When algorithms outperform instinct: Inside analytics strategy that transformed pharmaceutical launch

A pharmaceutical launch begins with a plan. The market rarely follows it perfectly.

Some physicians respond faster than expected. Others require more information. Hospitals that appear similar on paper behave differently once a product enters the market. Sometimes the obstacle to adoption is not the one the commercial team expected to encounter.

For Isaac Awulu, a pharmacist and Medical Representative with Novartis Nigeria, that uncertainty became one of the central questions surrounding the 2024 Nigerian launch of SYBRAVA.

The product was entering a competitive dyslipidemia market and carried a price of more than ₦1 million per dose, making decisions about where and how to concentrate launch activity particularly important.

Isaac’s response was to spend less time asking whether the launch plan was being executed exactly as designed and more time examining what the market itself was beginning to show.

“Once a product is in the market, you start getting information that didn’t exist when the plan was written,” Isaac said. “The question is whether you use that information quickly enough to change what you’re doing.”

That put analytics at the center of his approach.

Looking Below the Regional Average

One of Isaac’s concerns was that broad territory numbers could hide meaningful differences between accounts.

A region might appear to be progressing well overall while individual hospitals, physician groups or patient populations behaved very differently underneath the average.

Isaac began examining customer and market information at a more granular level.

Specialty, patient population, dyslipidemia caseload, account potential and accessibility were among the factors used to distinguish physicians and institutions. The point was not simply to rank customers. It was to understand where the launch was encountering different conditions and what those differences meant for commercial activity.

Dr Okechukwu Uzoma, a Lagos-based healthcare market analyst familiar with pharmaceutical commercialization trends, said that is where analytics can change the quality of a launch decision.

“The difference between intuition and analytics is that analytics show you what’s actually happening,” Uzoma said. “When companies start using real-time insights instead of assumptions, the entire launch strategy becomes more precise.”

For Isaac, the analysis began changing questions in the field.

Which accounts warranted more attention? Where was educational engagement gaining traction? Where were barriers appearing? And were some institutions being prioritized because of historical assumptions rather than what current information showed?

The answers influenced how attention was distributed across the Eastern market.

A Different Signal Emerges

But one of the more consequential findings was not about physician prioritization at all.

It concerned patients.

Isaac began seeing a disconnect between the commercial opportunity identified around certain accounts and whether patients with elevated cardiovascular risk were being recognized for further assessment.

Someone can live with cardiovascular risk without obvious symptoms. Lipid measurements provide physicians with one part of the information used to assess that risk, but the opportunity to identify it depends in part on patients actually being tested.

That observation pushed the launch team toward a different kind of intervention.

Isaac proposed working with healthcare facilities to expand opportunities for lipid-profile testing, giving participating physicians additional information that could help identify patients requiring closer cardiovascular assessment.

The testing included total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol and triglycerides.

It was not designed to determine treatment or identify patients for a particular medicine. Those decisions remained with treating physicians.

“The commercial analysis pointed us toward a clinical-access question,” Isaac said. “We could identify an institution that looked important for the launch, but that didn’t necessarily mean the patients at risk were being identified.”

Instead of producing only a different call plan or another customer segment, the analysis had exposed a barrier further upstream in the patient journey.

What Analytics Is For

Customer segmentation is not new to pharmaceutical marketing. The more interesting question is what happens after customers have been segmented.

Taiwo Ayodele, a pharmaceutical marketing consultant who advises multinational drug companies across West Africa, said the usefulness of analytics ultimately depends on whether it changes how companies engage healthcare professionals.

“Healthcare professionals today expect information that is relevant and evidence-driven,” Ayodele said. “Analytics help companies understand what doctors actually need, rather than guessing.”

In Isaac’s market, information about accounts began affecting decisions about physician engagement, institutional attention, educational activity and where patient-identification efforts could be useful.

“You can produce a very sophisticated analysis that changes nothing,” Isaac said. “For me, the useful question was always what we were going to do differently because of what the information showed.”

The approach coincided with a strong opening period for SYBRAVA in the Eastern market, where commercial performance ran ahead of expectations despite the access challenges surrounding the product.

But the more interesting test came later.

When a Local Approach Travels

As the launch developed, elements of the approach used in the Eastern market began appearing in SYBRAVA activities elsewhere in Nigeria.

That movement suggested that some of the questions Isaac had been asking locally were relevant beyond his immediate market.

Regional pharmaceutical teams work close to the physicians and institutions where national launch plans ultimately meet real-world differences in patient populations, infrastructure and access. That proximity can produce information that is difficult to see from an aggregate national view.

Dr Odemona Glory, a healthcare systems researcher at the University of Lagos, described analytics as useful precisely because it can supplement rather than replace professional judgment.

“Algorithms don’t replace human expertise,” she said. “But they enhance it by revealing patterns that humans might miss.”

Isaac’s experience during the SYBRAVA launch reflects that distinction.

The analysis did not prescribe medicines. It did not replace physicians, medical colleagues or the commercial teams working directly with customers.

What it did was make differences easier to see.

Some of those differences concerned customers. Others concerned institutions. One eventually led to a question about whether enough opportunities existed for cardiovascular risk to be identified in the first place.

For Isaac, that is what makes analytics useful in pharmaceutical commercialization.

“The value isn’t having more data,” he said. “It’s seeing something in the data that changes the next decision.”

In Eastern Nigeria, some of those decisions concerned where to concentrate commercial effort.

One of them led somewhere less obvious: to the patients the market analysis suggested might otherwise remain unseen.