IQVIA OneKey, the most widespread reference data product in global pharma, declares in 2025 coverage of more than 25 million HCPs and 6 million HCOs across 118 countries, with 250 attributes per record and over 1.5 million updates per month at the global level. Veeva OpenData covers more than 100 countries with HCP and HCO data including addresses, emails, specialties, demographic data and compliance information, and was extended in 2025 with OpenData Live to provide real-time updates beyond the field boundary. Salesforce Data Cloud for Life Sciences opened beta connectors to Veeva Vault in mid-2025. Three platforms, three different architectures, one convergence: the single view of the healthcare professional, the HCP 360, is the foundational problem on which the rest of pharma CRM in 2026 rests.
The promise, in commercial briefs, is that of a complete HCP record that integrates prescriptions, affiliations, trial participation, publications, congresses, content viewed, emails opened, events attended and transfers of value received. In reality, the concrete experience of Italian and European pharmaceutical companies is much more fragmented. Industry literature — Indegene, IntuitionLabs, Tika among others — converges on a recurring estimate of around 30% annual decay of HCP records in non-maintained pharma CRMs, and on a baseline of 10-30% duplicated or stale records at first deployment. The single view is less a product to buy and more a continuous process to manage.
Three architectures for the same goal
Veeva has built its HCP 360 inside the Vault Platform, combining OpenData as reference data, Network as master data management, Vault CRM as system of engagement, Pulse as a behavioral data platform and Link as a product dedicated to KOL identification. It is a vertically cohesive architecture: the four components natively speak the same semantic language, with minimal translation cost between them. It is also a proprietary architecture, and the price of internal integration is the flexibility to engineer the data toward external systems.
IQVIA has built its proposition around OneKey as canonical reference data, to which it adds Longitudinal Anonymized Aggregate Data from health claims and ChannelDynamics for promotional data, and proposes this stratification as the only architecture that allows the HCP view to be grounded on real behavior, not on what is observed by the sales force. Salesforce has approached the topic as a Customer Data Platform problem: Data Cloud solves identity resolution, Data 360 unifies entities, MuleSoft provides connectivity. All three platforms arrive at a similar conclusion — the single view exists as a product of federation, not as consolidation in a single database — but they get there with different stacks and very different transition costs.
MDM debt: the constraint that weighs more than technology
The constraint that prevents most pharmaceutical companies from achieving the HCP 360 promised by vendors is not the lack of tools but the quality of pre-existing data. A physician today can work in two different practices, two hospitals, a private clinic, participate in a clinical trial network, belong to a scientific society and have a digital profile as a Key Opinion Leader. Each affiliation produces different CRM records, each with different identifiers, each updated at different times. Indegene's surveys from 2024-2025 estimate that the vast majority of pharma CRM implementations start with a duplication or staleness rate between 10 and 30%, and that annual data decay is around 30% in non-maintained systems.
The most relevant technological response of 2025 was the formalization of the IQVIA-Veeva partnership, announced as part of a series of master data and Third Party Access agreements that allow OneKey to feed Veeva Network and Veeva Nitro and OpenData to feed IQVIA workflows. IQVIA joined Veeva's Tech, AI and Services partner programs during 2025. For companies operating on Vault CRM, this means the possibility of maintaining their IQVIA reference data without duplicating it, reducing the main factor of MDM debt which was the forced coexistence of two overlapping reference data sets. For Salesforce the same logic applies with Data Cloud + OneKey connectors, on a less mature trajectory but on an equivalent functional perimeter.
Sanita Trasparente: HCP 360 goes public in 2025
For pharmaceutical companies operating in Italy, the most significant regulatory change of 2025 was the effective activation of Sanita Trasparente, the Italian Sunshine Act approved on 24 May 2022 and finalized through the public Registry at the Ministry of Health in March 2025. Disclosure thresholds are set at 100 euros per single transfer of value to an HCP and 1,000 euros per year; for HCOs the thresholds are 1,000 euros per single event and 2,500 euros per year. The first reporting cycles became operational in 2025. The EFPIA Code, on the European front, requires the consolidated publication of transfers of value in a common window between 20 and 30 June of each year, with individual disclosure where national law permits.
The structural point is that HCP 360 in 2026 is no longer just an internal pharma tool. It has become an asset that must natively include the dimension of compliance and public disclosure, because the trace of every transfer of value — congress sponsorship, advisory board fee, research grant, editorial article — must be reconstructible years later with a level of reliability that leaves no room for MDM errors. Companies that have built their HCP record as an aggregate of disconnected CRM entries are discovering in 2025-2026 that public disclosure exposes the inconsistencies of the underlying data in a far noisier way than any internal audit.
What to do now: federation beats consolidation
The experience of HCP 360 projects completed between 2023 and 2025 in large pharma converges on three practical principles. The first is that consolidating all HCP data in a single repository is less useful than the disciplined federation of specialized repositories: prescription data lives in the systems that produce it, engagement data lives in the CRM, compliance data lives in disclosure systems. HCP 360 is a view that is composed, not a table that is populated. The second is that the data lineage — who creates which attribute, with what authority and with what frequency — matters more than the data schema. An HCP 360 with four contextually authoritative sources is worth more than one with twelve sources of confused provenance.
The third is that freshness is the KPI that weighs more than completeness. Veeva Pulse and IQVIA measure in their reports how the predictive value of an HCP attribute drops rapidly with its age: an affiliation registered eighteen months earlier is not worth as much as an affiliation registered six months earlier. HCP 360 is effective to the extent that its most sensitive attributes — affiliation, professional address, preferred contact, last interaction, consent status — are updated at a rhythm that reflects the real dynamics of the medical profession. For Italian pharmaceutical companies planning their HCP 360 investment in 2026, the choice between Veeva, IQVIA and Salesforce is secondary to the decision on which authorized source updates which attribute and at what cadence. That is the decision that produces the return.
