Veeva buys AdvantageMS, building out its foundation for healthcare-provider master data

Veeva (Pleasanton, CA), a leading CRM vendor serving the life sciences industry exclusively, has followed through on the promise it made at its annual customer meeting in May, buying AdvantageMS (Fort Washington, PA) for an undisclosed sum. The company had announced Veeva Network at that meeting, which will include master-data management and compliance services when it goes live later this year. When Veeva announced this service, it said that the Network will be enhanced by pooling (pending client approval) the HCP data of the customers of its CRM solutions. Through the cloud-based, software-as-a-service CRM platform it pioneered for the life sciences industries, much of these data is already on Veeva servers. In effect, Veeva is crowd-sourcing a data offering for pharma sales operations.

Dan Goldsmith, Veeva GM, says that AdvantageMS brings two valuable assets to the table: it is a Data Base Licensee (DBL) of the master-data products of the American Medical Assn., considered by some as the most authoritative source of physician demographic data; and it has a cloud-based IT solution, AlignPlus, that assists in developing territory alignments and trip itineraries for field sales teams. AdvantageMS claims nearly seven million active healthcare-provider (HCP) listings, including just under one million listings from AMA’s database. “The AdvantageMS team shares many of the same values that our company does, and we are going to continue the collaborative efforts of AdvantageMS with AMA in delivering the best possible provider data,” he says.

Master data management—the compilation of HCP names, addresses, business affiliations and government licenses—is a surprisingly complex task to manage for most pharma companies. Besides the need to continually update new HCP information, pharma sales forces have regulatory requirements and restrictions to meet. This year, the entire process is ramping up to a higher level of complexity as pharma companies are obligated to report aggregate spending on HCPs to the federal government. Goldsmith says that Veeva Network will ultimately include expanded HCP data sets, such as channel preferences and social media activity, to better to maintain communication with prescribers. Veeva is also actively turning Network into a global resources, having already begun developing, through another acquisition, a database for prescribers in China.