The Critical Role of Data Visualization in Rebate Management

In the ultra-competitive pharmaceutical industry, time to market is the most critical factor for enhancing revenue and increasing profitability. The time frame to get drugs into the market can be anywhere between seven and nine years, so anything that can be done to increase the time to business answer is a proposition many pharma manufacturers are very eager to explore.

If your rebate contract teams are still spending hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours every quarter on rebate landscape updates to support your business stakeholders in better understanding critical business data, there is now a revolutionary way to manage this process – one where rebate contract analytics no longer take days or weeks to produce. Where risk assessment isn’t a tedious task, but an automated process. Where questions about contracts can be answered in minutes, not hours or days.

This is the world that AI makes possible for today’s modern rebate contract managers in the pharmaceutical industry.

In this article, I’m going to explore how AI-powered data analytics are changing the game in the management of rebate contracts, allowing you to visualize important sales and contract data in seconds. The result is a faster, more comprehensive and accurate view of your business position as defined by contracted language.

The Role of AI in Rebate Management

If you work in the world of pharma rebate contracts, you know that managing these contracts is an extremely complex process.

People working in this field often find themselves in situations where they don’t have visibility into rebate contract information across their entire data estate. Furthermore, the visibility they do have may be lacking due to missing or inaccurate metadata or only achievable by ad-hoc manual searches and investigations across multiple systems. This impacts crucial aspects like time-to-information, distribution, and competitive advantage.

Manually combing through thousands of documents across various repositories isn’t a scalable or sustainable solution when the number of contracts you manage numbers in the tens of thousands. This is why more pharma companies are implementing AI-powered solutions to revolutionize this process.

In the EncompaaS platform for example, we use a combination of AI technologies to scan the content of contracts and intelligently extract hundreds of data properties, such as Drug Name, Approved Product Units and Shipping Terms, apply this as structured metadata to the contracts.

Extracted data properties are indexable, searchable and can be clicked on to jump instantly to those sections in the contract.

By eliminating tedious manual processing, this allows teams to focus on more strategic tasks such as nurturing vendor relationships, proactively managing contract renewals, and identifying market gaps and new opportunities.

In short, using AI removes the heavy lifting and provides the information you need almost instantly.

The Role of Analytics in Rebate Management

Once you’ve automated the extraction and analysis of rebate contract data, the next step is to visualize this in an easy-to-understand way.

In the EncompaaS platform, you can access all agreements and amendments pertaining to rebate contracts in a single, real-time view.

EncompaaS accurately reflects your current contract position by rolling up the original contract and all changes by amendments.

The extracted data can also be used to create reports and dashboards for specific users. This could include things like product name and strength, eligibility conditions, dispute windows, look back period, 340B utilization and more.

In the below Sales and Marketing Dashboard, you can identify churn risk and growth opportunities hiding in contracts. By using the interactive map, you can drill down into contracts by location, filter by top performing products to view revenue at risk by expiry date and inspect products that are due to expire to see their total value.

These easy-to-use visualizations enable different stakeholders in your business to locate and take advantage of this information in real time. This allows them to connect the dots between contracted agreements and business performance to preserve profitability, revenue generation, sales targets and improve competitive position.

You can drill down on the data that matters to you, zeroing in on specific customers, products and regions to get specific answers to your questions. Data can be presented according to your role at the company. If you are a contract manager, the data visualization supports that view. Product managers can see their data from a management perspective. And revenue managers can track sales performance against contract terms and conditions.

For example, you might be interested in understanding who your current contracts are with and the tiered pricing within these contracts to improve drug distribution. If an insurance company sells 10,000 doses of 5 milligram Stelara, and the next 10,000 doses they sell is offered at a lesser price, your pharma rep can drill down into these contracts, identify that they’re 2,000 doses away from hitting the next tier, and come up with a program to incentivize the insurance company to move those 2,000 doses in order to get them qualified for the next tier.

If you tried to do this manually, it would take weeks or months to get tiered pricing information into a spreadsheet – even if you allocated 30 people to this task.

At EncompaaS, we automate much of this process and provide you with the ability to understand your commercial position on every drug, so you can make better business decisions on pricing changes, incentive schemes and advertising strategies to create visibility, drive consumer demand and enhance distribution.