IMS Health centralizes commercialization services in a Customer Engagement Hub

At a client event held in Philadelphia (May 14-15), IMS Health (Plymouth Meeting, PA) threw a spotlight on how Cegedim Relationship Management (acquired last year with its CRM and related information services) has been integrated with the commercial effectiveness offerings of IMS Health itself. A key element is the Customer Engagement Hub (CEH), which is intended (for clients who use it so) to bring together customer relationship management (CRM; from sales-rep reporting), master data management (MDM; of relationships and affiliations) and marketing channels (personal and non-personal) for a comprehensive multichannel marketing resource. A key part of the service validating data quality—that is, ensuring that the correct and most up-to-date information about, say, a prescriber’s affiliations, are known to the system.

By providing a dashboard of customer-centric activities along with analytics, IMS Health expects to offer a streamlined, interoperable view of both data and processes encompassing commercial activity. Richie Etwaru, IMS chief digital officer, notes that CEH can run on IMS’ own data platform (IMSOne, which in turn is offered either through IMS’ own data centers or through Amazon Web Services), or be applied to a client’s own platform. “IMSOne is a mechanism to bring data from different clouds to one place; on top of that are transactional databases like CRM or MDM; and CEH is an engagement system on top of those, providing a new layer of value,” he explains. Databases or services from other, non-IMS providers can be integrated. In something of an interoperability tour de force, the company presented a live linkup between six data centers on three continents to attendees.

Meanwhile, IMS Health continues to build out additional data services of use both to manufacturers and to healthcare providers. In early May it announced the acquisition of Dataline Software, a Brighton, UK provider of analytics for real-world evidence documentation. Clients have included healthcare providers tracking patient treatment to managing large clinical trial reporting. It includes interoperability with SNOMED (the Systematic Nomenclature of Medical-Clinical Terms), a database of terms and codes for codifying medical activities. IMS Health will be integrating Dataline’s services with its existing Evidence360 RWE platform.