Welcome back to the final time for Real-World Data After Dark. I guess the budget for this has finally run out after three episodes, but it’s our job to pack as much goodness into this final one so we get renewed for next season. So my name is Daniel Chancellor. I’m VP of Thought Leadership at Norstella. I’m going to be the host, your Chatshow host for today. And welcoming back for the third and final time, our two resident guests are WD Experts. So firstly, we have Dr. Madeline Nayla, who’s Chief Clinician at North Stella. How are you doing, Maddie?
I’m great. How are you today?
I’m happy, but sad that this is the final time, but yeah, looking forward to this one.
Our last one
Was a lot
Of fun. So I’m looking forward to this episode.
Well, I can’t promise to quite beat the excitement of our game show last time round. We might have to end on a bit more of a serious note. And also welcome back Lance Walkenbrot, who is senior principal of RWD Solutions at Norstella. How are you, Lance?
I’m doing well. I mean, I think we probably have to have a season two just so that Maddie can beat me in a game and maybe get bragging rights back. But if we end on season one and I win, I’m happy with that.
Well, we’ll roll back the tapes. I’m not quite sure we had a winner or a lose the last time round. Well, we’ll have to check back. But yeah, on a more serious 12 … Let’s recap what we’ve spoken about so far. So first time round, we had a bit of a getting to know you. We talked a bit about your roles and a little bit about your outside of work lives. Most recently, we ended up with a bit of a competitive game show speaking about what we’re doing with our RWD at Norstella. The goal for this third and final is to focus on the real world impact of real world data. So we want to talk about actual projects that we are doing with our clients and the tangible results that that’s resulting in terms of them getting access for patients to new therapies.
Maddie, my first question is to you, because I know you’ve been working very closely with a client that specializes in the multiple myeloma space. Could you start by just talking a little bit more about this project and what the goals were?
Yeah, absolutely. So with our RWD data, I know we talked about RWD and EMR last episode, but just to reorient on what we have in our ecosystem and how we use that to support our clients. So in our RWD data, we have open claims, closed claims, EMR data, SDOH data, mortality data, and lab data. That all integrates, is linked and tokenized into 74 billion data points. While that’s so key when we’re talking about how we are supporting our clients and for impactful projects with our clients, because now we have all of this data where we can really track at different points of their clinical journey and different clinical time points, can fully track the patient, but we can also find patients at different times of where they are in their journey. So in this project, we were able to develop over 13 clinical profiles. We looked at from a newly diagnosed perspective, so finding patients who were going to be newly diagnosed and finding them very quickly to help inform treatment decisions, to help get them on treatment very quickly.
We also looked for patients who were relapsed or refractory, so who have been diagnosed, who have been treated, and then are relapsing so we can get them to the right therapy that based on their clinical profile, based on their cytogenetic markers, what’s going to be that right drug or therapy of choice for them that’s really going to help them and treat them. We looked at profiles that were like a high risk patient, so putting them in a higher risk category to inform the best treatment decision for them and then able to have this all linked at a provider level as well as that patient ID level. I’m able to really get to those providers at the right time for the right patient. So building this and having all the data available as a clinician, I’m able to take all the different data aspects and really map out these profiles for each clinical time point for our clients and projects.
Great. I mean, if this was easy, it probably would’ve been done before. So it sounds like you’re really breaking new ground. Turning the question over to Lance, what were the challenges in revolutionizing how this particular client was looking at these patients?
The interesting part is they’ve been working on that project for a number of years right there and they use just your traditional claims level data to tell them what happened. A patient, especially within multiple myeloma, there’s multiple lines of therapy they go through, monotherapies, combo therapy, et cetera. When we’re able to couple in the EMR, we’re understanding why did that happen? So we’re able to stratify patient populations there. And I think what was different was it’s not about the amount of data that you have right there. It’s about the value of the data we have. So when we’re understanding within our EMR data, the physician notes right there, we’re able to understand why did that patient change treatment right there? What was the discontinuation reason? Historically in claims, they understood a patient line one, line two, line three, et cetera right there. But what were the factors that physician decided to change given therapy?
Was there any toxicity? Was there drug holidays and stuff like that? Because we were able to bring in the EMR data and look at the physician notes and we had the clinical expertise as someone like Dr. Nalan, we’re able to understand the why did it happen. We understand the what, but what we’re able to understand is now the why. And when you elaborated to the 13 different profiles we have, we are able to understand all of the different reasons for that so that when the client was developing their products and bringing them actually to market and understanding what was the right patient at the right time, it actually allowed them to really understand what were the motivating factors for a physician to treat a given patient and I really understand where their value was in that whole treatment journey for that patient.
I mean, I’m sure if you’re in this space listening to Lance listening to Madi, your ears are like, “This sounds amazing. How do I get involved with this? What is the secret source?” Maddie, perhaps you could dive a bit more into specifics about this project. What were the step-by-step processes in order to help this company achieve the goals of the project?
Yeah, it’s a great question. So I know in our first episode, Lance and I talked about that our day-to-day is very different and I think this project really reflects what we’re doing in our day-to-day. So the first step is always just getting on with our clients and listening to them, hearing them out, hearing what their needs are, what exactly are they trying to track? What do they need to answer? What are those business questions? What does success look like to them? How can we make that impact and partner together? We always want to partnership with our clients that’s really important to us at North Stella. So step one is just sitting down with the client, forming that relationship and knowing we’re in this together, we’re going to help each other in how we can make the most impact. And then as Lance noted also is we have all this data, but it’s not just having the data in our environment.
It’s the team that we’ve brought together. Lance and I work extremely closely together. The expertise that he brings to the industry with all the years he’s been in the industry, his data science skills is invaluable. So having that, having our AI team, all of that together of, okay, this is what the client needs. Let’s all come together as a team and collaborate on how we can get to the best solution of the client. And then working through those steps of, okay, now we know the client’s needs, now we have the team assembled, how can we use our data, which we have all this data again in our ecosystem, how can we translate all that data into getting a valuable solution for the client? So when all of that comes together very well, then we hear these stories about the impact and all we’re doing at the ground level to really change these patients’ lives.
And Lance, would you add anything in terms of the steps purely from the data science point of view? I mean, Maddie’s spoken in very good, I guess, generalities around how the project would work and how we’d engage with our clients, but I suppose some of our clients would be very technical. I’m sure they’re eager to hear the details of our RWD. Yeah.
I mean, I think with any good science, there’s hypotheses of the what’s and the whys right there. And I mean, Maddie gave me props about my data science background and the number of years I’ve been working. Now it feels like you’ve aged me quite a bit, right? It’s a compliment. One of the things that … Sure, I’ll take that as a compliment, a backhanded compliment. Sure. The thing I think is in my past career, I really just worked in a desk in a computer and just started to analyzing data. The ability to work with someone like Dr. Neil, actually we can have these types of discussions right there where there’s those hypotheses and clients will always have questions. They’ll always like, “Why did this happen? Why did it happen?” Clients aren’t getting on the calls with us or I’m not working with clients because I’m charming or anything of that nature.
They have certain types of questions and potential needs that they have and it’s about having those discussions. And what is really exciting is when you get to those relationships where it’s not about a client relationship, it’s about a partnership relationship with there. So I think some of the things that’s exciting is when our clients are actually coming to us proactively and saying like, “Hey, I’m having this type of challenge. Is this something you can help with? ” Yeah. And it’s just like, can we … And I think that’s got back to the first discussion I was like, what is our day-to-day? I would say I write down each day what are the steps, what are the meetings I have? Half of those probably get done right there because everything’s a litle bit different there. So it’s a little bit of those interactive processes right there.
But I think what’s changing right here is data can be a commodity right there. I’ll just say that right there. I think when we’re bringing in our integrated data sets, it makes it a little bit unique right there. We’re able to not only mine the data, but understanding the reasons behind that level of data there. And so I think that those are things that are a little bit different there. And when we work on the projects where like Maddie said, this is a large client. They have had to do these types of things numerous times. Budget to them is not the actual concern. It’s the result that is the actual concern. And the way that we’re able actually to partner with them and understanding that is really is exciting right there. So I think those types of engagements right there are what makes each day super exciting to come in and sit down and get to work.
I mean, you mentioning results and I want to touch on real world impact of real world data without, I suppose, disclosing the client necessarily, what were the outcomes of the work that you’ve been doing with them, Maddie?
Yeah. So they translated to over 800 new patient starts on their drug. So when you really think about that in the time period that we were working with them, to think of 800 new patients, either a newly diagnosed patient or a patient got an appropriate therapy of a switched therapy that was going to be more targeted and really help the patient. When you think of 800 patients and one deliverable that we’ve reached, that’s pretty incredible to think about that impact. I mean, that’s 800 patients that got to a therapy on time, that’s 800 patients that got to the correct therapy on time. So like I said, I came from patient care. I worked my day-to-days, we’re working with patients, we’re interacting with patients and I miss that very much. So there’s days where I’m behind my computer, I’m integrating in data, I’m reading patient notes, but to have a client to call us and tell us, thank you, this is the most impactful thing and that your data reached over 800 patients and that one deliverable and we support them across multiple deliverables, I mean, it’s actually pretty mind blowing to hear and it’s really fulfilling to
Hear that. Yeah, that’s super powerful. 800 patients in not necessarily the most hugely prevalent treatment setting as well and presumably Lance, this is something that you’re ready to scale, not just for this one client, but so any number of pharma companies that are out there that are thinking, “Well, I need to be using real world data to find my patients.”
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that we do at Norstella is we have quarterly meetings right there where our whole company is on a given call. Each of those meetings, we either have a patient services representative or actually a pharma client come on and discuss what some of the projects we work on. It’s super humbling right there. When they talk about some of the impact that they have in the given market and how we might have supported them to get to that impact right there, it makes me feel like some of the stuff that we’re doing is actually meaningful right there. I’ll be honest right there. And it’s like something is like, it’s just not Xs and Os at the end of the day, it’s like actually how we really can support clients end to end, those types of things. And like when I said it’s like clients will call us up and they have a challenge and they need something to support.
It’s a motivating factor like why we come to work each day right there. And it’s just not about, for lack of better term, cash and paycheck right there. It’s actually doing certain things that makes me feel like the work we’re doing is actually meaningful and it’s super fulfilling in doing that.
Well, thank you very much. Go on, Maddie, please.
I would say when you asked me about my son and the first reason I light up when I talk about him and especially when we talk about him with work, when he tells his teachers that my mom works for the pharmaceutical industries and saves a lot of lives every day, I mean, his little face just lights up and so makes me proud to know that he sees that, he’s experiencing that and that we are really making an impact on the ground level for these patients and forming those partnerships with our clients every day and forming great working relationships with the team that we formed here at Norstella as well.
Absolutely. Well, hopefully we’ve, well, I feel like, not hopefully, we definitely have fulfilled the objective of turning what were pretty lighthearted conversations in the first couple of episodes into something a bit more serious and touching and meaningful today. So yeah, thank you very much, Maddie and Lance for your insights. We’ve certainly had a lot of fun on our side recording these. I hope that really is translated over to you and the audience that are watching. Any final words for our audience guys?
Hit that subscribe button so we come back for season two. That’s all I got to say.
I have to beat Lance. So great that we both were winners in season one, but season two coming back for that title, Lance.
Fight and talk. Okay. Well, fingers crossed, we do have that next time. If you are watching your feedback is really important to us and I will go a long way to make sure we can kind of bring this format back to you again. And until that time you’ve been watching Real-World Data After Dark. Thank you and good luck.
