PharmaSecure enhances its customer value proposition with Tableau

PharmaSecure, a technology provider for the healthcare industry, recognised that the company’s success was underpinned by its ability to understand patient data, derive critical insight and share it with customers regularly. Today, Tableau is helping PharmaSecure adopt an insight-driven customer service strategy that has helped the company:

• Cut reporting time by weeks
• Instill a culture of data-driven decision making in the organisation
• Add value to stakeholder ecosystem—helping customers understand patient consumption behaviour and enabling patients to better depend on medicine

Creating a Data-Centric Value System for Customers
PharmaSecure is a US-based software and technology company working towards improving global public health. Its offerings encapsulate a range of solutions that work towards eliminating counterfeit drugs, connecting patients with safe medicines, and impacting patient adherence.

The company works with pharmaceutical companies to print unique, randomly generated codes on medicine packages. These identification codes serve two purposes: First, they allow manufacturers to track each strip or blister pack and shipping carton they produce. Second, patients can verify the authenticity of their medicine through SMS, mobile app or by feeding it on the company website.

As part of this verification process, PharmaSecure enables access to a mobile health platform, allowing users to opt in to customized mobile heath programs. These programs have applications such as reminders to refill medicines, dosage checks, providing health tips etc. By creating this valuable ecosystem, PharmaSecure acts a facilitating link adding immense value to healthcare users and drug manufacturers.

Recognizing an Opportunity
With the industry-wide transformation in the way healthcare is obtained, delivered and paid for, pharmaceutical companies are scouting for tools that can help them decode patients’ behaviour and consumption patterns.

In the context of this trend, PharmaSecure wanted to gain insights from its growing data repository to help strengthen their partnerships with pharmaceutical customers while helping patients manage their diseases better.

“Data is at the corner stone of our business and we needed to make that our differentiating element. As a company, our data volumes, client portfolio and maturity had undergone an evolutionary curve and it was time for us to use an effective solution that could generate definable, powerful and intuitive analytics,” says Samit YADAV, Senior Director, Technology and Operations, PharmaSecure.

At first, the team analysed its data through a cumbersome and inefficient process. Team members would dedicate time every week to extracting information from different sources, populating Excel sheets with the data and finally, deriving graphs to visually represent the findings. To address this challenge, the company wanted an analysis solution that would offer a faster, interactive experience.

Using the Power of Simplicity for Powerful Analytics
After a careful evaluation of the players in the visual analytics marketscape, in 2013 PharmaSecure chose Tableau software due to its polished and comprehensive offering.

Today Tableau software is used by most members of PharmaSecure’s Operations team. Typically, PharmaSecure’s MySQL and Excel data sources generate transactional databases of 200-500 rows a day, slated to reach 1000-2000 rows over the next six months.

Throughout the span of 18 months that the company has used Tableau, they are gaining value by drawing insights from an ever increasing quantum of data. Today all internal reports are generated on Tableau with insights extracted from data every week and every month. This move to a prescriptive style of analytics triggers faster decision making for the company.

Believing in Data Analytics and Its Influence
Using Tableau, the company has been able to maximise the value from their growing data without having to invest any additional resources.

“Tableau’s power lies in its simplicity and intuitiveness. Putting Tableau over our data integration layer, has given us substantially greater insight across the business operations- supply chain, time to market, program enrollment, distribution, sales force effectiveness among other aspects,” Abhijit elaborates.

Going forward, PharmaSecure will also start Tableau deployment with its customers whereby they will be able to not only access but build Tableau data charts on their own.

“The biggest highlight of using Tableau has been that our entire team now truly believes in the power of insightful data. Thanks to Tableau, we as an organisation have become a lot more excited about using data in impactful and interesting ways for our customers.”