TargetRx Launches TargetAdvantage: First Product to Reveal Prescribing Motivators at the Physician Level

Powered by KNOW-Y Software, New Tool Provides Sales and Marketing Teams with Enriched Physician Insight to Promote Better Treatment Decisions and Greater Customer Focus

Horsham, Pa. - August 16, 2010 - Pharmaceutical sales and marketing teams have long understood that every physician is different - and that each is driven by a unique set of priorities, values and approaches to the practice of medicine. However, the traditional tools available to help guide brand teams' marketing and selling strategies have been limited to backward-looking trend data or segmentation studies by therapeutic category - neither of which provides true insight into a particular physician's motivations. Now, for the first time, TargetAdvantageSM from TargetRx allows pharma and biotech firms to understand what drives physicians to prescribe, and most importantly, how best to focus on individual physician's needs to positively influence treatment decisions and encourage improved patient outcomes.

The factors that impact a physician's decision to select one course of drug therapy or treatment - product attributes, promotion types, patient requests and payor requirements - have continued to grow more and more complex. While traditional physician targeting methods - based largely on using past prescribing behavior as a predictor for future behavior - provide useful information on what course of treatment the physician selected, they fail to consider a vital piece of the puzzle: why that specific action occurred. TargetAdvantage helps fill this critical gap by adding the missing context or the why behind a physician's behavior.

Y-Factors
Physician treatment decisions due to:
Efficacy
Safety
Dosing
Side Effects
Clinical Data
Price
Managed Care
Personal Promotion
Non-Personal Promotion
Patient Requests
Samples

What Are Your Physician's Y-FactorsSM?
Through its AdvantageBuilderSM database of more than 300 million questions answered by more than 78,000 physicians across most major therapeutic categories, TargetRx has identified 11 Y-Factors - attributes that motivate physicians to prescribe. Each doctor has an individual set of Y-Factors that are consistently updated by therapeutic category to reflect evolving market dynamics. The breadth and depth of data from TargetAdvantage enables pharma marketers to understand:

  • Who to target - Which physicians show the most responsiveness to each of the four forces (product, payor, promotion, patient) that drive treatment decisions? Do your target doctors ascribe equal importance to the attributes that make up each of these forces, or are some factors more influential than others?
  • Which message topics to communicate - Which message elements should you emphasize with a given doctor to deliver the greatest impact? Which topics will fail to resonate and thus waste valuable time?
  • How to most effectively promote to targeted physicians - As physician access becomes more restricted, which doctors on your call list will be most receptive to 'non-personal' forms of promotion? Which are likely to insist on personal, face-to-face support? To whom should sampling efforts be directed to maximize the ROI of this tactic?

Easy-to-use Software Further Helps Brand Teams KNOW-YSM
KNOW-Y, TargetAdvantage's new Web-based access tool, enables pharmaceutical decision-makers to view customized data through the clarifying lens of multiple Y-Factors, offering the flexibility to rank groups of target physicians on different variables or to dig deeper to understand an individual doctor's primary and secondary motivations for treatment decisions. Users can select from a group of criteria, including therapeutic category, specialty, population of interest (full data and/or call list), prescribing deciles, designated customer segmentations, and geography (standard or user-defined sales territories). TargetRx partners with clients to provide easy access to TargetAdvantage's data, as well as to offer expert consulting and advanced analytical services to drive more effective sales and marketing initiatives.

"With TargetAdvantage, we've not only responded to a critical market need for an advanced generation of prescriber information, but we've put it at the fingertips of the decision-makers who need this better insight to make confident and correct decisions pertaining to resource allocation and promotional effectiveness," said Craig Scott, President and CEO of TargetRx. "This is critical to making the successful transformation to a new and effective customer-focused commercial model in our industry. Combining the 'what' we know about prescribing with the 'why' - at the physician level - opens an entirely new dimension for pharmaceutical companies, ultimately enabling them to recognize the needs of individual physicians, optimize commercial strategies and improve brand performance."

For more information on TargetRx's products, please visit www.targetrx.com/trx/products or call 1.877.UKnowHow (877-856-6946).

About TargetRx

TargetRx provides pharmaceutical and biotech companies with unique insight into the true drivers of product choice and adoption for their brands, helping clients to confidently take the actions that will grow their businesses and help patients. Serving the majority of the top 30 pharmaceutical and biotech companies, TargetRx enables clients to significantly improve the launch of new products and indications, physician segmentation and targeting, creation of professional messaging and materials, and sales and marketing execution and effectiveness. All TargetRx solutions are powered by our AdvantageBuilder normative database and validated predictive models, created from capturing in-depth physician attitudes on the "four forces" of prescribing - product, payor, promotion and patient - on new launches, marketing campaigns and physician-rep interactions on over 500 pipeline and inline brands and modeling these attitudes against actual prescribing behavior. For more information, visit www.targetrx.com.

Media Contact:

Joe Ford
Phone: 215-444-8722
jford@targetrx.com