Pharmaceutical companies often need to pull together data from clinical, sales, marketing, and other departments to make quick strategic decisions. The challenge is that there are many data silos within a company that make such data assimilation difficult or impossible.

"Life science companies are looking for ways to streamline operations and become more efficient," says Manus Gallagher, director of strategic solutions at the pharmaceutical software company Dendrite International Inc. He notes, for example, there are many decisions about appropriating resources that require data sharing between groups such as clinical, marketing, and sales.

Like many pharmaceutical companies, Sankyo Pharma Inc., was dealing with these issues and embarked on what is essentially a data warehousing project.

In Sankyo's case, the company needed to break down the silos of information. "The challenge is that data is spread throughout the organization," says Bill Ippolito, Sankyo Pharma's CIO. "And each group feels like it owns that data."

A new industry effort called the Partnership for Prescription Assistance has started a pilot program in three states to increase the awareness and enrollment in existing patient assistance programs.

Dubbed the PPARx.org, the group this month launched a bilingual interactive website and bilingual interactive voice response (IVR) phone information system to provide patients in Georgia, New Mexico, and Wisconsin with a single starting point for information on the more than 275 public and private patient assistance programs that exist today - including 150 programs offered by pharmaceutical companies themselves.

To date, enrollment in these many and varied public assistance programs has been fairly low. Many of these programs offer no-cost or low-cost drugs to uninsured people who make less than two times the federal poverty level, which is about $19,000 for an individual and $31,000 for a family of three. PPARx.org estimates that about 27 million people fall into this category and about 14 million of them qualify for some help. Yet only about 3 million people take advantage of these programs.

With the FDA and large retail pharmacy chains pushing the adoption of electronic product code radio frequency identification (EPC RFID) tags on drug packages, pharmaceutical companies are looking for ways to leverage the soon-to-be mandated technology to their advantage.

The area where most believe pharmaceutical companies can reap substantial benefits from using RFID is in improving supply chain, inventory, and payment operations.

A new study by the Healthcare Distribution Management Association (HDMA) looks into such benefits and into the costs of deploying RFID. The study, which was conducted by the management consulting firm A.T. Kearney for the HDMA, found RFID is at best a break-even proposition when first deployed. But over time, RFID's ability to improved supply chain operations (if systems are properly integrated) could yield annual cost savings that quickly defray the initial expenses associated with a wide-scale RFID deployment.