Affiliation and hierarchy management in pharma

Decision-making power in U.S. life sciences organizations is shifting away from individual healthcare providers (HCPs) and toward organized customers—health systems, payers, group purchasing organizations (GPOs) and pharmacy benefit managers acting as consolidated entities.

For pharmaceutical companies, this means the traditional HCP-centric go-to-market model is no longer sufficient. Influence now sits with organizations, not individuals, and that influence is not evenly distributed: the relative importance of payers, providers, GPOs and specialty pharmacies shifts depending on therapy area (TA) and how a product is reimbursed (pharmacy benefit, medical benefit or drug).

Engaging organized customers effectively requires a commercial model built around organizational relationships and hierarchies—not just clinician-level detail.

This paper discusses how adapting to the shift toward organized customers requires solving the underlying data challenge first. We propose a framework for the account hierarchy and affiliations infrastructure needed to support pharma commercial models going forward.

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