Episode Details

Why does a single cardiologist show up as six separate entities across a pharma company's CRM, purchased claims data and analytics warehouse, and what does that cost? The position here is blunt: identity resolution is not a tool purchase, it is plumbing. Bad matching splits one high prescriber into six low ones, which skews sample allocation, wastes temperature controlled product, and can hide adverse event patterns in pharmacovigilance reporting that regulators will not excuse.

You get a working approach: make the federal NPI registry the source of truth, run nightly matches, write down survivorship rules, and name one accountable owner with budget for the prescriber master record. References include DBT Labs and MIT Sloan Management Review, plus a master data example at Novartis.

Key takeaways

• Make the federal NPI registry the source of truth for prescriber identity and force every other system to point at it.
• Run a match against the federal file nightly instead of treating deduplication as a one-off project that decays within 18 months.
• Write down explicit survivorship rules so you know which record wins when two versions disagree on address or name.
• Name one person accountable for the prescriber master record, with budget, before buying any matching tool.
• Pull every record for your top 10 prescribers by revenue by hand and count the duplicates to get the dollar figure your board needs.

Chapters
0:00 Six records for one cardiologist
1:09 Sampling waste from split prescriber records
2:02 Pharmacovigilance risk and regulator warning letters
2:53 Identity as plumbing: NPI golden record
3:51 Naming an owner for prescriber master data
4:12 Monday morning audit of top 10 prescribers

Go deeper, free lessons

• Master Data Management in practice: styles, tools, and the Golden Record
• Data quality metrics that matter: completeness, latency and lineage
• Mapping the pharma data landscape: sources, vendors and standards
• Consent, de-identification and the limits of anonymous data
• Marketing on a leash: promotional compliance and the anti-kickback minefield

Full article and transcript: https://www.mba-training.com/blog/hcp-patient-identity-resolution-pharma

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