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Better Forecasts for Pharma Launches
Ziment, the global healthcare research brand for The Kantar Group, has introduced a new research technique designed to improve the accuracy of drug sales and manufacturing forecasts. Customers traditionally overestimate potential demand and the new technique, 'Demand calibration', helps to adjust estimates.
Demand calibration is an algorithm developed by studying 20 years' worth of results on Ziment's database of primary research, comparing actual performance of products and the estimates made (called 'preference shares'). The result maps the extent to which customers say they will prescribe or use a new product, to a better representation of what will be their actual prescription or use of the product.
The demand calibration technique has been incorporated into many of Ziment's existing 'Compound-to-Profit' evaluation methods. Chief among these is TRIALZ, an approach designed to show pharmaceutical companies the optimal product profile and clinical trial configuration to maximize the commercial potential of compounds that they are developing.
CEO Howard Ziment says the problem of over-estimation is well known - 'physicians overstate their intent to prescribe a new product; patients overstate their intent to ask their doctor about a new product. No one has ever been able to properly adjust for this overstatement... Demand calibration solves this age old problem by providing a more rigorous means to adjust the overstatement'.
Ziment's Chief Methodologist John Tapper stresses the very broad base used to develop the technique: 'the algorithm has been formed based on over 15,000 respondents, across 25 disease states, with preference shares from studies ranging from 1% to 67%, spanning virtually all of the major pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world. It takes this depth and breadth to have developed an algorithm that can be applied universally'.
The company's web site is at www.ziment.com
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