Pharma commercial operations is everything a drug company does after a medicine is approved, so that doctors prescribe it, insurers pay for it and patients use it. Approval by the drug regulator, at the end of clinical trials, only allows the company to sell the medicine. It does not make any doctor prescribe it. The work is also called pharma commercial, or sales and market access. The data and analysis behind it are called pharmaceutical commercial analytics. Indian analytics centres in Bengaluru, Pune, Delhi and Chennai do a large share of this work for drug companies worldwide.
Say a drug company has just won approval in the United States for a new cream for eczema, an itchy skin condition. The United States is the largest market for new medicines, and most of this software is built for it.
First, the launch team studies the market. It looks up every rival cream, its price and which insurers pay for it, in pharmaceutical intelligence databases. In the United States, most patients do not pay the full price themselves. A health insurer pays most of it. So the company must persuade each insurer to add the cream to its formulary, the list of medicines that the insurer pays for. To win a place on that list, the company pays the insurer a rebate, a sum paid back after each prescription. Gross-to-net pricing software works out what the company really receives for each tube, once all rebates and discounts are paid.
Next, the team plans the selling. Pharma commercial analytics brings prescription and sales data together and forecasts how many tubes will sell each month. A sales representative is an employee who visits doctors to explain the company's medicines. Sales territory planning decides which skin doctors each representative visits, and how often.
Then the company reaches the doctors. Representatives visit clinics. The company also reaches doctors online, on a doctor community platform where doctors read medical news. Afterwards, pharma promotion research surveys doctors, to find out which visits and messages they remember.
Finally, the company learns what the cream really does. A trial tests a medicine on a few thousand carefully chosen patients. A few years after launch, perhaps two million ordinary people have used it, including older people and people who take other medicines. A real-world evidence (RWE) platform analyses their de-identified records, from which names and identifying details have been removed. It looks for rare side effects and for new uses.
In India, the same jobs look different. Most patients pay for their medicines themselves at the chemist, so insurers and rebates matter much less. Indian drug companies depend on medical representatives (MRs), who visit the same doctors every month. So territory planning and data about doctors matter most. The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) also caps the prices of many essential medicines.