The pattern is familiar. Sales operations reports one attainment figure, the brand team reports another, the field reports a third, and a new dashboard gets commissioned to reconcile them.
Underneath, the same prescriber exists three times across CRM, claims and the pharmacy feed, affiliated to two accounts and one practice that dissolved last year. Each system made a reasonable call about which record is real. None of them logged the decision, so all three reports are internally consistent and mutually incompatible.
How an unresolved record travels
The path it takes
- Targeting The customer lands in the wrong territory, so the coverage plan starts out slightly wrong.
- Attainment The coverage plan feeds attainment, the incentive follows, and an appeal gets raised.
- Promotional response Attainment enters the response model as a control, so the marketing read inherits it.
- Confidence By the time anyone traces it back, three teams have stopped treating one source as authoritative.
A governed data layer is, above all, an agreement about whose number stands when two teams differ.
- Resolve identity first: customer, account, affiliation and, where consent permits, the patient journey.
- Give every definition a named owner, so a change is a decision rather than a discovery.
- Publish the match rate beside the performance figure, so confidence travels with the number.
- Re-run resolution on a schedule; a customer master built once drifts as practices merge and prescribers move.