The company
Backed by nearly 100 years of experience, Cardinal Health is a global, integrated healthcare services and products company. The Fortune 500 company is known for its award winning business innovation and sustainability practices, as well as its diversity and inclusion. For Jerome Strickland, Cardinal Health’s Director of Market Intelligence & Analytics, his team’s mandate is clear: to accelerate Cardinal Health’s strategic partnerships and growth by providing visibility into the market for business development purposes.
The challenge
In a newly formed Center of Excellence, Strickland’s 5-person team monitors M&A, partnerships, and emerging technologies as they relate to the healthcare space. The Center of Excellence delivers research to high profile internal clients in a range of ways, including:
- Proactively evaluating new technologies impacting healthcare (such as blockchain) to support near and longer term decision making.
- Offering counsel on relevant industry news and events—for example, insights related to a new technology or M&A.
To quickly become subject matter experts on the topics impacting Cardinal Health every day, it’s essential for Strickland’s team to conduct research with speed, efficiency, and thoroughness so that no important information is overlooked.
Initially, Strickland’s team collected data to inform their recommendations and insights across a range of channels. But consulting many different sources of information presented challenges both due to the inefficiency of that process as well as the lack of certainty about the data they collected. Specifically Strickland cited several examples of challenges with legacy research approaches:
- High-friction querying: Being precise about with keyword searches was essential, but even with the right search string, there were lingering concerns about using the right combination of words or missing out on key information.
- Delays: getting access or a license to the right database of information wasn’t seamless and required an internal process. When searching for information to support a recommendation related to a times sensitive topic, anything less than instant access simply wasn’t good enough.
“In research you want to be discussing and engaging with ideas, not spending your time searching for the underlying data. AlphaSense reduces our research time, and we’re able to re-allocate our time to engaging people in concepts and ideas—and in doing so, add more value to our company.”
Jerome Strickland
Director of Market Intelligence & Analytics
Results
The team knew there had to be a better way. Strickland was familiar with AlphaSense as other teams at Cardinal Health were already using the AI-powered business insights platform for its impressive research capabilities and knowledge sharing functionality. The Center of Excellence team decided to give it a try. Within a few weeks of using AlphaSense, the Center of Excellence team saw:
- Time savings & more focus on high value activities: Instead of trial-and-error searching through disparate data-sets, Strickland’s team was able to efficiently search through many datasets within the AlphaSense platform and more quickly discover the information that drives their work, saving an estimated 45 minutes per day on average. The benefit of that saved time is that they’re able to dedicate more time to the strategic efforts that drive impact.
- Confidence in seeing the big picture: The team no longer second guesses their querying, feeling confident that AlphaSense fuels their analysis with all available relevant research. The AlphaSense search algorithm overcomes the variation in human language, so that the platform surfaces comprehensive search results related to a phrase, theme, or technical terminology that he searches. “It’s going to select the appropriate synonyms and articles, so I don’t have to change my search or search for that information elsewhere,” said Strickland.
- No more FOMO: In a landscape changing as quickly as healthcare, it’s essential to stay abreast of the latest news. Strickland arranged his AlphaSense alerts to provide a daily update on developments related to the themes, companies, and topics his team is following most closely, and his team enjoys the ability to change, add to, or refine the frequency and content of those searches at any time.
As Strickland’s team continues to scale in the coming months and advance its ability to provide insights into the biggest risks and opportunities related to healthcare, the team will continue to leverage AlphaSense to augment its research.
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