Pharmaceutical intelligence is a set of databases that describe the whole medicine business: every drug, every trial, every price, and which insurers pay for which medicine. A drug company's strategy and launch teams look up nearly every decision in them. The industry also calls it pharma market intelligence, or competitive intelligence.
The databases hold four main kinds of record. The first is the pipeline: the medicines that companies are still testing in trials, with the stage that each one has reached. The second is trials: where each trial runs, how many patients it needs and when it should end. The third is prices: the list price of each medicine and how it has changed over time. The fourth is insurance cover, which the industry calls market access: which insurers pay for a medicine, and on what conditions. Analysts at the database companies collect this data from regulators' websites, trial registries, patent offices, company reports and insurers' published lists. They clean it and link it, so that one drug has one record across all four.
Take, for example, a generic drug maker in Ahmedabad. A generic drug is a cheaper copy of a medicine whose patent has ended. Its strategy team wants to sell a copy of a blood pressure tablet in the United States, where the original costs far more than in India. The team looks up when the original's patents end. It checks how many other companies have already applied to the US regulator to sell a copy, because each new copy pushes the price down. It looks up the current price and how many prescriptions are filled each month. It also checks which insurers cover the original. Say six other companies plan to launch copies in the same month. The price may then fall to a small fraction of today's price within a year. So the team may choose a different medicine to copy.
The same databases serve companies that launch new medicines. A launch team checks which rival drugs are in late-stage trials, so that it knows what it will compete with in three years.
The numbers go on to pharma commercial analytics, which turns them into a sales forecast. Results from a real-world evidence (RWE) platform, about how rival drugs perform in ordinary patients, are added to the drug records. The trial records include the registrations that sponsors of clinical trials must publish. The price records are the starting point for gross-to-net pricing, which works out what a drug really earns after rebates.
Pharmaceutical intelligence is different from a healthcare data platform. A healthcare data platform holds the records of individual patients. Pharmaceutical intelligence holds facts about drugs, companies and markets, and no patient data.