Veeva acquires Crossix, pairing doctor, patient data and marketing services

Veeva Systems is buying Crossix Solutions with an eye to integrating the Veeva healthcare professional (HCP) cloud software services with the more patient-centric Crossix data and analytics.

Under the $430 million cash deal, Crossix will remain an independent unit inside Veeva called Veeva Crossix and will continue to be run by Crossix CEO Asaf Evenhaim.

Crossix’s data—both health and non-health—come from 300 million patients in the U.S. and include prescription, OTC, clinical, claims and hospital data to help inform pharma marketing initiatives. Crossix said more than 200 pharma brands use its services.

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Paul Shawah, Veeva senior vice president of commercial strategy, said the deal makes sense, as Veeva and Crossix grew up together in adjacent markets—with life science professionals for Veeva building communication channels for field reps, and with patients for Crossix building out data, analytics and privacy for pharma marketers.

He said while it’s still early, the potential and power is in combining the two.

“What we’ll be able to do is link patient data to healthcare professionals, so you start to better target HCPs based on the patients that they actually treat,” he said.

That leads to the potential for integration or cross-sharing data to do things like match patient activity data with patient data and outcomes, study cause-and-effect relationships and enhance custom reference data to better target and serve patients.

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Evenhaim agreed and offered an example of how the integration can boost both sides’ offerings.

“When marketing managers, for example, look to optimize a digital media camp, they can look at how the advertising is doing in terms of getting new patient starts, but also look at how much of that is prescribed by physicians the field force recently called on versus physicians that have not been called on," he said. "That kind of insight, that ability to integrate the patient and the HCP and sales and marketing, is pretty powerful."