HuiMei Digital and Stratifyd Forge Strategic Partnership to Drive Intelligent Digital Marketing Solutions for Pharmaceutical Enterprises

Recently, “Huimei Digital Tech,” a new business segment under the Huimei Medical Group, entered into a formal strategic partnership with Stratifyd, an AI-powered intelligent data analytics platform. This collaboration will deliver innovative intelligent digital marketing solutions to the pharmaceutical industry.

HuiMei Shuke CTO Ruan Haibo & Stratifyd CEO Wang Xiaoyu

In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have increasingly integrated the “patient-centric” philosophy into their market strategies. Particularly following the introduction of new procurement policies such as the “4+7” volume-based procurement program, the out-of-hospital market—where patients wield greater influence—has prompted pharmaceutical firms to pay closer attention to patient populations. Furthermore, as patients become more deeply involved in selecting treatment options and evaluating therapeutic outcomes, their voices and influence are exerting a growing impact on the healthcare industry. For pharmaceutical companies, understanding patients’ perceptions of medications, gaining insights into the factors influencing medication adherence, and thoroughly comprehending patient needs can provide highly valuable references for decision-making in new product development, drug quality monitoring, and sales strategy formulation.

Patient Population Insight Research has become relatively mature abroad. Serving and studying patients are key focuses for the marketing and medical departments of foreign pharmaceutical companies. It is reported that research on patient behavior and patient services often account for 10–20% of promotional budgets. These companies place greater emphasis on analyzing patients’ outward expressions, including their voices and behaviors, such as their considerations regarding drug efficacy, adverse reactions, and pharmacoeconomics. By defining patient populations and creating patient personas, they gain insights into patients’ intrinsic needs. This enables them to adjust product-related strategies accordingly, ultimately better serving patients with the end goals of improving efficacy and accessibility, reducing treatment costs, and enhancing the treatment experience.

Generally speaking, there are typically two types of market research solutions available for gaining insights into the needs of patient populations.

The first research approach involves gaining direct insights into patients by conducting problem-specific interviews with a large cohort of patients. Alternatively, indirect insights can be obtained by interviewing a selected group of physicians. Given their extensive clinical exposure, physicians possess a general understanding of patient perspectives; thus, physician-based interviews enable the rapid development of patient population profiles.

The second research solution is “Social Listening,” which involves setting keywords and using technical means such as “web crawlers” to scrape online content containing these keywords. This data then undergoes manual processing, including organizing the scraped content, extracting medical insights, and creating various charts and PowerPoint presentations for the conclusions, ultimately forming the deliverables.

PGI (Patient Group Insight System) is a patient listening and insights product jointly developed by Huimei Digital Technology and Stratifyd, an AI data analytics platform provider. It helps pharmaceutical companies gain precise insights into the characteristics of patient populations. Building on the methodology of “Social Listening,” PGI incorporates artificial intelligence technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and knowledge graphs to more accurately uncover insights from patients’ public discourse, including needs analysis and causal relationships.

For instance, traditional technologies that identify the keyword “headache” may generate significant ambiguity, making it difficult to ascertain the patient’s true intent. By leveraging PGI, the practical significance of sentences containing the keyword “headache” can be accurately identified within their actual context. For example, “I felt a headache after taking the medication” describes an adverse drug reaction; “This medication can alleviate headaches” refers to the patient’s disease symptoms; and “I am worried about the drug price” addresses pharmaceutical economic issues.

Huimei Shuke leverages the strengths of its medical and data science teams, combined with Stratifyd’s industry-leading expertise in natural language processing and automated modeling, to deliver an AI-driven data analytics platform renowned for its speed, flexibility, and robustness. This powerful partnership has enabled the project to achieve rapid and in-depth implementation within the pharmaceutical sector. Compared to the two previous research approaches, PGI significantly enhances automation, reduces manual workload, and enables continuous monitoring through the system.

PGI currently serves multiple Top 20 multinational pharmaceutical companies. For instance, PGI built an Engage platform for a mature drug marketed by a major Europe-headquartered pharmaceutical company to gain insights into the needs, interests, and concerns of kidney transplant patients. By further understanding these patient-centric factors, the company was able to adjust its product-related strategies, thereby helping to increase market share.

For another example, PGI helped a large U.S.-headquartered pharmaceutical company gain insights into long-term survival and out-of-hospital management among patients in the overall diabetes market, as well as physicians’ awareness of the importance of out-of-hospital management. This enabled the company’s marketing department to pinpoint key areas of focus for patient survival and to implement long-term monitoring and effectiveness evaluation of patient education initiatives.

Beyond the pharmaceutical sector, PGI has also made contributions to the medical device industry. By providing services to a large U.S.-based medical device company, PGI helped it gain insights into the unmet needs and concerns of patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery, ultimately mapping and validating the patient clinical pathway, key decision points, and the criteria used by hospitals and physicians in their selection processes.

Huimei Digital Technology is a new business segment under Huimei Medical Group, formed by integrating and merging the operations of Huimei Yijian, a former subsidiary of Huimei Medical Group. Centered on “digital technology,” Huimei Digital Technology leverages medical big data—including pharmaceutical and medical device data, disease information data, physician profiling data, patient profiling data, and clinical diagnosis and treatment data. By harnessing advanced technologies such as data science, marketing science, knowledge graphs, and artificial intelligence as its core drivers, the company helps healthcare industry entities achieve digitalization and intelligent transformation. This ultimately reduces corporate costs, enhances user experience, increases industry revenue, and upgrades industrial models, effectively leveraging digital technology to drive innovative and intelligent development in healthcare enterprises.

Huimei Shuke’s management team comprises professionals from globally renowned companies such as IMS (now IQVIA), Veeva, IBM, Accenture, and Tencent. The team is diverse, with members graduating from top-tier universities worldwide as well as prestigious Chinese institutions including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Their expertise spans clinical medicine, pharmacy, life sciences, computer science, mathematical statistics, and business administration. With many years of experience in digitalization and technology-enabled services for pharmaceutical enterprises, their project portfolio covers a wide range of IT scenarios in the pharmaceutical industry, from foundational software and business applications to cutting-edge innovations. Huimei Shuke’s core teams include medical, development, and data science divisions. The average member of the core team has over ten years of experience serving pharmaceutical companies, having provided services to nearly all of the top 20 multinational pharmaceutical firms as well as leading domestic pharmaceutical enterprises.

Stratifyd was named one of only three global “Cool Vendors” in the analytics field by Gartner in 2018. Its platform’s powerful capabilities—such as rapid integration with external data sources and automated training of semantic models to generate AI algorithms—secured orders from numerous Fortune 500 companies since its inception. Stratifyd’s core competitive advantage lies in its text analytics functionality, which is powered by underlying AI technologies including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and targeted monitoring models. This enables enterprises to effectively mine omnichannel user feedback data, directly uncovering the root causes behind observed phenomena and gaining insights into the sentiments, attitudes, and intent of target audiences.

Leveraging its advanced algorithms and foundational AI technologies, Stratifyd became Eli Lilly’s global data analytics solutions provider in 2017. It has subsequently signed contracts with multiple international pharmaceutical giants, including GSK, the world’s largest pharmaceutical group. This strong track record was a key factor facilitating successful collaboration between these enterprises. Throughout its service delivery, Stratifyd’s platform capabilities have not only helped leading pharmaceutical companies precisely identify critical issues in clinical trials but also integrated and analyzed patient feedback data to support new drug development and market launch. By providing predictive insights and decision-making references for product launches, Stratifyd has significantly improved market research efficiency and effectively supported revenue growth for pharmaceutical companies. The current partnership between Stratifyd and Huimei Digital Technology is built upon shared values and a commitment to industry-driven value. Both parties aim to leverage their accumulated success to drive broader adoption and practical applications within the pharmaceutical sector.

Huimei Shuke & Stratifyd Strategic Cooperation Signing Ceremony

Huimei Digital Technology and Stratifyd share a common vision of driving industry transformation through data. They believe that the future of the pharmaceutical sector will inevitably evolve into a new business model with data and AI as its foundational infrastructure. This strategic partnership between the two companies serves as a powerful accelerator of this trend and an effective endeavor to integrate advanced expertise. In the near future, Huimei Digital Technology and Stratifyd will join forces to deliver intelligent pharmaceutical solutions tailored to diverse scenarios, thereby facilitating the successful implementation of the broader trend toward intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry.

Huimei Digital Technology is a new business segment under Huimei Healthcare Group, formed by integrating the operations of Huimei Yijian, a former subsidiary of Huimei Healthcare Group, into Huimei Digital Technology. Huimei Healthcare Management Services (HM Healthcare Management Services) is a healthcare group established in 2015 through joint investment by Hillhouse Capital, an investment firm renowned for its focus on long-term structural value investing, and Mayo Clinic, a well-known non-profit medical institution in the United States.