2018 Annual Conference

April 29 – May 2, 2018
Grand Hyatt San Antonio
San Antonio, Texas
In April, pharma analytics representatives from across the US met at the PMSA Annual Conference to discuss current issues and trends, network, and have some fun. The 2018 conference was held in San Antonio, Texas and attracted 254 attendees from pharma manufacturers and their vendor partners and consultants.
Best Podium Presentation
Each year, PMSA gives the Best Podium Presenter Award to the highest ranked presentation as selected by conference attendees. Attendees were asked to rank all podium presenters based on several criteria -- insightfullness and applicability of the presentation, ability of the speaker to engage with the audience, and extent to which expectations were met.
The presentation "Computational, Cloud-Based Approaches to Look-Alike Analyses for Market Sizing, Targeting, Patient Finder and Resource Allocation", presented by Sandy Balkin, Sanofi and Vijay Chovatiya, Analytical Wizards, was selected by attendees as the best overall podium presentation. Click here to view the abstract. The runner-up presentation was "From Unstructured to Structured Data: Can Machine Learning Help Make Sense of EMR/EHR Data?" presented by Ashish Sharma, and Kaiwen Zhong, Axtria.

Best Poster Presentation
For the 2018 Conference, PMSA debuted interactive electronic poster screens for its annual poster presentation session. The winner of the 2018 PMSA Best Poster Presentation Award was "Measuring Health System Patient Flow for Effective Targeting", presented by Shubham Lahoti, Associate Director, Data Science, Axtria, Inc. Click here to view the abstract.

The debut of the PMSA electronic poster presentations
Lifetime Achievement Award
The 2018 PMSA Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Thomas Foster and Jerry Rosenblatt, for their contributions to PMSA and the pharma analytics community. Click here to read more about their history in the pharma data analytics industry.

Lifetime Achievement Award recipients Thomas Foster and Jerry Rosenblatt
Conference Highlights
The conference featured three keynote addresses. Day one kicked off with a presentation on Courageous Leadership from professional speaker Cindy Solomon. Day Two featured two keynote speakers, April Todd, Senior Vice President, Avalere and Mimi Huizinga, VP, Head Strategic Data and Digital,Novartis.
Day Two's panel session included a group roundtable activity, at which attendees split up into 15 groups and discussed industry trends, gaps between vision and reality, and keys to future success. Click here to view polling results from the panel/roundtable session.

Cindy Solmon at the opening session of the PMSA conference

Networking opportunities abound in the PMSA Exhibit Hall

Attendees learn line dancing skills at the Monday night social event at the Buckhorn Saloon

New committee volunteers were recruited during the annual Membership Meeting

Attendees worked on group problem solving during the Roundtable Session
Sunday, April 29, 2018 | |
1:00 p.m.- 5:00 p.m. | Conference Tutorial: The Fundamentals and Progression of Digital Analytics in Healthcare Ira Haimowitz, Vice President, Product Strategy, Crossix Alina Levin, Senior Director, Crossix This four-hour session offers an in-depth look at a specific topic of interest to the PMSA community. This event is free to manufacturer attendees. Pre-registration is required; you may select this event during the online registration process. |
6:30 p.m.- 9:00 p.m. | Welcome Reception |
Monday, April 30, 2018 |
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7:15 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. | Breakfast |
8:15 a.m. - 8:25 a.m. | Welcome Karthik Chidambaram, PMSA President |
8:25 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. | Keynote Presentation: Creating a Culture of Courage: The
New Leadership Challenge Cindy Solomon |
9:45 a.m. - 10:15 a.m. | Break and Vendor Fair |
10:15 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. | General Session 1: From Unstructured to Structured Data: Can Machine Learning Help Make Sense of EMR/EHR Data?
Ashish Sharma, Principal, Axtria Kaiwen Zhong, Senior Associate, Axtria |
11:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. |
General Session 2: The (So Far) Illusive Promise of Predictive, Real-Time Marketing in Pharma/Biotech: Root Causes of Failures and Ingredients for Success
Markus Hauser, CEO Enginologi Antonio Melo, Program Leader, Sage Therapeutics |
11:45 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. | Lunch and VENDOR FAIR/Poster Session Click here to review poster presentation details |
1:30 p.m.- 2:15 p.m. | General Session 3: What is the Value of Customer Experience in Pharma?
Prasanna Kumar, Manager, ZS Associates |
2:15 p.m.- 3:00 p.m. | General Session 4: The Strategic Use of Analytics for Business Impact: Multi-Channel Dashboard
Paul Rabideau, Sr. Advisor, KMK Consulting Julia Brodsky, Executive Director, Data Capabilities, Novartis Oncology Tatiana Sorokina, Associate Director, Digital & Advanced Analytics, Novartis Oncology |
3:00 p.m.- 3:30 p.m. | Break and Vendor Fair |
3:30 p.m.- 4:15 p.m. | General Session 5:
Getting Launch Tracking Right - How to Design an Effective Cross-Functional New Product Launch Tracker
Yu-Chen Chen, Genentech Gagan Bhatia, DataStride Solutions |
4:15 p.m.- 4:30 p.m. | Housekeeping and Announcements |
4:30 p.m.- 5:00 p.m. | Poster Judging and Reception Wine and light refreshments served. |
5:00 p.m.- 5:30 p.m. | Annual Membership Meeting |
6:30 p.m.-10:00 p.m. | Offsite Event: River Cruise and Buckhorn Saloon Step aboard a River Cruising Barge for an exciting and entertaining narrative of the rich history of the San Antonio River on your way to the Buckhorn Saloon! For over 131 years, The Buckhorn Saloon has been known as a gathering place for good conversation, great food and spectacular exhibits. Please meet at the Grand Hyatt Riverwalk Entrance at 6:30pm for a river barge ride to the Buckhorn Saloon. |
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 |
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7:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. | Breakfast |
8:00 a.m. - 8:45 a.m. | Keynote Presentation: Emerging Innovations in
Value-Based Analytics April Todd, Senior Vice President, Avalere |
8:45 a.m.- 9:30 a.m. |
Keynote Presentation: The Evolving Landscape of Pharma Analytics Mimi Huizinga, VP, Head Strategic Data and Digital,Novartis |
9:30 a.m.- 9:45 a.m. | PMSA Lifetime Achievement Award |
9:45 a.m.- 10:15 a.m. | Break and Vendor Fair |
10:15 a.m.- 11:00 a.m. |
TRACK A: NEXT GENERATION ANALYTICS AI Can Give Pharma Companies a Competitive Edge: Here's How! Dharmendra Sahay, Principal, ZS Associates Arun Shastri, Principal, ZS Associates TRACK B: PATIENT ANALYTICS Strengthening the Patient Journey with Emotional Insights via Social Analytics Jeff Greene, VP Digital Strategy & Insights, DRG |
11:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. |
TRACK A: NEXT GENERATION ANALYTICS Winning With Analytics When The Chips Are Stacked Against You: A Novel High-Dimensional Hybrid Machine Learning Approach Identifying High-Value Rare Disease Specialists Jack Lin, Actelion Rick Rosenthal, Symphony Health Tim Hare, Senior Manager, Symphony Health TRACK B: PATIENT ANALYTICS Optimizing Physician Targeting to Find Undiagnosed Patients: An Application of Advanced Machine Learning Methods to Hepititis C Orla Doyle, Senior Data Scientist, IQVIA Steven Laux, Principal in Predictive Analytics, IQVIA |
11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. | Lunch and VENDOR FAIR/Poster Session Click here to review poster presentation details |
1:45 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. |
TRACK A: NEXT GENERATION ANALYTICS Use Machine Learning to Better Identify Physician Targets for New Product Launches JP Tsang, President, Bayser Shunmugam Mohan, Principal Consultant, Bayser TRACK B: PATIENT ANALYTICS Closing the Loop: Leveraging Behavioral Data for More Effective Patient Segmentation Adam Dubrow, Crossix Mark Schulman, Crossix |
2:30 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. |
TRACK A: NEXT GENERATION ANALYTICS Just What the Doctor Ordered: Robust Insights to Fuel HCP Digital Campaign Measurement Ira Haimowitz, Ph.D., VP, Product Strategy, Crossix TRACK B: PATIENT ANALYTICS Predicting Patient Severity: Secondary Data Based Approach and a Case Study Wesley Heeter, Genentech Mukulita Bapat, ZS Associates |
3:15 p.m.- 3:30 p.m. | Break and Vendor Fair |
3:30 p.m.- 5:00 p.m. | General Session 7: Next Generation Analytics Panel Discussion and Roundtables
Moderator: Devesh Verma, Ph.D., Principal, Axtria Panelists: Anton Berisha, MD, Senior Director, Clinical Analytics & Innovation, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Health Care Jeff Greene, VP Digital Strategy & Insights (DRG Digital) Ajit Menon, Sr. Director, Commercial Innovation, Janssen North America Kingston Smith, Managing Director, Accenture Cynthia Dilley, Head of New Patient Value Focus, UCB |
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 |
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7:00 a.m. - 8:00 a.m. | Breakfast |
8:00 a.m. - 8:15 a.m. | Final Day Announcements |
8:15 a.m.- 9:00 a.m. |
General Session 8: Measuring Direct and Indirect Influence of Account Managers
David Wood, Ph.D., Axtria Shubham Lahoti, Axtria, Inc. |
9:00 a.m.- 9:45 a.m. |
General Session 9: Computational, Cloud-Based Approaches to Look- Alike Analyses for Market Sizing, Targeting, Patient Finder and Resource Allocation
WINNER: BEST PODIUM PRESENTATION Sandy Balkin, Senior Director Global Analytics COE, Sanofi Vijay Chovatiya, Data Scientist, Analytical Wizards The PCSK-9 Inhibitor class of cholesterol-reducing drugs has faced unprecedented payer scrutiny resulting in only about one in five prescriptions approved within 24 hours and about one-third of prescriptions that were ultimately approved, never picked up. Our hypothesis is that the information contained in the characteristics and complete medical histories of those patients that did successfully obtain payer reimbursement for a PCSK9 therapy can be identified using statistical feature identification methods and leveraged to size the addressable or “reimbursable” market, identify the geographies and possibly physicians seeing these patients that look reimbursable and help identify the resources required to get past prior authorizations, rejections and possible reversals. The ability to perform the computationally sophisticated analytics necessary to identify patients that look just like those who are on a PCSK-9 Inhibitor, but have not yet received a prescription, is only recently possible due to the general availability of open and closed patient claims data, which include robust lab results, and the computation power afforded by cloud based analytic platforms like AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, Apache Spark and machine learning libraries, such as H2O, that can be efficiently deployed across multiple CPUs and computational clusters. This presentation will describe one such approach, called Look-Alike Analysis, and how we developed a predictive model on a closed claims database, which includes all interactions for a representative subset of patients, and applied it to an open claims database, which has some data missing not at random, but covers many more lives and geographic details. The results can be used for many traditional commercial activities including market sizing, forecasting, segmentation and targeting. |
9:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. | Break and Vendor Fair |
10:00 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. | General Session 10: Marketing Science for Portfolio Analyses & Optimization
Sanjay K. Rao, Ph.D. , Vice President, Strategic Research Insights, Inc. |
10:45 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. | General Session 11: Innovative Machine Learning Methods To Enhance Accuracy and Effectiveness Of Physician Alert
Yilian Yuan, VP, Stats & Adv Analytics, Advanced Analytics, IQVIA Li Zhou, Director, Advanced Analytics, SDI Service Delivery, IQVIA Yunlong Wang, Manager, Advanced Analytics, IQVIA |
11:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. | Conference Wrap-Up and Prize Giveaways |