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Patients playing a bigger role in medtech ecosystem and care decisions
Social intelligence as a key input for medtech strategy
Online communities and social networks give greater access to voice of the patient insights
Patients playing a bigger role in medtech ecosystem and care decisions
Social intelligence as a key input for medtech strategy
Online communities and social networks give greater access to voice of the patient insights
Marketing and commercial teams now have a mandate to understand patient needs and their experience at a deeper level in order to innovate and engage effectively with stakeholders:
When patients ask their physician for a specific medical device as part of their treatment, they get it a third of the time.
Among the 9% of U.S. physicians who say patients have asked for a specific device
Source: ePharma Physician® study, 2018, Decision Resources Group
Traditionally, the industry has leveraged primary market research in the form of surveys, interviews, and focus groups to understand what is happening and why within target physician populations treating patients with a particular condition.
Increasing access to real world data has enabled us to more clearly understand the ‘what’ part, by analyzing data with a sample size of millions of patient lives.
We can now enhance the ‘why’ by analyzing online conversations among patients directly, with sample sizes exponentially greater than what can be captured through traditional primary research, granting us deeper insight into the factors that influence treatment-related patient decisions.
Sana Siddiqui Syed
Principal Medtech Consultant
Decision Resources Group
Our learnings from working with multiple brand teams to incorporate social data into their planning:
Voice of the patient work isn’t for everybody (or every category). While the insights derived from patient social conversations can be a game-changer for devices in categories where there’s a high degree of consumer agency in therapeutic decision-making – such as diabetes or aesthetics – it may not have as much value for products and solutions in some categories where purchasing decisions are made further upstream.
Just “listening” is not enough. To get the most value out of initiatives leveraging voice of the patient data, the key metric should be actionability, in terms of potential impact on how patients or caregivers make decisions around treatment. What are the factors driving adoption and the barriers holding it up at each stage of the patient journey?
First, understand what you’re trying to solve for. Effective voice of the patient work starts from a set of business questions and imperatives, and is designed to support the broader corporate strategy, with implications throughout the enterprise.
Voice of the patient initiatives must be systematic, rooted in rigorous data science practices and repeatable methodologies, with core tools/platforms featuring customized frameworks and taxonomies to eliminate redundancy in technology utilization.
Speed is of the essence. Agile pivoting between use cases ensures cross-organizational applications that can support multiple devices, markets and languages. Standardized SLAs, processes and delivery criteria can help here.
…and it shouldn’t be done in a silo. These projects can and should be designed to inform multiple areas of the business, from patient and provider engagement to market access, to realize maximum value.