ValueCentric opens a portal for detailed inventory, scrip data

Building on its data-collecting and analytic services for distribution and inventory data, ValueCentric (Orchard Park, NY) has opened a news and analysis portal to showcase its data services. Called ValueCentricIQ (www.valuecentriciq.com), the site combines aggregated news from various online publishers and bloggers. The company has aspirations of being a central information source for marketers, supply chain managers and others concerned with commercial operations in pharma and medical supplies, but the key element is its presentation of “industry benchmarks” such as days’ inventory on hand for branded and generic products, returns activity and the like. Another data field tracks the volume of tweets for pharma companies.

“We started out managing EDI 852 and 867 data for manufacturers and wholesalers,” says Dave Janca, CEO, referring to the data formats with which trading partners exchange order and delivery information. Some 200 manufacturers, distributors and retailers are already ValueCentric clients of those services. “That has evolved into partnerships with retailers like Walgreens and others, by which we validate and normalize their data, and now market it to industry.” Janca says that the data feeds (which would be purchased by individual clients) can provide store-level scrip and inventory data, help manage medication adherence programs, reconcile chargebacks and rebates and similar sales-volume-related operational measures.

Traditionally, while IMS Health and others work with reported scrip data from retailers and hospitals, ValueCentric and a few other companies work with channel data coming out of distribution activity; now the two perspectives are beginning to overlap. From a data provider’s (like Walgreens) perspective, the choice can be whether to sell its prescription data to IMS, or market it jointly with ValueCentric. Given their hunger for reliable market data, pharma companies will probably buy from both sources.