Overview
At the heart of most successful sales and marketing programs is customer-relationship content that is organized and maintained to reflect accurately the health-industry market. HCOS provides the industry's most comprehensive and timely source of US healthcare reference information.

HCOS – Five Levels of Relational Hierarchy

 

The HCOS database is designed uniquely to offer the five levels of relational hierarchy that reflects the US healthcare industry. HCOS is operationally ready: it is integrated with all IMS transactional data sets. Depending upon a client’s data requirements, HCOS can be customized to include sites with DDD sales or with affiliated physicians’ Xponent script activity. Additionally, market-segment views of the data add insight regarding organizations of customer interest such as hospitals, long-term care facilities and medical groups. The result: a client-specific data set assured to include the client’s most important customers by brand.

 

The HCOS database provides prescriber-to-group-practice-site affiliation as well as independent or corporate-owned status of the organization. This is critical to assess the value of a group at the account level based on transactional data. The HCOS information includes a comprehensive profile of each group-practice site, corporate owner and buying group as well as the relationship of the one-to-many prescriber affiliations (physician/physician extender).

 

The following lists the five levels of organizational and professional relational hierarchy exclusively provided by IMS HCOS:

 

Professional Layer – Healthcare professionals with IMS identifiers who practice within the healthcare organization. Professionals include physicians and physician extenders such as PAs, ARNPs and RNs as well as pharmacists and administrative officers and medical directors.

Location Layer – The DDD outlet location to which product is shipped; sales data (DDD dollars and units) is available at this DDD outlet level. An organization may include one or more DDD outlets.

Facility Layer – Account or site level where one record represents each distinct healthcare-organization legal business entity, such as a medical group practice or hospital.

Corporate Parent Level – each organization can be owned, managed or leased by, or have strictly a purchasing affiliation with, an integrated delivery network (IDN), corporate owner or owner subsidiary. (An owner subsidiary has an analogous relationship to an IDN or a Corporate Owner.)

Purchasing and Distribution Layer – Each organization can have a purchasing, contracting or distribution relationship with one or more GPOs and distributors.

 

HCOS – Industry Leading Class-of-Trade (COT)

 

The HCOS class-of-trade (COT) has been recognized as an industry standard for its coverage and completeness of the healthcare market. The verification process used to qualify and document COT at the organization supports the accuracy of the information and demonstrates IMS’ commitment to ongoing maintenance.

 

Comprised of about 150 unique health-industry COTs, HCOS data delivers value to clients by providing critical information concerning facility type, which is fundamental to DDD channel analysis and script-data alignment.

 

The chart below shows a sample of the HCOS COTs, comprised of three levels: Classification, Facility Type and Specialty: