Community Show: Veeva Integration

The presentation focuses on Reltio's pre-built integration solution for Veeva Vault CRM, demonstrating how life sciences organizations can leverage Master Data Management (MDM) to unify fragmented customer data, optimize commercial operations, and ensure regulatory compliance. The speaker begins by addressing the critical challenge of siloed data—scattered across SAS applications, legacy databases, and cloud platforms—which acts as a primary barrier to digital and AI transformation. This fragmentation results in poor data quality, delayed information mobilization, and significant costs, including reduced sales effectiveness, poor engagement due to inaccurate HCP/HCO data, and risks of regulatory sanctions related to IDMP, privacy, and transparency.

Reltio's solution is built around the concept of "HCP 360," part of their Life Sciences Velocity Pack, which unifies data from first-party sources (CRM, ERP, CTMS) and enriches it with third-party vendor data (e.g., IQVIA). This comprehensive, trusted data, including interactions and behavioral attributes, is then mobilized via real-time synchronization to downstream enterprise applications, including Veeva Vault CRM, which serves as the primary system for sales force automation (SFA) and marketing engagement. The core value proposition of the integration is guaranteeing a single trusted view of HCP and HCO data through bidirectional profile synchronization, enabling accurate and compliant customer engagement.

The integration utilizes a layered architecture based on the Reltio Integration Hub (RIH). The foundation is a pre-built Veeva Vault CRM connector, which includes managed business transformations and mappings. On top of this are customizable RIH "recipes" that manage specific triggers, workflow processes, and error handling tailored to customer use cases. The integration supports syncing HCP data (mapped to Veeva's Account object types: Professional or Key Opinion Leader) and HCO data (mapped to Hospital, Clinic, Pharmacy, etc.). Crucially, it handles complex relationship synchronization, such as parent-child HCO affiliations and HCP-HCO affiliations (e.g., a medical director working at a hospital), and manages cross-object mapping for license data (DEA, NPI) which may reside in different fields or objects within the two systems. The solution also features a Data Change Request (DCR) capability, allowing new records created in Veeva to be reviewed and approved by data stewards in Reltio before being finalized, thereby maintaining strict data governance.

Key Takeaways:

• Fragmented data across legacy systems and cloud platforms is identified as the primary barrier to achieving digital and AI transformation in life sciences, leading to significant profitability hits and compliance risks (e.g., IDMP, privacy).
• The Reltio Life Sciences Velocity Pack provides an "HCP 360" view by ingesting and unifying first-party data (CRM, ERP, CTMS) and enriching it with third-party sources (like IQVIA), including interaction and behavioral data, which is essential for effective commercial segmentation.
• The integration provides bidirectional, near real-time synchronization between Reltio (MDM) and Veeva Vault CRM, ensuring that the single trusted view of HCP/HCO data is consistently available for sales force automation and marketing engagements.
• The integration handles complex data structures, including the synchronization of organizational relationships (parent-child HCO affiliations) and professional affiliations (HCP working at an HCO), which are vital for accurate commercial targeting.
• Regulatory readiness is supported by the system's ability to maintain auditable customer records, streamlining compliance tracking and reducing the risk of regulatory sanctions associated with inaccurate data.
• The Reltio Integration Hub (RIH) uses "recipes" for specific use cases, offering a customizable layer on top of the pre-built Veeva connector to manage triggers, workflows, and detailed error handling, ensuring scalability and flexibility.
• Data flowing from Reltio to Veeva is real-time (using queues like SQS/PubSub), but data flowing from Veeva to Reltio is near real-time (up to 30 minutes latency) due to Veeva's reliance on file-based data exports with a minimum 15-minute polling frequency.
• The solution supports Data Change Requests (DCRs): records created in Veeva appear as DCRs in Reltio, allowing data stewards to compare values (e.g., specialty, NPI number) and approve or reject the change before it becomes a consolidated master record.
• The integration manages data merges: when duplicate records are merged in Reltio, the system automatically triggers the necessary API calls to merge the corresponding records in Veeva Vault CRM, maintaining data integrity across both systems.
• The system handles initial bulk data loads, allowing organizations that already have an established Veeva CRM to efficiently migrate their existing customer data into the Reltio MDM platform for unification.
• Customized Veeva entities and attributes are supported; Reltio provides detailed guides on how customers can enhance RIH recipes to map custom fields from their Veeva objects into Reltio attributes.
• License data (DEA, NPI) requires specific cross-object mapping, as these details are often mapped to address objects within the Veeva CRM structure, a complexity handled by the pre-built integration.
• Future development plans include pre-built integrations with other Veeva systems, specifically mentioning Veeva CTMS (Clinical Trial Management System), indicating a roadmap to connect clinical and commercial data domains.

Tools/Resources Mentioned:

• Reltio: Master Data Management (MDM) platform.
• Veeva Vault CRM: Primary target system for SFA and commercial engagement.
• Reltio Integration Hub (RIH): Integration platform managing connectors and workflows.
• SQS, GCP PubSub, Azure Queues: Messaging services used for real-time data flow from Reltio.
• IQVIA, Metro: Examples of third-party data vendors used for data enrichment.

Key Concepts:

• HCP 360: A unified, comprehensive view of a healthcare professional, combining internal operational data with external enrichment and behavioral data.
• DCR (Data Change Request): A workflow mechanism where proposed data changes from source systems are held for review and approval by data governance teams in the MDM platform.
• Crosswalks: Unique identifiers stored in the MDM system that link a single master entity record to its corresponding records in all connected source systems (e.g., the Veeva Vault ID).
• RIH Recipes: Pre-configured, customizable integration workflows that define the specific logic for data synchronization, transformation, and error handling between Reltio and external applications.
• Reverse Transcoding: The process of translating standardized MDM values back into the specific lookup codes or formats required by the target system (Veeva) during the outbound sync.