Drug Sentiment Index launches on Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point


• Index Allows Bloomberg Data License clients to Understand How Drugs Are Perceived in Real Time
• Drug Sentiment Index tracks shifts in reputation and public perception of 165 top-selling drugs hand selected from 35 NYSE-listed pharma companies
• Provides a quantitative measure of ongoing perceptions of a drug, on a scale of 0-100

The Drug Sentiment Index, a new data offering providing a glimpse into what doctors, the public and the media think about the top medications on the market, has launched today via Bloomberg Enterprise Access Point as part of the Alternative Data catalog.

A proprietary offering developed jointly by Pulsar, the leader in audience intelligence and Sermo, the leader in physician insights, the Index allows investment and pharma professionals to gain a real-time, ongoing quantitative understanding of drug reputation and public perception across different stakeholders in the industry.

Updated daily, the Drug Sentiment Index tracks shifts in reputation and public perception of 165 top-selling drugs hand selected from 35 pharma companies. The Drug Sentiment Index combines drug ratings from Sermo with visibility and sentiment from Pulsar to provide a quantitative measure of ongoing perceptions of a drug, measured on a scale of 0-100.

Sermo has 977,623 physician Drug Ratings which include a summary of doctor perceptions along 6 vectors; preference, efficacy, safety, tolerability, accessibility, and adherence totaling over 5 million singular data points. Doctors provide over 3,000 new Drug Ratings weekly; over 15,000 unique data points. Doctor’s Drug Ratings provide actionable intelligence at the point of prescribing, aid in value-based pharmaceutical purchasing, enhance commercial analytics, and investment strategies.

“Understanding the value and impact of certain drugs is invaluable for investors and stakeholders, especially against the backdrop of a global pandemic, when there are so many questions about the benefits of select therapies,” said Peter Kirk, CEO of Sermo. “By being able to take the pulse of physicians and patients on a daily basis, we will be able to see trends in confidence and interest that are not always reflected in other outlets or publications.”

The companies in the Index are all listed on the New York Stock Exchange and represent a cross-section of pharmaceutical and biotechnology leaders. Drugs from each company are selected based on annual sales.

“This is a new kind of alternative data product leveraging the precision and scale of a traditional quantitative signal like Sermo Drug Ratings alongside the scale, granularity and real-time pace of big data,” said Francesco D’Orazio, co-founder and CEO of Pulsar. “By combining doctor drug ratings with sentiment and visibility from social media and the news we are able to layer in a previously unavailable qualitative element that provides a deeper understanding of the value physicians, patients, markets and media place on these drugs.”

This data offering builds on Sermo and Pulsar’s exclusive partnership, which provides leaders in pharma and healthcare with a comprehensive and actionable 360-degree view of the medical, public and media conversation on health.

Since September 2019, Sermo’s 5.5M global medical conversations feed into social intelligence tool Pulsar, allowing marketers and researchers to understand how both the public and the medical world react and talk about topics related to healthcare – from treatments to conditions and drugs to news stories and trends impacting the world of healthcare.

Enterprise Access Point is Bloomberg’s web-based data marketplace that allows Data License clients to easily discover, access and immediately use high quality, market leading content from both Bloomberg and third party providers. In September 2020, Bloomberg announced the expansion of its alternative data offering, representing a three-fold increase in the number of third-party alternative data vendors available since the product’s introduction in February 2019. The move allows Bloomberg clients to access a much-expanded catalogue of curated alternative data, uniquely positioned to provide insights in today’s market environment.

Jake O’Neill

+44 (0) 203 426 4012

www.accessintelligence.com