Who We Are

We believe any commercial and medical strategy must start with the patient.  Beyond rhetoric, understanding the attributes, behaviors, demographics, locational aspects, assess barriers, and other factors will maximize patient access.  Consider, for example, the burden of travel on patients with regards treatment or trial access.  Or HCP knowledge gaps for a condition which may impact access. 

This example describes the relative risk rates for a condition with the estimated travel distance within 1 hour of a clinical trial site based on google traffic data to estimate relative patient access.

This model describes patient and HCP awareness of a condition adjusted for population.  Access to public transportation (rail lines) and key centers of excellence are also mapped to suggest relative degree of patient access.

We also lead discovery and assessment programs across genes, biomarkers, and other areas to assess and illustrate key relationships.  This model shows the relationship between the top 30 genes most often mutated in breast cancer AND BRCA1 based on analysis of >200,000 publications.  

We use a variety of tools including Google Big Query, Connected Sheets, and Data Studio to analyze and visualize our models.  

We often design a series of dynamic charts and analysis to enable advanced discovery. 

 While working closely with KOL Database & Analytics providers, True North further advances your strategy thru design of web-based geospatial models.  These model help with resource deployment & territory analysis, patient advocacy identification, digital asset / web deployment, strategy visualization, patient access, and site of care selection.  We can also model referral patterns to visually track the patient journey from diagnosis to treatment by city.

This dynamic graphic visualizes the referral pathway for a condition.  It will also helps identify emerging and high impact thought leaders

We have experience across North America, EU, and Asia.  This model describes scientific influencer locations for a condition across EU based on publications.

Based on field interactions captured in your CRM, we design and deploy NLP (natural language processing) MSL free text analysis adapted to each TA/ condition. With 40+ unique analyses available, we design a custom ontology and apply scientific natural language algorithms (NLP) to distill key insights, trends, themes, and catalysts from your raw data

Interested in measuring impact?  So are we.  True North has extensive experience designing and deploying KPI/ Metrics dashboards within Medical Affairs & Commercial

We also develop dynamic reporting based on your CRM data which include longitudinal trends, co-occurrence analysis, trends by stakeholder group, and sentiment / perception analysis

One of the fundamental activities in Medical Affairs is CME (Continuing Medical Education). CME serves a critical purpose to address key HCP educational gaps in order to ensure appropriate use of the treatments.  Currently, HCP gaps are typically identified through surveys, advisory boards, internal discussion, and subjective opinions.  However, True North is pioneering the use of AI, big data models, and NLP to identify gaps yielding 12X efficiency gains with more objective evidence.

Using Google Life Sciences tools, True North will develop a custom machine learning algorithm to predict educational gaps for your stakeholders.  Once developed, this can be applied to more than 2,000,000 full text documents to discover trends in <18 hours.

We also design dozens of analyses to assess growth, frequency, consistency, syntax, and trends for outcome measures most closely liked with educational gaps.  The goal is to prioritize gaps most likely to impact patient outcomes.

Following hand curation of relevant content, we design and deploy customized web-based tools to measure trends, gaps, test hypotheses, and allow for dynamic search of Congress Abstracts from the previous 5-10 years.  Typically, the platform contains >250,000 abstracts.  These tools help prioritize Congresses, support publication planning, track thought leaders, support competitive intelligence, and alert Medical & Commercial teams to emerging trends.  In addition, these platforms ensure objective, data driven decision making during annual scientific strategy planning.

The platform allows for identification of specific, targeted Congress abstracts in < 1.8 seconds with direct link to source content.

We can also deploy from a sample of >30 dynamic visualizations which allow the user to transverse technical and scientific content quickly

In order to improve "voice of the patient", we analyze social media to discovery trends, catalysts, sentiment / perception by topic, influencers, competitive intelligence, and data gaps.  In addition, we identify posts with highest impact, engagement, and influence.  All major platforms are analyzed including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and blogs.

We track posts from most influential users, those with highest volume, and with highest impact.  

We also apply natural language processing to extract key themes, interested, and challenges for patients & the general community

We recently completed a project using Google search data related to COVID-19. The models incorporate aggregated search activity by day from key locations across the globe.  Over 400 symptoms are aggregated and tracked. The models utilize “differential privacy” which is a cutting edge technique to add randomness to the data for privacy purposes while preserving data quality.  The result is the ability to better predict disease spread, outbreaks, assess symptom co-morbidities, assess various conditions on local level, advance population health research, and accelerate government response with tailored tactics

This is an “anxiety” index across the US by day across 2020. Note the spike related to the US election in Nov 2020.  Analysis is based on google search trends.

This a breakdown of “anxiety” related searches across the US by state by day related to the US election.  Note the spike across all US states in Nov 2020.

In addition to robust market size and key opinion leader (KOL) insights from commercial claims analysis, True North Solutions leads locational-based analysis to further advance your strategy and better leverage your data investment.  These models can be used to prioritize KOLs, deploy resources more effectively, develop hyper-accurate market size estimates, visualize impact of external events, and engage in visual scenario planning.  

This model visualizes key opinion leaders based on claims data, but adds referral analysis and traffic data to predict how far patients will travel for care.

We also provide advanced simulations and models to prioritize markets based on claims plus other relevant factors such as access to reimbursement.