Master Data Management (MDM) is the process of creating and maintaining a single, accurate, and consistent source of information for an organization's critical data entities such as customers, products, suppliers, and patients. In the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, MDM is especially important due to the ever-increasing amount of data that needs to be stored, managed, and used to drive better commercial outcomes.
In this article, we will explore the benefits of master data management in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, including how MDM can improve data quality, enhance operational efficiency, and support regulatory compliance.
Data quality can be broken down and assessed by several different metrics – including timeliness, relevance, and consistency – all of which combine to give an organization an overall view of the quality of its data. With such large amounts of data to manage and so much potentially dependent on the accuracy of that data, data quality should be a primary concern for every company in the healthcare industry. Advanced Master Data Management platforms such as CluedIn can improve data quality by over 50% in a matter of weeks, helping organizations to make better-informed decisions, minimize the risk of errors and inconsistencies, and reduce the need for manual data reconciliation.
Improving data quality and ensuring that both technical and business users have access to the right data when they need it helps organizations to streamline business processes, improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs. By having a single, consistent view of data entities, organizations can avoid duplication and redundancy, reducing the need for manual data entry and minimizing the risk of errors. This helps to reduce the time and resources required for data management, freeing up staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
Regulatory compliance is a significant concern for life sciences and pharmaceutical companies. MDM can help organizations to meet regulatory requirements by ensuring data accuracy and consistency, enabling traceability, and providing a complete view of their data. By having a centralized data management system, organizations can quickly and easily access data required for regulatory reporting, audits, and inspections.
MDM provides a single, consistent source of data that can be used across different functions and departments. This enables organizations to make better-informed decisions, based on reliable, accurate, and up-to-date data. With MDM, organizations can improve their ability to identify trends and patterns in their data, enabling them to make more effective strategic decisions. In order for those decisions to have maximum impact, they also need to be made in a timely manner. Traditional MDM systems have struggled with this, as they often require months of upfront modeling before the system can even be deployed. Not to mention the delays caused by constantly having to go back to the IT department to ask for fixes. Modern MDM systems do away with all of this, using techniques like eventual connectivity and low code/no code to accelerate time to value and empower business users, both of which are important when decisions need to be made in a proactive and agile way.
Data silos often reflect the organizational structure of a business and build up over time, causing an increasing technical debt and significant financial harm. Not only does modern MDM facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing across different departments and functions, but by having a centralized data management system that is accessible to every department and team, organizations can break down data silos and enable cross-functional collaboration without overburdening technical teams.
There are many ways in which these industries can use MDM to maximize commercial success and drive operational efficiencies. Here is a selection of the most popular:
The life sciences and pharmaceutical industry faces a number of unique data management challenges due to the complexity and high volume of data involved. Some of the key challenges include:
There are few – if any – industries with a higher reliance on data than life sciences and pharmaceutical companies. By establishing a single, accurate, and consistent source of information for critical data entities, organizations can improve data quality, enhance operational efficiency, support regulatory compliance, improve decision-making, and facilitate collaboration. This is what traditional MDM was designed to do, but in many cases, it took too long to achieve and created an unnecessary management burden on technical teams.
Modern, augmented MDM systems have eradicated these barriers by accelerating the process of ingesting and integrating data, making it possible to deliver a successful use case in as little as six weeks. They are also designed to allow business users and domain experts direct access to the data. A Cloud-native platform such as CluedIn will also allow you to take advantage of the economics and scalability offered by the Cloud, as well as integrate with other Cloud-based data services with ease.
With the legacy obstacles now a thing of the past, there should be nothing to stop life sciences and pharmaceutical companies from getting the data they need to deliver the outcomes that only high-quality, trusted data can offer.