Cegedim-Dendrite buys SK&A Information Services, looks to strengthen spend reporting

In acquiring the Irvine, CA-based database provider, Cegedim Dendrite (Bedminster, NJ) will expect right off to continue growing SK&A’s service for verifying contact information with 800,000 healthcare providers, and will integrate that information into the OneKey service, its existing database of providers. OneKey is used to locate healthcare providers in 80 nations. But down the road, according to Bill Buzzeo, manager of market access at Cegidim Dendrite, the SK&A database will be useful for solving another industry problem: identifying and tracking the ever-shifting professional affiliations of prescribers and other pharmaceutical purchasers. This will be useful both for managing aggregate spending reports (a growing requirement among states) and for addressing the nagging problems of resolving conflicting or erroneous information in business affiliations like group purchasing organizations (GPOs).

Dave Escalante, president of SK&A, notes that simply tracking where providers are and how they can be reached is no trivial task; “there’s a 15-18% turnover in contact information annually, and the process of tracking this across 800,000 providers is a challenge.” SK&A touts its process of contacting all providers by telephone at least twice a year, and over the past three years, the company has increased its pharma clients from two to 22.

Starting a year ago, SK&A began obtaining additional information on business and professional relationships among prescribers, such as the professional societies they belong to, or the GPO that their business office might use. This information, in turn, will become valuable for Cegedim-Dendrite offerings like State Guardian and Nucleus Pharma, that Buzzeo’s group manages. Those services are helpful for creating master data lists for managing aggregate spending, PDMA compliance and other marketing reporting requirements.