IMS Pharmaceutical Research Aid

Healthcare researcher IMS has recently announced the launch of a new web-based aid to pharmaceutical marketing. Christened as the 'IMS Marketing Effectiveness Suite' of applications, the package should help professionals to address a raft of lifecycle questions for their medical products.

As a concept, this Net tool carries IMS' marketplace intelligence from across the whole gamut of the researcher's prescription, sales, promotional, managed care and medical databases. It is structured around a simple question-and-answer format, conceived as a way to streamline the resultant information stream. IMS also suggests that users can benchmark competitive performance, gather market intelligence, track product performance, and pinpoint new business opportunities with the suite.

The company is initially releasing one application in the form of IMS HEALTH Performance Tracker. This provides product performance tracking in particular, be that at national, regional or state level. It also promises to tackle prescription activity, sales, total promotional spending, product inventory and product withdrawal issues.

Second on to the market will be the 'IMS HEALTH Early Insight' application. This is based on daily prescription information as an early indicator of product performance. It should be of special benefit to products at launch. Users will also enjoy the ability to monitor aspects of competitor activity, along with data to assess market potential and understand prescribing/diagnosing behaviour.

'Our new Marketing Effectiveness Suite offers clients immediate access to critical marketplace intelligence so they get the answers they need to make timely marketing decisions,' said Don Otterbein, vice president, IMS HEALTH Global Product Development. 'We've drawn upon our 50 years of experience and the unparalleled breadth and depth of IMS HEALTH data assets to develop solutions tailored to the issues marketers encounter throughout the product lifecycle - from pre-launch through patent expiration.'

'By providing easy-to-use solutions to users in different parts of pharmaceutical companies, the market research departments can be more responsive and more productive,' added Jeffrey Green, group director of marketing for IMS HEALTH. 'And we've incorporated collaboration features so key market intelligence can easily be shared in an online format with users throughout the world.'

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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