Analytical Wizards
Revolutionizing Healthcare Analytics with AI/ML

Pharma organizations have long struggled with disaggregated and de-identified data. No single source or sets of data are complete in themselves. Pharma organizations have had to piece together multiple data assets to understand the complexity and evolution of a dynamic, rapidly evolving treatment and market landscape for any given therapeutic area.

Moreover, the complexity and regulation around drug development and commercialization requires specialized business functions, each with their own analytical requirements to bring a drug to market. As such, healthcare analytics has been largely a manually-driven customized project-based approach, each business problem requiring an analytical solution addressed as an individual task. This slow and cumbersome process requiring multiple resources to execute results in delayed time to insights, lack of integrated insights, and slow ill-informed decision making, not to mention a lack of efficiency and scale.

Having experienced these challenges first-hand, the founders at Analytical Wizards, with decades of experience in the industry, foresaw the possibility for AI/ML-enabled technology to bring scale and efficiency to transform healthcare analytics and enable stakeholders to make timely data-informed business decisions.

Analytical Wizards, a global healthcare analytics company, was founded with the mission to revolutionize healthcare analytics by bringing unprecedented scale, efficiency, and speed to insights. “We are trying to enable a holistic view from disparate data sources to provide faster and more integrated insights for our clients in pharma and biotech, while bringing efficiencies and scale to their analytical processes,” says Ram Sharma, who is the founder, CEO, and chairman of Analytical Wizards. Analytical Wizards automates complex analytic models using algorithms that integrate and expedite big data mining using AI and ML power to uncover deep insights faster and cheaper.

A Largely Unfulfilled Promise

“Trends in the pharma industry demand efficiency in processes and a radical change in how drugs are developed and brought to market and commercialized,” says Jaya Subramaniam, chief strategy officer at Analytical Wizards. The era of Precision Medicine, emphasis on Real World data and evidence generation, the need to design trials for specific subpopulations, accelerate time to market, for real-time triggers to target commercial opportunities in a rapidly evolving competitive treatment landscape, all demand more sophisticated approaches to analytics, harnessing the predictive power of AI/ML, and speed and scalable efficiency of technology.

Analytical Wizards has built two proprietary platforms: WIZ, an omnichannel promotion analytics platform, and IZE, an insights engine. Both WIZ and IZE are scalable, customizable, efficient solutions that integrate seamlessly with any legacy IT environment and enable parallel processing and merging of divergent data sets, dynamic analysis, and powerful visualizations.

Accelerating Performance and Optimizing Investments

By enabling automation of real-time, multi-touch attribution and optimization of marketing promotions at the customer level, WIZ facilitates data-driven decision-making to optimize marketing and promotional activity. The platform has multiple modules, including a channel attributor that identifies and measures historical promotional impact and creates response curves.

Other modules include test and control, performance dashboard, scenario planner, customer profile or a dynamic segmentation tool, and campaign enhancer, a predictive analytics tool that identifies key drivers of engagement and performance.

We are trying to enable a holistic view from disparate data sources to provide faster and more integrated insights for our clients in pharma and biotech, while bringing efficiencies and scale to their analytical processes

The IZE insights engine empowers clinical and commercial teams to drive performance by integrating, processing, and analyzing big data with a self-service tool for custom queries. IZE enables teams to proactively predict, identify, and target emerging patients and patient-level outcomes. “Similar to WIZ, IZE too has different modules that serve different use cases. For example, the Opportunity Assessment module quantifies and dynamically tracks the patient journey, helps identify leverage points, and create a strategic forecast,” explains Jason Carlin, principal at Analytical Wizards. “The IZE Trial Accelerator module makes clinical trial recruitment more efficient and effective. In a nutshell, both platforms drive efficiencies and deliver significant value to pharma and biotech businesses.”

The WIZE decision engine optimizes and enables real-time deployment of the next best engagement across tactics for a brand and across multiple tactics for a portfolio to integrate triggers into any legacy CRM system for Field Force and NPP deployment. It utilizes a multi-factorial optimization algorithm that enables client-specified, customized business rules and includes a dynamic targeting module that enables instant target lists based on any combination of criteria that a business owner requires. WIZE is scalable, automated, and efficient at the back end while retaining full flexibility for client needs and business rules at the front end and seamlessly integrates into any legacy CRM environment.

A Perfect Recipe for Success

Analytical Wizards’ scalable offerings are a cut above the rest, given how flexible and customizable deploying them is. Designed to be transparent, easily customizable, visually powerful with the ability to export charts and data, the technology is built to seamlessly integrate with legacy systems at most pharma companies. Elucidating the flexibility aspect, Carlin says, “Our solutions can be licensed as self-service tools, which works well for larger organizations that have in-house experts with analytical capabilities to use the tools themselves. If not, we offer a managed service combination wherein the tools are deployed within the client environment while we provide consultative support—both from a training perspective as well as for utilizing and deriving insights on a regular basis.”

Analytics Wizards also offers two other deployment options: one, wherein the team utilizes the tools and platforms externally and provides clients with the triggers and insights regularly, and another project-based approach, where the company provides very specific project and resource-based deployments. “We offer multiple options to clients based on individual business needs and organizational demands,” states Subramaniam.

Another notable differentiator is that the Analytical Wizards team integrates life science domain expertise with data scientists to provide an unmatched level of support to clients. “Our unique mix of skills—data science, domain expertise, technology, and high touch customer service is what makes us stand out among our peers,” asserts Sharma. Also, data-agnostic solutions enable harnessing all relevant data assets depending on the business problem.

Analytics Wizards’ unique value proposition can be illustrated with a recent client success story. The pharma client was recruiting patients for a phase III clinical trial; even after the first year were only at 20 percent of their goal. “They realized that current pace would take them a really long time to complete. This prompted them to engage with us. We ended up creating predictive algorithms to predict investigators and sites with eligible patients that would be quickest at enrolling patients,” mentions Carlin. Consequently, they were able to finish the other 80 percent of recruitment in a year, with an estimated cost savings of 10 million dollars and an even bigger business impact of an expedited market entry, finishing the phase three trial sooner, and getting FDA approval sooner.

Keeping Pace with Innovation

Rapid growth has been a hallmark of the Analytical Wizards, which has doubled its revenues every year since its inception. In fact, post-COVID, the firm grew by 110 percent in bookings while revenue improved by 35 percent year over year. The company was also able to increase its multi-year contracts and add numerous new clients. Currently in their sixth year, Analytical Wizards is working with over 15 different partners across 30 countries.

As the next step, the firm is planning to enhance the applicability of its solutions for the managed care and payer teams. “We are also looking at other analytical solutions within the research and development side. The long-term vision is to address the broader healthcare space, helping potential payers and providers as well as pharmacy and distribution players benefit from our scalable solutions,” asserts Subramaniam. For the WIZ and WIZE platforms, Analytical Wizards plans to reap the full potential by scaling their capabilities to fit other verticals such as retail, FMCG, CPG, and BFSI. “We will continue to deliver what customers value most: control, transparency and speed,” wraps up Sharma.