An Rx for Pharma CRM

Oracle Corp. and Dendrite International Inc. this week announced completion of a jointly developed CRM solution for the pharmaceutical market. Dendrite, which focuses only on delivering CRM solutions to the pharmaceutical industry, contributes its knowledge of the market and specialized pharma analytical models to the solution. Oracle's brings its architecture, data warehousing, and business intelligence capabilities. The integration of the Oracle E-Business Suite 11i with Dendrite's WebForce application, links sales, marketing, and service channels with back-end applications such as procurement, financials, and human resources. The CRM solution features an open architecture that enables customers to implement Dendrite or Oracle products to interface with existing software applications. The two companies have also formed joint pharmaceutical sales and product integration teams, and a collaborative marketing program to support the solution. Using Dendrite's analysis of anonymous patient drug-dispensing data, received from a consortium of nearly half of the nation's chain and independent pharmacies, drug manufacturers can evaluate patient and prescriber behavior patterns. This enables pharmaceutical representatives and marketers to target precise messages to the right prescriber. "By providing a sound understanding of physicians' behavior and needs, Dendrite's sophisticated analytics will help ensure the proper integration of all communication channels between the drug company and the physician--ultimately ensuring, for the first time, that maximum ROI from CRM is fully achieved," says Dendrite Chairman and CEO John Bailye. A recent study shows that adoption rate of CRM at pharmaceutical companies is two-thirds higher than that of other businesses, due to a rapid embracing of CRM analytics. Pharma takes advantage of CRM about two-thirds more than other fields, with 60 percent of drug companies currently rolling out or having implemented CRM, contrasted with 38 percent of other global companies, according to a recent report by Forrester Research Inc.