Drug Analyzer on AWS Provides Analytics That Inform Treatment Decisions and Support New Therapies

By Sam Woodard, Product Lead, Life Sciences – Change Healthcare
By Anil Konda, Sr. Director of Engineering – Change Healthcare
By Irshad A Buchh, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS

Change Healthcare

Change Healthcare Data Solutions collaborated with the innovation teams at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop Drug Analyzer, a commercial launch application powered by AWS.

Within a few short months, the teams were able to refine the idea and deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) that offers patient journey analytics, including commercial opportunity evaluation, informed forecasting, competitive landscape analytics, market access, pre-clinical research, post-approval clinical and commercial research, and pharmacovigilance.*

The Drug Analyzer application is built on Change Healthcare’s Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) platform, a security-enabled analytic cloud service that provides persistent compliance monitoring and highly customizable analytics capabilities.

By leveraging its centralized data ecosystem, which is highly representative of the U.S. healthcare ecosystem, Drug Analyzer offers an alternative for analyzing potential markets for new drug launches and evaluating drug performance post-launch.

Drug Analyzer is a tool offered by Change Healthcare to provide life sciences organizations with real-world data insights that inform treatment decisions and support the development of new therapies.

Change Healthcare is an AWS Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that is a leading healthcare technology company accelerating the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system.

Overview

Change Healthcare’s DSaaS platform offers a wide range of data analytics capabilities, including machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), which help identify trends and patterns in healthcare data. This, in turn, enables more informed decision-making and better patient outcomes.

Additionally, the platform’s highly customizable analytics capabilities enable users to create and customize reports based on specific needs.

With Drug Analyzer, users can gain insights into a variety of areas. The application provides a comprehensive view of the drug launch process, from the initial market research phase to post-launch performance monitoring.

The tool’s dashboard offers quick visual insights into drug performance without the need for an in-house SQL expert, allowing organizations to easily view information on performance, market share, fill rate, denials, and more. The data is secured by DSaaS operating on AWS, helping ensure compliance monitoring and highly customizable analytics capabilities.

This tool is intended for life sciences organizations and their executives, brand teams, and consultants who seek real-world data to inform decisions.

Architecture

The key AWS services used by the DSaaS analytics platform are:

• Amazon AppStream 2.0 provides secure access to the workbench environment.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) securely stores the DSaaS datasets and any customer data. Server-side encryption with customer master keys (CMKs) stored in AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS) encryption to protect data at rest.
• Apache Superset is an intuitive interface for visualizing datasets and crafting interactive dashboards.
• Amazon Redis Cache provides an in-memory data store for high performance.
• Amazon Redshift Serverless is an analytics data store.
• Amazon Aurora provides a data tier to store authorization and metadata information.
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is an enterprise system to authenticate users.
• Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and Amazon GuardDuty are used in conjunction with network activity monitoring with virtual private cloud (VPC) flow logs, Amazon S3 access logging, and application logs sent to CloudWatch for security and compliance.

Figure 1 – Architecture diagram.

Each user is provisioned a private analysis environment, securely accessed through Amazon AppStream 2.0, with SAML support for single sign-on (SSO) via the customer’s identity provider service. Additionally, it adopts a continuous compliance approach, whereby the compliance status of the architecture and data is continuously evaluated and remediated.

Business Use Cases

Drug Analyzer can benefit life sciences organizations and their biopharma executives, brand teams, and consultants who need real-world data to make informed decisions throughout the drug lifecycle. The tool helps organizations gain insights into market needs, identify new opportunities for therapies, and differentiate their products.

Analytics and insights are essential for addressing the three most common reasons for missing expectations in drug launches: limited market access, inadequate understanding of market needs, and poor product differentiation.

However, life sciences and biopharma organizations often face challenges such as limited access to permissioned real-world data, talent, fidelity, and expense.

Demographics

The demographics tab within Drug Analyzer allows biopharma users to generate and understand insights on their selected population of patients. Users can select a variety of filters to determine a specific population of patients based on criteria, such as target drug, comparator drug(s), date range, data source (medical or pharmacy claims), diagnosis, and denial filter.

The demographics dashboard hosts a variety of insights, including total patient count, gender (count/percentage), gender/age distribution, total claims on the target drug, and the top 10 drugs claims based on the filters applied.

Figure 2 – Demographics tab.

Adjudications

The adjudications tab within Drug Analyzer allows biopharma users to generate and understand claims adjudications insights on the selected target drug. Users can select a variety of filters to determine a specific population of patients based on criteria, such as target drug, comparator drug(s), date range, data source (medical or pharmacy claims), diagnosis, and denial filter.

The adjudications dashboard hosts a variety of insights, including claims (count/dollars), average days a claim is open, claims by payer (%), prescriptions by provider specialty, and claims rejections.

Figure 3 – Adjudication tab.

Denial Prevention

The denial prevention dashboard hosts a variety of insights, such as total adjudication errors, error amount, error rate, error reasons over time, error reasons by count and percentage, and error workflow.

Figure 4 – Denial prevention tab.

Social Determinant of Health

The Social Determinant of Health (SDOH) tab within Drug Analyzer allows biopharma users to generate and understand claims SDOH insights on the selected target drug. Users can select a variety of filters to determine a specific population of patients based on criteria such as target drug, comparator drug(s), date range, data source (medical or pharmacy claims), diagnosis, and denial filter.

The SDOH dashboard hosts a variety of insights, including total patient count, income, occupation, population density, housing, net worth, education, and economic stability.

Figure 5 – Social Determinants of Health tab.

Helping with Performance Challenges

Launching new drugs can present a multitude of challenges. To successfully navigate an ever-changing market and provider and patient behavior, it’s crucial to have a deep and fast understanding of key insights.

Here are some insights that can empower you to overcome performance challenges:

• Perform market segmentation: In-depth market segmentation is critical to understanding drug utilization patterns and drug efficacy within custom patient populations. This helps you identify opportunities and tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Access claims data: The ability to access medical, pharmacy, and SDOH data on the same patients from a single data aggregation vendor is crucial. This helps you gain a comprehensive understanding of your target population and identify prescribing providers who have high or low patient counts and utilization of your target drug/s.
• Identify prescribing providers: Understanding the dynamics around physician prescribing and utilization of a target drug in a target population can assist biopharma organizations enact behavioral change and bring meaningful treatment to patients who otherwise might not have had the opportunity to utilize your drug/s. Population cohorting capabilities help you accurately identify your target population.
• Access real-world data: Quick and timely access to real-world data that provides off-the-shelf analysis to both biopharma business users and technical users is critical. This helps you make informed decisions and take action based on fresh data.
• Mitigate claims denials and rejections: Insights on claims denials and rejections can help you understand why a drug has been denied or rejected and provide insights into claims mitigation methods. This helps you optimize your claims processes and minimize barriers to patient access.
• Analyze market share: Analyzing drug performance relative to market competitors provides actionable market intelligence. This helps you navigate decisions and stay ahead of the competition.
• Utilize various claims data sources: It’s essential to utilize various claims data sources from both medical and pharmacy data and correlate that data with SDOH data. This helps you gain a comprehensive understanding of your target population and identify opportunities for improving drug performance.

By leveraging the vast healthcare network and fresh data provided by Drug Analyzer, life sciences and biopharma organizations can efficiently analyze potential markets for new drug launches and evaluate performance post-launch.

Overall, Drug Analyzer helps organizations turn insights into action, leading to better-informed decisions and more successful drug launches.

Conclusion

Drug Analyzer is a powerful tool for pharmaceutical companies looking to launch new drugs or evaluate the performance of existing ones.

Powered by AWS and built on Change Healthcare’s Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) platform, Drug Analyzer offers a comprehensive and highly customizable analytics solution that helps users make informed decisions and drive better patient outcomes.

You can also learn more about Change Healthcare in AWS Marketplace.

* Any descriptions of future functionality reflect current product direction and are for informational purposes only. They do not constitute a commitment to provide specific functionality. Timing and availability remain at Change Healthcare’s discretion and are subject to change and applicable regulatory approvals.

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Change Healthcare is an AWS Partner and leading healthcare technology company accelerating the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system.

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