Zephyr Health introduces a new IT tool for product life-cycle management

Coming out of the “big data” and cloud-computing worlds, there is an evolving and as-yet unnamed new type of IT service; Zephyr Health calls its version “insights as a service;” others use the term predictive analytics. In any case, the San Francisco company, with products already in use at most major pharma companies, is launching Illuminate, which it says represents its next generation of analytics capabilities for clinical and commercial operations in life sciences.

According to the company, Illuminate gather disparate public and private data—health system affiliations, prescriber activity, manufacturer sales and promotion data and others—and unites them into a unified picture of the marketplace for drugs, devices and related therapies. The system is especially attuned to new product launch activity: “Illuminate maximizes time to market for life sciences companies and provides market metrics to instrument their business with facts at every stage of product development, launch and commercialization," said William King, president, in a statement.

Another feature of Illuminate is a Recommendation Engine, which clients can use to make predictive analysis of their data. In this regard, the Zephyr product is similar to efforts by others, such as Veeva’s Suggestions solution or Shyft Analytics' (Waltham, MA) Real World Evidence offering, to guide clients through the growing thicket of data sources now available. Some of these tools are valuable complements to the CRM systems that sales reps can use in the field; other implementations guide the home office in areas like territory management, KOL relationships and market access issues with payers.