Key Benefits of RWD in Privacy and Targeting Effectiveness

In his video interview with Pharmaceutical Executive, Ted Sweetser, VP, Ad Partnerships and Strategy, PurpleLab explored the challenges and opportunities in healthcare advertising, particularly in the context of increasing data privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies. The discussion highlighted the importance of leveraging real-world data (RWD) to gain valuable insights into patient behavior and preferences. RWD, when combined with advanced analytics and privacy-compliant targeting techniques, enables more effective and targeted advertising campaigns. The conversation also touched on the potential impact of cookie deprecation on the broader advertising industry and the need for advertisers to adapt to a more privacy-centric approach.

How has the use of Real-World Data evolved in the healthcare industry, and what are the key benefits in terms of privacy and targeting effectiveness?

There have been essentially three major trends that have driven the evolution of the real world data space. The first one has been the drive towards digitization of health records, which has been ongoing for some 30 or 40 years. The second one is cloud computing, which has made it so much easier to transmit data, move it around and house it in secure environments like clean rooms. And the third is de identification protocols, so figuring out ways to continue to tie data elements together without leaving what you call the phi, the protected health information in the loop. What you get out of that is, you know, now for the first time in the past 10 years, people have been able to tie together all of this information about what's happening in the healthcare ecosystem, which we commonly understand via our access to claims data here at purple lab, and really understand what are the hotspots for patients having a given condition, What are the personas of different types of doctors treating How long does it take for a patient to get on a medication or to get successfully diagnosed?

That's incredibly important in the rare disease space, especially, I'd note, because doctors are, you know, based on statistics trained to look for horses, not zebras, and while that is effective most of the time. But it does mean that rare diseases take longer to identify, so having access to these data sets has allowed people to do a lot more intensive analysis and gain a better understanding of how diseases present and when you know someone is likely to actually get a given diagnosis. Now you asked about privacy, the de identification is an enormous part of how privacy has had substantial improvements in the healthcare space for real world data. So, at this point, you know, we have software that can completely remove all of the patient identity elements, the PII, while preserving all of the remaining information. That gives us this map of the healthcare ecosystem. It's really allowed us to make data more interoperable while increasing the privacy of it. The way that that function is, effectively what you're doing is what network security analysts refer to as reducing the attack surface, the number of ways that you can get to personal health information.

By way of example, if someone were to try and find out a patient's medical information, and they hacked purple lab, they wouldn't be able to find anything, because we don't retain any PII and we go through expert determination to ensure that the data we retain is not able to be linked back to an individual. This is kind of why most of the time, 99% of the time, when you hear about a HIPAA breach of some kind, it happens much closer to the point of care, because they have to hold on to medical information and PII in the same place in terms of targeting effectiveness, you know, we have fantastic national organizations that work to research disease states and treatments. You know, just to give shout outs to some of my favorite organizations, the AHRQ, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Library of Medicine, all put out incredibly useful clinical research, which is often leveraged by pharma companies when they're doing drug development.

Unfortunately, you know, all of that information is extremely dense and not something that's necessarily very readable or comprehensible to the average marketer. What we've been doing here at purple lab is trying to take these tools, which are developed for clinical analytics applications, and make them intelligible and usable by people across the commercial and marketing tech stack, so that they can take the same best in class tools for understanding patients and apply them to marketing applications. It means you have a lot more of a picture of who the patient is in the aggregate and how best to get a message to them that will resonate with them.