Definitive Healthcare Makes Another Key Life Sciences Acquisition

October 29, 2020 - Data analytics and business intelligence company Definitive Healthcare continues to expand its footprint in the life sciences space with the acquisition of Monocl, the company announced.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Monocl is a provider of medical and scientific expert data and insights that enable subscribes to identify key opinion leaders in medical affairs.

"We have been expanding our presence within life sciences very rapidly, growing over 40% organically within that space," Definitive Healthcare founder and CEO Jason Krantz told PharmaNewsIntelligence. "We're looking for opportunities to take the commercial footprint that we have and expand that into other areas of pharma, medical affairs as an example. Our goal is to be the single source of truth across the entire organization, with solutions that meet all the different needs."

Definitive began the year with the acquisition of PatientFinder, a company specializing in creating customizable patient cohorts to improve product development in the life sciences.

The most recent acquisition adds another robust data set to the company's growing platform.

"We take all of their research and clinical trial history as well as their speaker and conference data and combine that with our deep provider profiles and 6.5 billion medical claims," Krantz continued, "and we instantly propelled their product to the top of the medical affairs food chain. We meet all of the needs of that group from an expert standpoint, better than any other player that's out there."

According to Krantz, two features of Monocl's platform were key in driving the acquisition.

"It's the real-time access through a very powerful front end that allows you to filter and adjust your filters and analyze the data and engage with them. But then also the data science behind it," he explained.

"You're getting data from a lot of different sources, whether it be publications, conferences, et cetera. Figuring out how to match those people and build the best profiles for almost 6 million experts globally is extraordinarily complex. And they've invested in that data science to allow their clients to get the most up-to-date information on all of these experts across the world."

Monocl will continue to operate independently with the added benefit of access to Definitive's outsize database of medical claims data.

"We're investing heavily in the growth of Monocl, and we want to support that growth in any way that we can," Krantz said.

"The best way we can do that is to allow them to run relatively standalone for the time being," he added. "And we will complement their data by providing them with a lot of the data that Definitive has in order to bring their product to a whole new level. And then next year we'll start to work together to commercialize more effectively and make sure that we get this fantastic product out to as many people within the industry as possible."

And the coming year is expected to be a busy one for Definitive. Over the past eight years, the data analytics and business intelligence company has undergone tremendous growth and is set to continue that trend into the new year.

"Definitive's been growing very fast —we've grown right through the pandemic," Krantz noted. "We've added over 160 new people this year. And with Monocl, we have about 570 people in total at this point. We expect continued rapid growth next year. We'll investing heavily in data across all the markets we serve, including life sciences, healthcare IT and software, and their professional services and providers as well."

And that growth will include its already sizeable client base.

"Through both bringing on new clients, we'll bring on close to a thousand new clients next year, and then selling more and more to existing clients. And Monocl is a key part of that by giving us a new solution to sell to our deep biotech and pharmaceutical and medical device client base," Krantz concluded.