The Startup Tracking ‘Valuable’ Doctors for Big Pharma

Physicians are worth billions of dollars to drugmakers, who see the prescription pad as a path to profits. But it’s growing harder for Big Pharma to get doctors’ appointments. Since 2010, Obamacare has slowly curbed the mass travel junkets and fancy meals that drug companies once used to sway the doctors most valuable to their efforts to sell products.

Pharmaceutical companies are now searching for ways to refine their marketing efforts, to target the doctors most compatible with the medications they’re pitching. “You’re desperate for data to make those key decisions,” says Lance Scott, a former marketing manager at medical-device maker Abbott Laboratories. “But while there’s lots of data out there, it’s really challenging to bring it together.” Scott’s now chief executive officer of Zephyr Health, a data analytics startup promising to help drugmakers identify key medical personnel and find ways to approach them.