Veeva Link Key People, IQVIA Expert Ecosystem or CREATION DOL Finder: which DOL insights platform to choose?

If you work with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) or play a part in identifying the most impactful healthcare professionals (HCPs) in your field, you have probably wondered about the digital impact of those KOLs. You might even have considered the idea of “Digital Opinion Leaders” or DOLs, a phenomenon that’s been growing steadily since I first introduced the idea in 2012 in my eBook, Activating Digital Opinion Leaders. 

More than a decade on, the concept of Digital Opinion Leaders is now being widely adopted. However, few advisors have the specialist knowledge and experience to identify and engage these HCPs, who now have an incredible impact on health systems, policies and individual physician behaviours, or the experience of activating DOLs.

So, seeing the two giants of KOL insights embrace the idea of Digital Opinion Leaders is encouraging. We’ve been watching, listening and hearing feedback from users of Veeva and IQVIA’s services, and below, we’ll share some of what we have learned so far. 

We’ll also offer an alternative approach if you want to identify HCPs who are making a measurable impact through their social media conversations: DOL Finder, from CREATION.co.

Veeva Link Key People

If you’re a Veeva CRM user, you will know that Veeva has grown from a core CRM product to include additional integrated intelligence tools. Key People is one of these extensions, and part of the Veeva Link suite. 

Veeva Link Key People is primarily a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) insights tool, providing rich insights into KOLs and their ecosystems. 

Link Key People provides 4m+ profiles containing publications, clinical trials, conferences, associations, guidelines, grants, payments, social media, news mentions, and patient mix by disease and drug class. Data is sourced from over 250k public sources, including PubMed, conference websites, and social media feeds.

Data from Key People is accessed via a web or mobile application, and is also available through an API or as data files, so it’s possible that you could integrate the data with other platforms. It already integrates with Veeva CRM. 

What we love about Veeva Link Key People for DOL identification:

• It’s useful if you want to know which of your existing KOLs is also active on social media.
• It includes rich data on offline activities.
• Veeva CRM integration.
• Ability to tag your ‘favourite’ HCPs.

What we think is missing from Veeva Link Key People for DOL identification:

• Since the data is focused on KOLs, the digital activity is restricted to those KOLs profiled on the platform, which may exclude certain individuals and HCP roles who have gained significant influence online.
• There are limited insights from social media except for the basic activity of each HCP on social media.

Image source: veeva.com

IQVIA Expert Ecosystem with IQVIA Digital Expert

There’s little doubt that IQVIA is the world’s greatest healthcare data insights company. With around $15Bn in revenues and 2024 net profit projections of almost $1Bn, the company has dominated the health insights space. It’s no surprise that, in light of growing interest in the field, IQVIA recently added “Digital Opinion Leaders” to its positioning for IQVIA Expert Ecosystem, the platform that’s been tracking traditional KOLs for years, with the introduction of “Digital Expert.”

Much like Veeva Link Key People, IQVIA’s Expert Ecosystem is first and foremost a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) insights tool, providing insights into KOLs and their professional credentials. Expert Ecosystem integrates with IQVIA’s vast dataset on scientific leadership, and it claims seamless integration with any CRM system.

With the recent introduction of the Digital Expert component, IQVIA adds social media to KOL profiles and claims to aggregate data from 677,000 X (Twitter) and 605,000 LinkedIn accounts.

What we love about IQVIA Expert Ecosystem’s Digital Expert product for DOL identification:

• It matches digital presence with scientific and clinical profiles, so it’s useful if you want to find HCPs who have strong scientific credentials and are also active on social media.
• Validation of HCPs by IQVIA’s unique physician identifier.

What we think is missing from IQVIA Digital Expert for DOL identification:

• Although the platform lists HCPs’ X (Twitter) and LinkedIn profiles, it has limited additional data on what the HCP says on those channels or the impact that their content has upon other online HCPs, which we consider essential for assessing true digital opinion leadership.

Image source: IQVIA.com

DOL Finder from CREATION.co

Twelve years ago, we launched CREATION Pinpoint, a vast global database of HCP social media profiles built on an AI engine with human verification. Today, CREATION Pinpoint has access to more than 3M HCP social media profiles, and we have analysed billions of HCP social media posts.

So in 2024, we launched a new platform that puts the power of this intelligence into your hands, with an easy-to-use dashboard that ranks HCPs in any therapy area by the measurable impact they have upon their peers, within that therapy area discussion.

Unlike Veeva Link Key People or IQVIA Expert Ecosystem, CREATION.co’s DOL Finder takes a digital-first approach. We start by listening to the online conversation among HCPs around a particular indication, and then we rank every HCP in that conversation by the impact they have on their peers.

We add a filter by specialty or country so you can drill down to a subset of the data based on your targeting. Then we provide a rich profile of each HCP’s digital activity in the therapy area.

Here’s what clients tell us they love about DOL Finder from CREATION.co:

• A vast dataset of HCPs from various roles talking about their therapy area.
• Intuitive, easy-to-use interface and great presentation.
• Clear visualisations showing each HCP’s measurable impact upon their HCP peers, including by location, specialty and name.

What’s missing from DOL Finder?

• We’re constantly ideating, with clients, to consider what features will add additional value to DOL Finder in the future. With every data refresh, we also release our latest enhancements. So if you’re a DOL Finder user, you already know how to add ideas to our roadmap.

In summary: Veeva, IQVIA or CREATION.co DOL Finder?

We love the platforms from Veeva and IQVIA and, at CREATION.co, we have always focused on solving problems that are not being addressed elsewhere. Here’s where we see each platform fitting as tools for KOL and DOL identification and profiling:

We’d choose IQVIA Expert Ecosystem if we wanted rich insights on KOLs, and money was no object.

We’d choose Veeva Link Key People if we simply wanted to know which of our KOLs are active on social media, and we were already running Veeva CRM.

If we wanted to know the most impactful online HCPs – the true Digital Opinion Leaders – then we’d add on CREATION DOL Finder!

If you would like a personal demonstration of DOL Finder, get in touch and we’ll set that up for you. Or register to watch an on-demand recording of a DOL Finder demo.

Or are you looking for a more comprehensive DOL consulting? You’ve come to the right place. Discover how we can help you identify, engage and activate the right DOLs, and measure the impact through our health strategy solutions.