Analytical Wizards
The Wizards of Healthcare Analytics

Running a business without intelligent, data-centric business models and skilled consultants is like taking a road trip without proper navigation. Such is the predicament of today’s healthcare organizations that have yet to successfully tap into data-driven insights, artificial intelligence (AI), and operationalize machine learning (ML). To help organizations navigate the rocky road to meaningful results, Analytical Wizards – a cutting-edge data science and healthcare analytics firm – ensures customers reach their destinations with efficiency and scale. They combine deep pharma/biotech knowledge, with over 100 years of combined AI/ML expertise and a high-touch culture that ensures customers are able to answer their key commercial questions and drive results. In a time when the industry is rife with black box solutions, Analytical Wizards puts its magic into the hands of customers, empowering client teams through open solutions that encourage experimentation – providing the efficiency, scalability, and speed they need.

In this informative discussion, Ram Sharma, CEO of Analytical Wizards, shares his insights into the trends and challenges in the healthcare analytics space, their dedicated solutions and services to overcome roadblocks, and the company’s vision for the future.

As a data science and analytics firm in healthcare, what are some of the pain points that you see in the industry?

One key pain point is the substantial patent pressure from the advent of biosimilars and generics, resulting in growing competition on market share and prices. Secondly, with restricted sales rep access to physicians, there needs to be an increased focus on multi-channel marketing where optimal investments maximize physician engagement and ROI.

Another concern is the heightened government, social, and payer pressure on drug prices, which is compelling pharma/biotech to focus on top-line revenue and protect margins through efficiency.

And finally, the emergence of personalized medicine through genomics and biomarkers has created a huge responsibility for analytics companies to provide better analysis and analytical capabilities for not only improved clinical R&D, but also for efficiently managing patients and improving compliance.

What are some of the recent developments impacting the industry and how is Analytical Wizards tackling those?

Most analytics companies operate as a black box, where customers don’t have access to the models and are unable to export data. Our customers, on the other hand, can work with the models themselves; they can export data into Excel or export visualizations into PowerPoint.

Additionally, clients now desire high-touch relationships. They want to work side-by-side as a team. Unlike our competitors, we are not a “body shop.” Traditional providers and consulting companies may struggle in their attempt to deliver high-quality services because their bread and butter is selling data or accruing consulting hours. At Analytical Wizards, we have a very good understanding of the regulatory framework and different datasets, which we combine and turn into actionable insights for clients as trusted members of their team.

This, in combination with our cutting-edge platforms, has been our driving force since inception. We continue to hire individuals with in-depth industry knowledge and AI/ ML advanced analytics expertise.

What sets you apart in the data analytics space? How do you integrate AI and analytics into your offerings?

As I mentioned before, there’s a huge unmet demand for analytical expertise, compounded with a lack of domain knowledge where partner teams and tools aren’t set up to handle the unique nuances of pharma/biotech. What makes us unique is that we focus squarely on the pharma/biotech space. A key distinguishing characteristic is that we work with completely anonymized, HIPAA-compliant datasets while operating on the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS). We leverage privately and publicly available data and divergent datasets. We’re now processing terabytes of information in near real time, expanding our platform features and continually improving the user experience. Analytical Wizards is able to deliver AI/ ML models in weeks versus months. And, our machine learning iterates over data on a real-time basis, delivering insights and reports daily if needed.

In one case, a customer hired us to solve a problem in an ultra-rare disease space – to find new patients and to improve compliance for patients on therapy. Patients are incredibly difficult to identify; with incidence of disease in the U.S. of less than 10,000 patients. We used a combination of historical data, concomitant conditions, lab results, and other procedure codes to arrive at the best model for identifying new patients. We then operationalized the model to enable our client to reach specific physicians who were seeing undiagnosed patients, as well as notifying them ahead of patients becoming non-compliant. And, a list of new patients and those likely to become non-complaint was delivered weekly.

Can you elaborate on the functionality of your WIZ and IZE platforms and how they are beneficial to clients?

Analytical Wizards’ solution stack includes WIZ, an omnichannel marketing analytics platform with its name originating from “wizards,” designed to make marketing more agile. The cloud-hosted WIZ platform enables marketers to set their ideal budgets according to various scenarios, allowing them to allocate funds across channels, conduct test and control studies, and optimize each individual channel and message across the key customer segments they’re targeting. Besides being highly customizable, WIZ’s point-and-click interface is incredibly user-friendly. It’s also immensely scalable, running thousands of models in a parallel environment so that customers can find the best model to fit their specific brand needs across their organization and therapeutic categories. WIZ is a proven platform running thousands of models and millions of iterations across hundreds of brands, and dozens of therapeutic categories in more than 40 countries or regions – with clients seeing up to 20 percent gain in incremental sales, up to 30 percent improvement in cost efficiency and greater than 50 percent gain in productivity.

To empower clinical and commercial teams with powerful insights, we have IZE, a real-world evidence platform designed to accelerate business and brand performance by leveraging Big Data. IZE incorporates a suite of customizable modules for a variety of groups—marketing, sales, market access, HEOR, and clinical R&D teams—to harness the power of AI-ML and gain powerful insights. The platform’s Compliance Risk Predictor module, for example, helps identify rare disease patients while improving compliance and persistency rates by predicting each patient’s risk for non-compliance. IZE doesn’t require expensive software purchases or downloads and integrates well with any legacy IT system and architecture. It’s designed to do it all; whether helping design new clinical trials or assisting payer teams in creating better access for physicians and patients to the therapies they need.

Having achieved 80 percent growth last year, Analytical Wizards is on track to achieve the same growth this year. Our efforts are always focused on incorporating more cutting-edge, innovative technology into our solutions for improved and advanced healthcare analytics that solve real-world business problems.

Analytical Wizards is an advance analytics company that is revolutionizing analytics in healthcare by combining its AI/ ML-powered technology, domain expertise, and high-touch relationship model. Their flexible approach leads to scalable innovation that drives actionable decision making in real time, enabling customers to rapidly transform an accelerate their business performance.