Medtech Market Trends Series
Keeping you on top of the latest trends and commercial implications for medtech
Incorporating the
Voice of the Patient into
Medtech Strategy
Social intelligence is helping medical device companies better understand patient needs – and inform more effective product development and customer engagement strategies.
Patients are increasingly empowered – and networked – making understanding the patient experience in their words a critical tool for device brands in developing strategy and content
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
Gauging the patient experience is an increasingly urgent focus for all stakeholders, as patients play a greater role in their own care, including treatment decisions
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:
- Clinical and non-clinical stakeholders are increasingly factoring patient experience into purchasing and device decisions
- Patients are more involved in their care decisions due to increased cost-sharing burden and access to information
- The FDA and other regulatory bodies are beginning to include patient input in regulatory decisions
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
Social communities give brands greater visibility into the patient voice
At the same time, patients are increasingly using social platforms to find information on managing conditions, and to share their experiences with other patients.
This activity has created a rich repository of on-demand insight into the patient experience, including patient emotion, attitudes, needs and motivations, that companies can leverage for customer-centric strategies.
170,000
online conversations among U.S. patients in the past 2 years mentioned glucose monitors and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs).
Share of voice for top CGM brands:
60%
37%
13% 
Note: Percentages exceed 100% due to overlap of brand mentions
Among 170,000 annonymized comments sourced from public social platforms including Twitter, YouTube, blogs, forums, condition communities and product review sites over the past two years
Source: Social data analysis (2019), Decision Resources Group
Voice of the patient social data can help device companies uncover critical insights into consumer behavior at scale and patch blind spots in their market knowledge. Treatment decisions and behavior may happen long after the patient leaves the provider facility, claims and EHR data won’t necessarily reveal the drivers.
However, patients go online and talk to their peers, sharing what they liked and did not like in a device, expressing fears related to a procedure, getting advice on alternatives and informing key decisions. These insights can help companies improve product design and optimize patient education and support programs.
Sharath George
Consumer Insights and Social Intelligence
Decision Resources Group
Integrating patient social intelligence with other data sources is critical for strategic planning
Coupled with primary market research, traditional real-world data sources like claims and EHR data can give us a granular understanding of the treatment pathway, therapy line dynamics and patient-provider interactions.
However, as powerful as they are for diagramming what’s happening as a patient moves through treatment, these data types can miss the “why” driving patient behaviors and treatment decisions.
That’s where voice of the patient data comes in. De-identified social conversation data can give marketers deep insight into patients’ emotions, attitudes, needs, and motivations, lending qualitative insights at quantitative scale – insights that might be missed by traditional methodologies alone.
These insights can help device brands:
- Shape product development strategy
- Better define patient segments
- Evolve messaging and content from product-first to customer-focused
- Arm sales reps with patient-focused proof points that resonate with key stakeholders at accounts
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
Best practices for getting started
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.
