By Melane Sampson
A pharmaceutical and life sciences technology, data, and consulting platform, IntegriChain delivers solutions that help companies manage the commercial and financial complexities of bringing therapies to market, ensuring patients have affordable and timely access to medications.
Through its sponsorship of the Revenue Analytics Collaboration (RAC)—a peer benchmarking and networking community of more than 900 life sciences professionals across nearly 300 manufacturers—IntegriChain supports industry-wide knowledge sharing around market access, gross-to-net management, government pricing, forecasting, and commercialization.
In this interview with BioTuesdays, Jen Sharpe, partner, advisory services, at IntegriChain, and founder of the RAC, discusses the origins of the collaboration, the growing importance of revenue analytics, and how better data can ultimately improve patient outcomes. Joining Ms. Sharpe at BioTuesdays is Sharon Langan, executive director of strategic customer programs at IntegriChain.
How did the Revenue Analytics Collaboration begin?
Ms. Sharpe: I always thought I’d spend my entire career in big pharma. Then, about a decade into my biopharma experience, I made what many people jokingly called “the move to the dark side”—I transitioned into consulting.
What surprised me was the perspective it gave me. Instead of solving problems for one manufacturer, I suddenly had a front-row seat to the challenges facing the industry as a whole. I realized that companies were wrestling with many of the same issues, often in isolation, with very little opportunity to learn from one another.
Around that time, 35 or 40 of us who had worked together across big pharma had dispersed throughout the industry. What started as informal dinners and happy hours to stay connected gradually evolved into something much bigger. Today, that small network has grown into a collaborative community of more than 900 professionals representing nearly 300 biopharma companies.
In the beginning, it was simply a way to keep a pulse on what everyone was experiencing. Sometimes it was as simple as asking, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” I’d collect questions from members and send them anonymously through an old-school BCC email chain so people could benchmark experiences without revealing company information.
The goal was simple: help people realize they weren’t alone. There were hundreds of professionals in similar roles facing the same challenges, and the Revenue Analytics Collaboration became a trusted forum for sharing experiences, comparing approaches, and helping the entire industry move forward together.
Ms. Langan: I call Jen the revenue analytics industry’s “bumble bee.” She gathers ideas from across the industry and pollinates them throughout the community.
That’s what makes the RAC so powerful. It’s not about helping one company improve—it’s about elevating the entire industry. Jen has created a trusted environment where common challenges become shared learning, allowing organizations to benefit from one another’s experiences rather than solving the same problems in isolation.
What differentiates RAC from traditional industry groups or conferences?
Ms. Sharpe: Most industry networks require a subscription or membership fee. RAC is completely free and open to everyone in the industry.
More importantly, it’s built around networking rather than selling. There are no booths, no vendors, and no sales pitches. Even during our hot-topic sessions we ask facilitators to focus on asking questions rather than providing answers.
Within five or ten minutes, the tables are buzzing because people are hearing directly from peers who face the same challenges every day—not from consultants or vendors. IntegriChain’s role is simply to facilitate those conversations.
Our tagline is “Our collective intelligence is powerful.” It’s about helping people make smarter decisions, pivot faster, and learn from the experiences of the broader industry.
Why do you think benchmarking and shared best practices are especially critical in areas like gross-to-net, market access, and government pricing?
Ms. Sharpe: Everyone is talking about AI right now, but I believe the future is really subject matter expertise plus AI. The life sciences industry has a wealth of data, but who is actually harmonizing those datasets across platforms and functions?
Benchmarks and analogs are the output of that work. Today companies may benchmark against a single dataset. Tomorrow, AI will be able to connect dozens of datasets, triangulate insights, and show how one decision affects multiple parts of the business.
I don’t care what’s happening in one channel—I care about how all the channels ebb and flow with each other. That’s where the real value is. Understanding those ripple effects allows companies to make better decisions and pivot more quickly.
The companies that are not going to struggle with AI are the ones with deep datasets, good technology, and good expertise. And if you look across the life sciences ecosystem, IntegriChain is the only company that has all three—the data, the technology, and an 80-person consulting team. I believe we have the largest consulting team in the industry specific to revenue performance.
What are some of the most important insights or patterns emerging from RAC?
Ms. Sharpe: One of the biggest needs we’re seeing is help interpreting policy and regulations.
Large pharmaceutical companies have government affairs teams, lobbyists, and people in Washington tracking every development. Small and mid-sized biopharma companies don’t have those resources. RAC has become a place where members can ask, “Has anyone read this 600-page document? What does it mean for us?”
We can bring together the collective intelligence of the community while also drawing on IntegriChain’s subject matter experts to provide context and guardrails. For many smaller companies, that’s incredibly valuable.
Ms. Langan: The collaboration also informs our technology roadmap. When members consistently raise questions around copay, 340B, claims visibility, or government pricing, it helps us understand where the industry needs better tools and capabilities.
Those conversations influence where we invest in our ICyte platform and how we develop future solutions.
As companies bring therapies to market, there’s often tension between patient access and financial sustainability. How should leaders think about balancing those priorities?
Ms. Sharpe: People talk about following the patient journey, but you can’t truly follow the patient journey unless you can see it.
The patient journey begins when a prescription is written and continues through fulfillment, reimbursement, rebates, discounts, and ultimately net revenue. Historically, that data has been fragmented.
For me, this is personal. My mother was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis 25 years ago. At the time, some physicians believed she might only live another five to seven years because treatment options were limited. Today, she’s 80 years old, and thanks to advances in therapy, her disease has been halted.
Even though I work on the finance side of the business, I’m passionate about advancing therapies that improve patient outcomes. If we can help companies launch successfully and operate efficiently, they can bring life-changing therapies to patients like my mother.
Where do companies most commonly fall short in aligning pricing, payer strategy, and gross-to-net execution?
Ms. Sharpe: I hear this question more and more, especially on executive panels at conferences. In the 2000s, everything was about access at all costs.
I believe that has shifted dramatically over the past 10 years. Today, understanding government policy and how it impacts your product—from launch through loss of exclusivity—is critical. It’s also about understanding net price by channel. It’s no longer enough to look at the overall gross-to-net profile; you need to know what the net price looks like for a Medicaid patient versus someone with commercial insurance or a retiree on Medicare.
Understanding those differences upfront helps drive strategy in ways we never considered 20 years ago. It’s also about using game-theory modeling to understand the economic pressures at play and putting yourself in the shoes of the stakeholders you contract with—distributors, insurers, payers, providers, institutions, and hospitals—to understand what motivates them.
Quite frankly, what often motivates them is profitability. Sometimes it’s not about the science. If efficacy is comparable, whether a therapy is delivered as a pill or an IV may matter less than the financial implications. At the end of the day, we’re all businesses, and the bottom line matters. That’s why I think we need to move beyond focusing solely on access and spend more time understanding profitability by channel and stakeholder incentives.
How can stronger revenue analytics ultimately lead to better patient outcomes?
Ms. Sharpe: It starts with good data.
Many companies believe programs are effective because they’ve invested significant resources into them. Analytics allows you to monitor and verify whether those programs are actually moving the needle. Then you can actually circle back to your contracting, pricing, and strategy and say “Great, it’s working—hold tight,” or “No, let’s make some strong pivots.”
When companies make better decisions, forecasting improves. Reserves become more accurate. Capital is freed up. Those dollars can then be reinvested into research and development, acquisitions, new indications, and future product launches.
It’s not always a direct line, but better analytics ultimately creates more opportunities to improve patient outcomes.
You’ve spoken about revenue leakage as a major challenge. Where do companies most often miss opportunities?
Ms. Sharpe: Revenue leakage can occur throughout the patient journey.
Sometimes it’s a patient assistance program that has extended beyond its original purpose. Sometimes it’s duplicate discounts.
Sometimes it’s a patient who never fills a prescription in the first place.
One area we discuss frequently is prescription abandonment. If a physician writes a prescription, but the patient never starts therapy, that’s both a patient access issue and a business issue.
The first step is visibility. You can’t stop leakage if you don’t know where it’s occurring.
Ms. Langan: Revenue leakage has moved downstream to places most companies can’t see or manage, and it’s estimated to amount to ~$30 billion, making revenue recovery one of the industry’s largest value creation opportunities.
For biopharma companies to continue investing intensely in their R&D pipelines, protecting net revenue has never been more important. That starts with having a complete, trusted view of what’s happening across the commercial ecosystem—from distributors, providers, specialty pharmacies, and payers to government programs, hub and copay vendors, and channel data.
When all of that information comes together in a single data foundation, every decision becomes more informed. We see a world, not too far away, where AI can then connect the dots in ways that weren’t previously possible, linking contract decisions to the patient access journey, provider economics to gross-to-net performance, and payer dynamics to patient adherence. The result is greater revenue integrity, better decision-making, and ultimately more capital that can be reinvested in developing the next generation of therapies.
Can you walk us through an example where identifying revenue leakage materially changed business outcomes?
Ms. Sharpe: We see revenue leakage as multi-fold—one example is the patient programs and the copay where you set something up at launch with an intent to bridge them into being a commercial patient on insurance but the bridge winds up being too long and it’s getting taken advantage of. But that’s just one of the many leakages.
This revenue leakage concept is really important and I find even with big pharma they don’t even know where leakage is happening. Again, subject matter expertise, AI toolsets on your data. Bringing that leakage to light and quantifying it is the first step.
Ms. Langan: And that bleeds into patient outcomes. In specialty, the first-fill abandonment rates can be more than 30%, so it’s about having the data and the ability to action on it. Reducing that abandonment rate is a commercial objective, but it also helps patients access the therapies they need. It’s both a business outcome and a patient outcome.
What role are finance teams playing in commercialization today compared with five years ago?
Ms. Sharpe: Finance has become front and center in the conversation.
Historically, finance teams focused on reporting and variance analysis. Today they’re helping shape commercialization strategy years before launch. We’re seeing companies model net revenue in Phase 2 and Phase 3 development because reimbursement dynamics, government policy, and pricing strategy can dramatically affect long-term viability.
Many CFOs are playing a much bigger role now, often acting as strategic architects. They’re pressure-testing assumptions, evaluating scenarios, and helping determine where companies should invest resources.
They are asking, “Why are we launching this indication before the more profitable one?” The days of old where one drug had 20 indications aren’t happening because companies are not incentivized to do so—it’s an economic disadvantage. This is counterintuitive to the industry—I want 20 indications that will improve more patients’ lives. Unfortunately, legislation is driving these financial decisions and they are boomeranging back to hurt patients.
That’s a major shift from where the industry was even a decade ago.
Ms. Langan: Clinical development costs per approved drug continue to climb, and smaller companies often have very tight cash runways and significant capital constraints.
At the same time, precision medicine means smaller indications, smaller trial sizes, more endpoints, and often longer timelines—all of which amplify the financial risk they face. It’s a multidimensional squeeze: capital constraints, rising R&D and clinical costs, and ultimately pricing pressures. That reality heightens the need for high-value commercialization at launch.
Looking ahead, where do you see the greatest opportunity for biopharma companies?
Ms. Sharpe: Mine your own data.
Most companies have far more information than they realize, but it’s often siloed across departments. Finance may not know what data exists in patient services, for example. Commercial teams may not be connected to operational data.
The greatest untapped opportunity is bringing those datasets together and using them to make smarter decisions.
The second opportunity is game-theory modeling. Too many companies model only from their own perspective. They need to think like payers, providers, distributors, competitors, and policymakers.
Understanding what motivates the person on the other side of the table is often the difference between a good strategy and a great one.
How do you expect industry collaboration to evolve over the next decade?
Ms. Sharpe: I think we’re already seeing it happen.
The pace of change in healthcare has become overwhelming. Executive orders, pricing reforms, regulatory changes, reimbursement pressures—people are looking for trusted peers who can help them make sense of it all.
That’s really what RAC is about. I don’t want to see anyone alone with a blank sheet of paper wondering if they are the only one facing a particular challenge.
Sometimes the greatest value comes from knowing that others are navigating the same issues and learning how they’re responding.
Ms. Langan: AI will only accelerate the value of collaboration.
Communities that share knowledge become smarter faster. When you combine domain expertise, common data models, and advanced analytics, the potential impact becomes enormous.
Looking back, what experience most shaped your leadership philosophy?
Ms. Sharpe: Empowerment.
I’ve been fortunate to work with leaders who encouraged ideas and trusted people to pursue them. That’s something I experience at IntegriChain every day.
The company has an entrepreneurial culture. If you see a way to improve something you’re encouraged to act on it. That kind of empowerment encourages innovation.
I love that IntegriChain has sponsored RAC. It could have been very easy to scrap it—it’s time-consuming. But Josh Halpern, co-founder and CEO of IntegriChain, immediately saw its value. He established the guardrails needed to ensure we could share data appropriately. He did all the right things, made an investment in this initiative, and he continues to support it today.
What continues to motivate you?
Ms. Sharpe: The people.
It’s helping someone—wherever they are in the industry—solve a problem. It’s hearing from a member who felt stuck and finding a way to connect them with the right expertise. It’s seeing companies succeed.
And it’s still my mom’s story—she’s thriving at 80 years old because innovative therapies reached patients who needed them.
That reminds me why all of this matters.
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To connect with IntegriChain or any other companies featured on BioTuesdays, send us an email at editor@biotuesdays.com.
