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March 02, 2015,
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Decision Resources Group said it acquired venture-backed Activate Networks Inc ., a provider of software that helps drug and medical-device companies with sales and marketing by analyzing physician networks. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed in a news release.... Document DJFVW00120150302eb32rhokm
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Decision Resources Group Buys Activate Networks

BURLINGTON, Mass., March 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Decision Resources Group, a leading research and advisory company focused on high-value healthcare data, insights and analytics, announced today that it acquired Activate Networks, a provider of network and relationship analysis. Jim Lang, CEO of Decision Resources Group said, "This important acquisition builds on our data-driven solutions and predictive analytics offerings that are becoming increasingly critical for life sciences organizations. In today's complex healthcare environment, the ability to understand physician prescribing behavior gives life sciences the insights they need to deploy their sales and marketing efforts. "
Activate Networks' proprietary algorithm's, developed out of the social science laboratory of Dr. Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, helps to understand relationships between people in order to find influential leaders and communities. Activate uses real-world evidence to provide rapid and accurate mapping of physician networks to help biopharma and medtech sales forces connect with the doctors who will have the greatest impact on product utilization. In concert with DRG's core strengths of KOL mapping, industry leading databases around IDN and Hospital Affiliation Structures and a Market Leading ACO Database, biopharma commercial and market access teams will be able to target resources to key physicians who drive product adoption. "Taking the next step in formalizing our multi year relationship with Activate, we see this move as an expansion of our underlying analytics capabilities and a continuation of our desire to support our clients with sales force targeting," said Brigham Hyde, Chief Data Officer of Decision Resources Group. "Together with Activate, DRG Analytics will be able to provide life sciences customers a 360 degree view of physician behavior. "
About Decision Resources Group
Decision Resources Group offers best-in-class, high-value information and insights on critical issues within the healthcare industry. Clients rely on this analysis and data to make informed decisions. Find out more at www.DecisionResourcesGroup.com . About Activate Networks, Inc.
Activate Networks, Inc. is the leading provider of network analytics for healthcare/life sciences companies, identifying the key connections that drive commercial success. Activate Networks' analytics platform and suite of SaaS software applications enable healthcare/life sciences companies to unlock the commercial value of their customer networks. More information can be found at  www.activatenetworks.net . All company, brand, or product names contained in this document may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. For more information, contact:


Decision Resources Group acquires Activate Networks

Industry Leaders Offer Insight on How Real-World Social Networks Can Transform Companies and Industries
NEWTON, MA--(Marketwired - Sep 19, 2013) -  Today, Activate Networks , an innovator in and social network analytics, announced its 3rd annual Connected Insight Summit: Breakthroughs Fueled by Network Science , taking place October 8-9, 2013 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA. Bringing together visionaries, industry leaders and world-class experts in business, life sciences and healthcare, the Summit will focus on how to harness people power to drive business results. "In its third year, the Connected Insight Summit promises to offer disruptive approaches to leveraging social networks for competitive advantage," said Larry Miller, CEO of Activate Networks. "Attendees will not only learn from the leading visionaries and scientists, they will be able to connect with the leaders who are using the power of social networks to work smarter, faster and better. "
Connected Insight Summit - At a Glance
Comprised of three tracks: Enterprise (focusing on Organizational Network Analysis), Life Sciences / Pharma , and Healthcare , the Connected Insight Summit will provide unique networking opportunities while educating attendees on novel social network approaches they can immediately apply to boost business performance, grow sales, and contain costs 
Enterprise Track :
Dedicated to corporate leaders and HR professionals, the Enterprise track will offer powerful insights on how leveraging companies' internal social networks can boost employee engagement and performance, improve collaboration, and accelerate innovation throughout an organization. In addition to case examples from Juniper Networks, Cigna and more, featured speakers and themes for the Enterprise track include:
How Trust, Energy and Fear Electrify Your Company's Network - Rob Cross , DBA, University of Virginia
The New Human Capital Advantage and Companies as People Networks - Juan Enriquez , futurist
Where Your Reputation Comes From: A Network Story - Ronald Burt , PhD, University of Chicago
Life Sciences / Pharma Track :
Geared toward pharmaceutical sales, marketing, and market research professionals, the Life Sciences track will give attendees the opportunity to discover powerful new ways to target physicians, and boost revenue. Featured speakers and themes for the Life Sciences and Pharma track include:
Using Social Networks and Social Influence to Affect the Behavior of Physicians - Nicholas Christakis , MD PhD MPH, visionary network science leader
The Biosimilar Age: How to Promote a Biosimilar; How to Defend a Franchise from a Biosimilar Attack - Steve Gullans , Excel Ventures
Insights into physicians online: identity, brand, and behavior -  Nate Gross , MD, Doximity
Healthcare Track:
Dedicated to hospital administrators and healthcare leaders, the Healthcare track will offer powerful new approaches to understanding the ways physicians practice medicine, and how to harness their professional networks to coordinate care and control costs. Featured speakers and themes for the Healthcare track include:
Clinically Integrated Networks and ACOs: Preparing for Risk and Reward - Bruce Landon , MD MBA MSc, Harvard Medical School physician and network investigator
Measuring progress toward accountable care: lessons from 59 pioneering hospitals - Keith Figlioli , Premier, Inc. Physician referral leakage: understanding physician social influence is the key to controlling leakage - Speaker TBA
Game Changers:
The Game Changers general session is a special section that will allow attendees to meet Game Changers who are tackling the world's biggest challenges with network science and achieving breakthrough results. Themes and featured speakers of the Game Changers track include:
Busting Fraud Rings - The Case of Healthcare Bluewater - Gary Gordon , Ed.D., managing partner of Bluewater International
Spotting Your Insider Threat Through His Network - Tom McAndrew , Executive Vice President, Coalfire
Tracking the electronic metadata trail of the social network - Luke Matthews , PhD, Activate Networks
Connected Insight Summit -- Full Agenda and Registration:
The full agenda and registration information can be found here . About Activate Networks, Inc.
Activate Networks, Inc. is an innovator in social science research and social network analysis. The company provides human and organization network analytics for businesses that identify and provide insights about the key social connections that drive commercial and organizational results. The Activate Social platform and its suite of applications for the Human Capital, Life Sciences and Healthcare markets, enable organizations to do business better, faster for accelerated growth. Activate Social platform is based on groundbreaking social-science research by the recognized leaders in network science, including Professor Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, of Harvard University; Professor James Fowler, PhD, of UC San Diego; and Professor Rob Cross, DBA, of the University of Virginia. The company combines its access to this intellectual property with recently available computing power. The result is vastly improved precision in mapping social connections, identifying and targeting key influencers, conducting campaigns and improving organizational effectiveness. Headquartered in Newton, MA, Activate Networks caters to the Human Capital Management, Life Sciences/ Pharmaceutical and Healthcare sectors. More information can be found at www.activatenetworks.net . Follow Activate Networks on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook , YouTube and the company blog . Contact Information

Activate Networks Announces Its 3rd Annual Connected Insight Summit

March 20th, 2013
Ravi Parikh Exclusive , Informatics
Network science, the science examining the structure of relationships between social entities, is a complex but burgeoning field in healthcare. Based on research from pioneers like Nicholas Christakis , data from network studies might inform important questions like “What communities are likely to adhere to a particular medication?” and “How does one person quitting smoking affect others’ decisions to quit in his/her community?” Institutions ranging from big pharma to hospitals are using network science to learn about important trends relevant to their industry. However, it is difficult to interpret such information, and there is still a relative dearth of data out there. Activate Networks, based out of Newton, MA, is one company attempting to translate network analytics into information that companies can use. We had a chance to see one of their presentations by Activate Networks Director of Analytics Luke Matthews at the Harvard Business School Health Care Conference last month. Activate Networks was co-founded by Dr. Christakis and others, and the company is one of the leaders in providing actionable insights from big network data. We spoke with Matthews this past week:
 
Ravi Parikh, Medgadget: Can you give us a bit of your background? How did you get involved in network analytics? Luke Matthews, Activate Networks: I first used network analytics during my doctoral dissertation research on white-fronted capuchin monkeys in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I’m a PhD anthropologist by training, and at the time I was studying whether monkeys who were close together in their troop’s social network learned the same foraging behaviors. Social network theory and statistical analyses were a powerful way to test whether the monkeys learned foraging techniques from those they had more opportunities to observe, which in fact, they do. Then I expanded my work on social networks to study how human social networks influenced the diffusion and inheritance of cultural information like Iranian tribal rug designs and religious beliefs of Christians. I became convinced by this work that the predictive abilities afforded by social network analysis also could have powerful applications in industry and government, and I was quite keen to be a part of developing such applications. So, when the opportunity with Activate Networks came about it was a great fit for my interests and skills. Medgadget: How did you help early on with Activate Networks? How far has the company come since then? Matthews: I started working at Activate Networks almost two years ago, about 8 months after the company was formally launched. When I started our only product was in the life sciences sector mainly in the context of drug launches. We’ve been growing rapidly since and each year we have moved into new sectors including the healthcare provider space and our Organizational Network Analysis division that drives results through organization social networks. We are continuing to expand our product offering in our established business verticals and are exploring new opportunities. Medgadget: I have read about the work of Dr. Christakis in this area. How is Activate Networks leveraging that information for businesses? Matthews: Dr. Christakis is a cofounder of Activate Networks and continues to be active as a board member and advisor. Activate Networks has an exclusive license to commercialize some of the scientific insights developed in the Christakis lab. Dr. Christakis’ published work provided the basis for Activate Networks’ initial technology. In particular, Dr. Christakis showed that many network characteristics cluster in a network out to 1, 2, and 3 degrees of separation. So, that means you have similar characteristics to your friends, but also to your friends’ friends and even your friends’ friends’ friends. We continue to use this insight to map network influence through the network more broadly than most other software that examine only an individual’s immediate social relationships. Medgadget: Can you give us examples of specific populations for which businesses have used network analytics successfully? Matthews: One specific case from our life sciences vertical is a client who was interested in ‘generic conversion’, or getting doctors to prescribe an equally suitable generic drug rather than the brand name version. Activate Networks applied its proprietary process to identify the most influential physicians in the market who, if converted, would have the greatest overall impact on use of generics throughout the physician to physician network. The client then applied our Influence Index™ in one city while applying their existing targeting process in a comparable nearby city in the same state. The existing process is largely the same across the pharmaceutical industry, and it involves sending detailing reps to the highest volume prescribers within a drug class. The two alternative lists (Influence Index™ vs. Volume) were used by the same drug rep to determine which doctors s/he visited. The rep also used the same detailing message in the two locations. So, the only difference was which prioritization scheme was used. The results showed 50% greater generic conversion in the city that used ANI Influence Index™ as compared to the city that used a more standard volume-based decile approach. That’s a substantial difference that amounts to real revenue for the client. We have demonstrated similar levels of improvement in other verticals, such as improved efficiency from our Organizational Network Analysis and increased Facebook connect invitations for an online wellness community whose network we mapped. Medgadget: Your company is organized into 3 divisions: Life Sciences, Health Plans and Hospitals, and Organizational Network Analytics. Why did you divide the company that way, and which division has been most active? Matthews: We organized the company in this manner because each of these divisions have customers with very different use cases and business concerns. So, for the Life Sciences space we map physician to physician relationships with an eye toward leveraging peer to peer influence about pharmaceutical and medical device choices. Our product for Health Plans and Hospitals relies on similar networks of physicians, but in this case coordination of patient care, referrals, and place of service are all of primary importance. The Organizational Network Analytics division is based on the pioneering work of Rob Cross at the University of Virginia. In this division, we map the networks of employees at large corporations with an eye toward increasing workplace efficiency and collaboration. Historically this work has been conducted with surveys filled out by the employees, but increasingly we are doing this work from passively collected email log data. We don’t examine any of the text fields (subject line, email body, etc. ) which protects employee privacy and the whole process saves everyone a lot of time as compared to doing another survey. Medgadget: Who are some partners that you have successfully worked with so far to implement your analyses? Matthews: We have worked with Healthways, the leading wellness company, on developing wellness programs that leverage the power of patient social networks, and with Navvis, its subsidiary, on developing products for hospitals that leverage the power of physician social networks. We are working with the Premier healthcare alliance to help health systems better align physicians and coordinate care. We have worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies through our Organizational Network Analysis division to help them address issues around innovation, collaboration, leadership development, and talent management by understanding how work really gets done in their organization. Medgadget: What do you see as the potential of network analysis in the future of health care? Matthews: Networks analysis is going to play a critical role as the healthcare industry transforms into one that involves more pay for performance, less pay for service, and hopefully more efficient pricing structures in general. Peer to peer networks of both physicians and patients have an incredible influence on factors that directly affect people’s health, such as how care is coordinated among physicians, hospitals, and payers as well as the drugs and devices that are actually deployed. The businesses that navigate the upcoming changes best are going to be those that understand the real world networks they operate in and are able to leverage that understanding into actionable insights. Activate Networks provides both pieces of this puzzle, robust understandings of the network and, perhaps even more critically, simple and actionable recommendations based on those understandings. Medgadget: Is there any other information that would be helpful for us to know? Matthews: I think one of the biggest insights from network science is that if we want to learn about people, we should look at them not necessarily as individuals or as members of formal groups only, but also as members of social network made up of people with strong relational connections to each other. Particularly if we want to understand how they learn new information or change behavior, or if we want to encourage them to adopt a program, we should look at them in their networks in social space, and not only at demographic information or formal group affiliations.

Exploring the Network: Q&A with Activate Networks Director of Analytics Luke Matthews

Reprints
A midweek run through the companies making financing and acquisition news across the region:
— Activate Networks , a provider of analytic software for businesses, reports that it has raised a $10 million Series B round of financing. The investment was led by Reed Elsevier Ventures, with participation from previous investor Excel Venture Management and new investor Premier, a healthcare network. Newton, MA-based Activate Networks uses software to illustrate the real-world social connections between people, including customers and employees—here’s a profile from the Boston Business Journal . The company says its software is being used by major pharmaceutical companies, domestic hospital systems, and corporations around the globe. — Spindle , a Boston-based startup led by former Microsofties, is revealing the list of investors who have already seeded the company with $2.3 million. And there are some pretty notable names on the list: Polaris Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Broad Beach Ventures, and Project 11, along with former Microsoft technical chief Ray Ozzie and Raman Narayanan. Spindle is among the startups trying to perfect local search on mobile devices by tapping into the flood of information being generated by companies and everyday people through social media channels. The Spindle app is available on the iPhone for users in Boston and San Francisco. — Arcadia Solutions , a provider of health IT services, is being acquired by a private equity fund under the umbrella of Ferrer Freeman & Co. and the company’s senior management. The price of the acquisition wasn’t disclosed. Burlington, MA-based Arcadia was founded in 2002 and has about 190 employees. Arcadia’s software helps customers in the healthcare system implement and manage electronic health records, which it says can improve clinical decisions and keep costs down. The deal is intended to, in part, help the company expand. — Cignifi , a Cambridge, MA-based financial services startup, has raised $1.5 million from the Omidyar Network. As Scott Kirsner reports at Boston.com , the company assesses a consumer’s creditworthiness by analyzing how they use their mobile phone. That’s intended to help people qualify for debt when they normally would be turned away because they don’t have a traditional credit history.

Boston Deals: Activate Networks, Spindle, Arcadia Solutions, Cignifi

Premier is a purchasing organization providing primary supply chain services to large hospital systems and more recently to alternate outpatient locations. It offers a complement of advisory services and consulting services along with software-as-a-service-based subscriptions. The company was founded in 1969 and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Premier

CHARLOTTE , N.C. -- -- A new partnership between the Premier healthcare alliance and Activate Networks Inc. will help health systems better align physicians and coordinate care .

Posted by Steve Wardell on 12 December 2012 | 0 Comments.
Tags: Activate Networks , Premier healthcare alliance , Larry Miller , Steven Wardell ,.
Premier Healthcare Alliance, Activate Networks Partner to Help Health Systems Assess and Predict Physician Behavior Across the Continuum » Activate Networks Inc

Healthways provides specialized, comprehensive solutions to assist people to maintain and improve health and well-being. The company's solutions are designed to assist healthy individuals stay healthy, mitigate, and slow the progression of disease associated with family or lifestyle risk factors; and promote the possible health for those already affected by disease.

Healthways

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Activate Networks is a network analytics company that identifies and understands the key social connections that drive commercial, organizational, and health results. Activate Networks' suite of analytics products and software enables organizations to unlock the commercial value of customer, prospect, voter, and employee real-world social networks commonly using data already available in the organization.

Name	Work History	Title	Status
Nicholas Christakis		Founder	Current
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