Pulse Analytics
2026
Competitive Access Tool
Redesigned how customers compare drug coverage between competitors
Context
Where Competitive Access Fits In
The Payer tool is part of Pulse Analytics, a suite of market access tools for pharma teams in oncology and specialty therapeutics. It shows how their drugs are covered by insurance plans and how that coverage shifts over time.
Within it, the Competitive Access feature lets teams compare their coverage against competitors. This project addressed key pain points and usability issues in that feature to make competitor coverage easier to compare.
Why This Matters To Our Customers
Competitive Access is used by pharma strategy teams to see how their drug's coverage stacks up against competitors at each payer, or insurance companies and government programs like Medicare.
Our customers use insights from this feature to make key decisions, such as which insurers to focus on, how to compete against a rival drug, and which coverage gaps are costing them. They need a clear and reliable view of how their drug's insurance coverage compares to others to make these decisions.
Problem
Why Users Got Stuck
Feedback on the tool told us users were struggling with the Competitive Access feature. They couldn't find the products they were looking for, or run the comparisons they needed.
To understand why, we dug into the feature and talked to our proxy users. Two issues stood out, and became the focus of this project:
Issue 1: Users kept hitting dead ends
The feature works by showing your drug next to its direct competitors. But the tool used a strict definition of what counted as a "direct competitor," so for many products it found no matches at all. Users would select their product, apply their filters, and land on an empty "no data" screen. With nothing to compare, they couldn't get any answers, which made the feature unusable for them.
No data state
Issue 2: Users couldn't pick who to compare against
Even when competitors did show up, the tool chose them automatically. There was no way to compare your drug against a specific competitor you had in mind, so users gave up and pieced the comparison together on their own, outside the tool.
Exiting tool experience - no way to choose the competitor
Solution
From Empty Screens to Answers
Before
After
We came up with two core changes to fix the problems stated above.
Fix 1: Let users add any product to compare against
If a user hits a state with no direct competitors, they can now add any product themselves instead of being stuck on an empty screen.
After clicking “Add product,” users get a selection modal to choose the product and the required criteria. I laid it out as a table rather than dropdowns so users can scan every available option at once, see that some choices depend on earlier ones, and avoid the “no data” states that dropdowns tend to hide.
Fix 2: Loosen the logic for what counts as a direct competitor
To reduce how often users hit an empty screen at all, we widened what qualifies as a direct competitor.
A product competes with another when it treats the same patients, at the same point in treatment, under the same type of coverage. Previously, a product had to match the primary product on all four criteria; now it only needs three. That expanded the competitor list, so more data auto-populates on landing and fewer no-data states.
Loosening critiera for what counts as a direct competitor
Design Iteration
Further UI Updates
Beyond the core fixes to the bottleneck issues, I also made a handful of UI updates to improve the rest of the experience.
Rethinking how the comparison is shown
I also took on an older complaint: seeing all the data took too many clicks across tabs.
Users need to click between different tabs to see the full data
My first direction, showing multiple competitor tiles at once, tested badly.
Redesign of the page I tested with users
Users found it confusing and told us they preferred focusing on one comparison at a time, selecting products from the top filters, and keeping the original tabs. So I iterated back toward the original by reverting back to show one comparison at a time, with the side tab restored.
Final design
A better home for the payer data
Within that view, I replaced the grouped containers of payer accounts with a table. It shows the same access groupings but adds real control: sort by restriction, percent of lives, or name, filter to a specific payer, or narrow to just the payers where their product is advantaged.
Payer Data - Before
Payer Data - After
The table also resolves the clicks problem. Instead of one packed first view, I added a separate table showing the comparisons against all competitors at once, where sort and filter let users focus on what matters, like coverage where they're at a disadvantage.
Final design for showing payer data
Outcomes
Early Response
The redesign was released recently, to a positive response. Stakeholders and proxy users were excited by the direction, and told us the feature is now much easier to work with. They can find the answers and data they need without hitting the dead ends that made the original version unusable.
Since the two core problems, empty screens and no way to choose a competitor, were the main things blocking users, addressing both marks a meaningful improvement to the feature.
Now that it's live, I plan to monitor page usage to see whether page views and clicks increase, which will tell us whether the changes are getting more people to the data and keeping them in the tool rather than working around it.
