prescribers by their interests and prescribing patterns; the formulary data enables sales teams to keep prescribers aware of a drug’s status for reimbursement, copays and related financial aspects. Illuminate also has a “recommendations” engine—software that automatically links the formulary changes with a salesperson’s key accounts that are likely to be affected by that change. Illuminate also provides state-of-the-art visualization tools to improve usability. Other Zephyr/DRG collaborations might be in the works.