Company profile
Norstella is a global pharmaceutical intelligence leader dedicated to helping healthcare providers, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies bring life-changing therapies to patients faster. With a mission to smooth patient access, the organization delivers reliable, scalable solutions to standardize complex healthcare data across claims, labs, electronic health records (EHRs), and social determinants of health (SDoH).
The challenge
In life sciences, real-world data (RWD) is both an asset and an obstacle. Data arrives fragmented, inconsistent, and often locked in unstructured formats. Without a reliable coding foundation, organizations face:
Data fragmentation across ICD-10-CM, SNOMED CT®, NDC, LOINC®, CPT®, and local codes leading to mismatched definitions and duplications.
Unstructured complexity in clinical notes, lab reports, and pathology PDFs that are rich in insights but labor-intensive to extract and normalize.
Compliance risks as changing code standards threaten downstream analytics.
Resource drain as internal teams struggle to maintain coding hierarchies and mappings instead of focusing on strategy.
For Norstella, the stakes were even higher. As a data integrator and insights provider, the quality of their deliverables directly depends on the integrity of incoming data. Inconsistent, low-quality RWD doesn’t just slow operations; it erodes sponsor confidence, jeopardizes regulatory submissions, and weakens payer evidence. That can mean missed milestones, delayed launches, and compromised market access.
As William Van Derveer, Vice President of Product (Data Platform) at Norstella, explained, “Getting unstructured data isn’t the hard part. Remaining legally and privacy compliant with unstructured data is the hard part and doing it consistently at scale is even harder.”
Indeed, without a scalable, trusted coding foundation, timelines stretched, compliance risk rose, and analytic teams faced unnecessary friction.
The IMO Health solution
IMO Health brought more than 30 years of provider-side terminology expertise, trusted by 89% of US clinicians, to help address Norstella’s challenges. As a result, each of their data feeds is now aligned with how care is actually documented in the real world.
Key elements included:
Industry-leading terminology and hierarchy for ICD, SNOMED CT, CPT, HCPCS, NDC, MONDO and other code sets, all continuously maintained by IMO Health’s dedicated clinical informatics team.
Multi-vocabulary mapping to ensure interoperability across disparate systems, eliminating the need for Norstella to build and update crosswalks in-house.
Flexible delivery (Cloud APP, API, and flat files) for seamless integration into Norstella’s ingestion pipelines, supporting both structured and unstructured data workflows.
Reduced manual lift by eliminating the need for internal coding builds, freeing product and engineering teams to focus on higher-value analytics and innovation.
“Contracting and finding a gold-record source that’s easy to access and regularly maintained is incredibly valuable to us,” said Van Derveer. “Everybody has quality issues with RWD, but IMO Health acts as an accelerator, getting us from raw feeds to usable data much faster than we could internally.”
Normalized terminology isn’t a “nice-to-have,” it’s the foundation that determines whether any downstream RWD program succeeds. By partnering with IMO Health, Norstella ensures that every dataset it delivers to sponsors is interoperable, reproducible, and ready for evidence generation. For sponsors, this means fewer bottlenecks, fewer errors, and greater trust in the insights driving billion-dollar development and access decisions.
Everybody has quality issues with RWD, but IMO Health acts as an accelerator, getting us from raw feeds to usable data much faster than we could internally.
Results and outcomes
Speed to standardization was critical for Norstella and readily achieved. IMO Health fit directly into the company’s ingestion workflows with no re-architecture required. Through APIs and flat-file exports, the team seamlessly supported both structured (claims, labs, EHR feeds) and unstructured (clinical notes, pathology reports) data. The results were impressive and, in many cases, immediate.
By embedding IMO Health’s terminology and normalization framework, Norstella automated routine code updates, created dynamic connections across vocabularies, and reduced onboarding and cleansing time by more than half. The new workflow not only cut manual labor by an estimated $25K–$50K per dataset but also gave analysts freedom to strategize on the insights provided, with confidence.
Beyond efficiency, the collaboration delivered consistency. Cohorts once built manually could now be reproduced for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR), real-world evidence (RWE), and regulatory studies. The ability to link unstructured and structured data unlocked early diagnosis signals and surfaced barriers to therapy access that had previously been hidden, all while bolstering expectations for traceability and reproducibility.
Norstella automated routine code updates, created dynamic connections across vocabularies, and reduced onboarding and cleansing time by more than half. The new workflow [also] cut manual labor by an estimated $25K–$50K per dataset.
Commercially, the gains were equally significant. Within 18 months, Norstella launched 10 new analytics models and products, accelerating insight delivery and differentiation. Cohort definitions that once took weeks were finalized in days, enabling faster trial feasibility assessments and market access pivots. Even subtle coding inconsistencies, once a source of payer delays, were resolved upstream, strengthening Norstella’s readiness in competitive therapeutic markets.
Looking ahead, the partnership continues to evolve. Norstella and IMO Health plan to expand their collaboration into broader unstructured data integration, faster onboarding of new data assets and products, and precision cohorting across rare disease, oncology, and other high-value domains.
As the volume and diversity of real-world data accelerates, sponsors need partners who can tame complexity without sacrificing speed. The Norstella–IMO Health relationship now stands as a model for how pharma can turn RWD from a liability into a strategic advantage, one scalable dataset at a time.
To discover how IMO Health can transform your RWD, book a meeting today.
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