McKesson - For­tune top 10 health­care com­pa­ny - looks to the fu­ture of da­ta with Com­pile ac­qui­si­tion

The health­care in­dus­try’s vo­ra­cious ap­petite for da­ta is in­creas­ing ex­po­nen­tial­ly with the adop­tion of AI and Ma­chine Learn­ing, and it won’t be slow­ing down any­time soon. In a move to meet cur­rent and fu­ture de­mand for da­ta and jump­start the in­tro­duc­tion of new prod­ucts, McKesson has ac­quired spe­cial­ist da­ta provider Com­pile.

Stan­ton Mc­Comb, Pres­i­dent, McKesson Med­ical-Sur­gi­cal So­lu­tions said: “With the Com­pile ac­qui­si­tion, we are build­ing for the fu­ture of the in­dus­try, which in­creas­ing­ly re­quires high-qual­i­ty da­ta to feed AI and Ma­chine Learn­ing ini­tia­tives. We chose Com­pile be­cause their so­lu­tions are de­signed for qual­i­ty and us­abil­i­ty, and we are very ex­cit­ed to add high-cal­iber da­ta prod­ucts to our of­fer­ings.”

Plans are to pro­vide cus­tomers of both com­pa­nies with pre­mier da­ta prod­ucts built on the ex­per­tise strengths of both busi­ness­es. Com­pile is known for its ex­cep­tion­al da­ta prod­ucts, which are used by phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and biotech com­pa­nies and oth­er health­care in­no­va­tors. McKesson is a For­tune top 10 com­pa­ny and a di­ver­si­fied health­care ser­vices leader that de­liv­ers in­sights, prod­ucts and ser­vices to help make qual­i­ty care more ac­ces­si­ble and af­ford­able.

McKesson Com­pile will pro­vide da­ta prod­ucts in­formed by McKesson’s pro­pri­etary da­ta foot­print, cre­at­ed by decades of work with life sci­ences in­no­va­tors in­clud­ing bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies, care providers, phar­ma­cies, and more.

Isaac Fehren­bach, CEO at Com­pile said, “We are thrilled to join McKesson and ac­cel­er­ate adop­tion of our da­ta prod­ucts among the lead­ing health­care trail­blaz­ers who com­prise the com­pa­ny’s ex­ten­sive part­ner and cus­tomer net­work.” He con­tin­ued: “We are en­abling the life sci­ences in­dus­try to de­vel­op and dis­trib­ute life­sav­ing in­no­va­tions faster than ever be­fore.”

The Com­pile dif­fer­ence

McKesson rec­og­nized the Com­pile dif­fer­ence, in­clud­ing its an­a­lyt­ics-ready pa­tient da­ta, pro­pri­etary af­fil­i­a­tions dataset, and pre­mi­um cus­tomer ser­vice.

The foun­da­tion of Com­pile’s tech­nol­o­gy is its pro­pri­etary graph pro­cess­ing en­gine—which works in 3D, cap­tur­ing all re­la­tion­ships in graphs—as op­posed to ta­bles. By us­ing the graph for­mat, Com­pile’s ap­proach main­tains all da­ta points and in­for­ma­tion about re­la­tion­ships, cre­ates more link­ages be­tween da­ta points, makes da­ta re­trieval more ac­cu­rate and eas­i­er for end users. The ta­ble-based ap­proach can re­sult in miss­ing re­la­tion­ship da­ta and re­quires users to cross ref­er­ence be­tween ta­bles.

Kir­by For­lin, SVP of McKesson Med­ical-Sur­gi­cal Da­ta Com­mer­cial­iza­tion and Ad­vanced An­a­lyt­ics, not­ed: “Provider 360 Ready­Da­ta and oth­er Com­pile so­lu­tions are help­ing cus­tomers tar­get their mar­ket­ing in ways that they didn’t think were pos­si­ble.”

Com­pile Ready­Da­ta – ana­lyt­ics-ready da­ta sets

Life sci­ences com­pa­nies are able to an­a­lyze rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion more quick­ly by de­ploy­ing ready-to-use da­ta sets, rather than spend­ing time and re­sources on da­ta prepa­ra­tion.  In fact, da­ta prepa­ra­tion can ac­count for much of the ef­fort in da­ta analy­sis.

Fehren­bach said, “Every bit of da­ta we pro­vide is care­ful­ly craft­ed so you can hit the ground run­ning. We call it Ready­Da­ta be­cause we be­lieve the da­ta cus­tomers re­ceive should be ready to use when they want to use it. Com­pile does the de­tailed clean-up and or­ga­ni­za­tion so cus­tomers don’t have to.”

Com­pile’s Ready­Da­ta in­cludes provider and pa­tient (open claims, closed claims, Medicare da­ta, and EHR) datasets.

In or­der to cre­ate Ready­Da­ta, Com­pile does the cleans­ing, nor­mal­iz­ing, dedup­ing, and ta­ble-merg­ing clean-up, and then en­hances the da­ta with mod­eled vari­ables and val­ues to make it more ro­bust and help stream­line analy­ses.

Fehren­bach con­tin­ued: “We im­pute miss­ing val­ues, al­low­ing cus­tomers to use more dat­a­points in every analy­sis. We add mod­eled fields, flags, and cat­e­gories to make it eas­i­er for cus­tomers to write queries and faster to run an­a­lyt­ics.”

Provider 360 Ready­Da­ta

Com­pa­nies launch­ing new prod­ucts, or re­search­ing ad­di­tion­al mar­kets, need to un­der­stand the provider mar­ket­place. Com­pile’s Provider 360 pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive provider ref­er­ence da­ta that maps the re­la­tion­ships be­tween health­care pro­fes­sion­als, health­care or­ga­ni­za­tions, and health sys­tems / IDNs. With Com­pile’s pro­pri­etary scor­ing sys­tem, users can un­der­stand the strength of the re­la­tion­ships be­tween en­ti­ties. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, Com­pile Provider 360’s provider in­tel­li­gence goes be­yond ba­sic de­mo­graph­ics to pro­vide a holis­tic view of physi­cians and al­lied health pro­fes­sion­als, en­abling a fo­cused mar­ket­ing ap­proach.

In one ex­am­ple, a cus­tomer in­tro­duc­ing a much-need­ed new drug ther­a­py for a rare dis­ease in the pe­di­atric pop­u­la­tion was strug­gling with the se­ri­ous gaps in its lega­cy da­ta set.

Com­pile’s so­lu­tion gave the biotech com­pa­ny an un­der­stand­ing of the range of health­care pro­fes­sion­als in the mar­ket, in­clud­ing spe­cial­ists, pri­ma­ry care doc­tors, pe­di­a­tri­cians, and nurse ed­u­ca­tors, and how they were all af­fil­i­at­ed with each oth­er and var­i­ous health­care or­ga­ni­za­tions. With that da­ta, the com­pa­ny was able to build re­la­tion­ships, de­vel­op pro­mo­tions, and ap­pro­pri­ate­ly al­lo­cate their mar­ket­ing re­sources.

The cus­tomer said: “Any­one who’s worked with rare dis­eases knows that the da­ta is not any­where as clean as we want it to be. There are a lot of nu­ances to it, and that’s why it’s crit­i­cal to have a part­ner like Com­pile that un­der­stands those nu­ances as we work through them to­geth­er.”

AI and ma­chine learn­ing: build­ing for the fu­ture with the Com­pile dif­fer­ence

AI and Ma­chine Learn­ing-en­abled ap­pli­ca­tions are be­ing adopt­ed by life sci­ences com­pa­nies across func­tions in­clud­ing R&D, op­er­a­tions, mar­ket­ing and more. Ac­cord­ing to some bull­ish pre­dic­tions, fifty per­cent of the $4.3 Tril­lion U.S. health­care mar­ket will be AI-dri­ven in just a few decades. An­a­lysts pre­dict that use of these ad­vanced ca­pa­bil­i­ties could be a key com­pet­i­tive dri­ver, de­ter­min­ing which com­pa­nies thrive and which do not.

Yet for all the fan­fare, the qual­i­ty and depth of da­ta need­ed to run AI and ML ini­tia­tives and pro­vide ac­cu­rate and use­ful out­comes can be dif­fi­cult to se­cure. Com­pile’s unique da­ta tech­nol­o­gy al­lows cus­tomers to store more da­ta and ac­cu­rate­ly cap­tures the full uni­verse of com­plex provider and health­care or­ga­ni­za­tion re­la­tion­ships. By pro­vid­ing more da­ta, and clean­er da­ta, AI and ML pro­grams cre­ate bet­ter con­clu­sions.

Fehren­bach con­tin­ued, “Com­pile’s com­mit­ment to cre­at­ing high-cap­ture, high-fi­deli­ty da­ta sets across providers and pa­tients en­ables cus­tomers to max­i­mize op­por­tu­ni­ties cre­at­ed by AI and ML. Go­ing for­ward, our work with McKesson gives us ac­cess to an ad­di­tion­al, un­matched source of da­ta that will pro­vide fur­ther depth and ac­cu­ra­cy to cus­tomers as they im­ple­ment their AI and ML ini­tia­tives.”

Build­ing for the fu­ture

By join­ing forces McKesson and Com­pile are build­ing for the fu­ture of the life sci­ences in­dus­try.

Da­ta will con­tin­ue to be a dri­ving force in the in­dus­try, and com­pa­nies will be en­gag­ing AI and ML to help with R&D, op­er­a­tions, and mar­ket­ing. By adding new da­ta prod­ucts, McKesson con­tin­ues near­ly 200-year-old track record of help­ing the in­dus­try stay ahead of the curve.

Read more about the ac­qui­si­tion here or con­tact us here.