Placing patients at the forefront of marketing in drug development
Jo Halliday, CEO and founder of Talking Medicines looks at the role that patient intelligence will play in the future of pharmaceutical marketing.
Over the past decade, digital transformation has risen up the boardroom agenda, as management teams grapple with both the challenges and opportunities which true digitalisation can bring. From leisure and hospitality to manufacturing and processing, digital transformation functions are now commonplace in businesses large and small as they seek to gain a competitive advantage and secure a sustainable future. Yet, despite its relative wealth of resources, the pharmaceutical industry continues to follow in the footsteps of others when it comes to adopting and utilising new technology.
This slower pace of digital adoption is particularly true of marketing functions. Through no fault of their own, and for all the right reasons, heavy and prominent regulatory barriers have meant that pharmaceutical companies have traditionally struggled to gather reliable feedback on medicines directly from patients. This lack of direct user feedback has hampered patient-centric decision making in the development and marketing of medicines.
However, the proliferation of social and online media has changed the game in many respects. Patients are now much more likely to use digital channels and platforms to vocalise their experiences of taking medicines, whether positive or negative. By listening to, and learning from, these experiences, pharma is now much better placed to identify what matters to patients and ultimately provide them with a better product. Commonly termed as ‘social intelligence’, the information gathered from online sources is about much more than hashtags, shares and mentions. Used effectively, it can provide relevant and timely “patient intelligence” on patient confidence at a medicine level within a competitive set, and drive decision-making for more effective marketing spend.
Better social intelligence is key to helping pharma understanding the patient voice.
The feedback that pharmaceutical companies can obtain about their products once launched to market is traditionally very limited. Conventional methods rely on focus groups or feedback from clinicians to try and understand patient experience. However, the small size of these groups and limitations in the scope of questions can now be addressed through technologies that enable compliant data collection from patients at a far greater scale on a systematic, and real time basis
Until recently the use of social intelligence within pharma has been limited. However, changes are occurring at an increasingly rapid rate, and have been further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is growing recognition that AI, when combined with social intelligence, can be leveraged by pharma to not only listen to how patients are experiencing their medicines in a real-world setting, but also to make sense of this data.
Putting patients at the heart of the process and giving them a voice not only benefits the patient, but can also impact the commercial, marketing and drug development process. Using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing, social listening can provide pharma marketing teams with empowering metrics that measure patient confidence in medicines, helping them to make data-based decisions on how and where they allocate financial resources.
Since customers express their thoughts and feelings more openly online than ever before, social intelligence is becoming an essential tool to monitor and understand exactly how customers across a range of industries are reacting to a particular product or brand.
Automatically analysing customer feedback, such as opinions in survey responses and social media conversations, allows brands to learn what makes customers happy or frustrated, so that they can tailor products and services to meet their customers’ needs. The same can be said for patients when it comes to understanding their feelings towards medicines. Now more than ever, these conversations are happening online, so there is an opportunity for pharmaceutical brands to take notice and adopt a more patient centric model of marketing.
Curating data from social listening over a prolonged period enables businesses to identify barriers patients are facing to access and use their medicines. This data is critical to ensure effective marketing spend and ultimately drive business decisions for better patient experience. Data can also be used to educate healthcare professionals about how people are using specific medication and allowing patient-support programmes to ensure that they are designed effectively. For example, Talking Medicines’ AI platform, PatientMetRx®, analyses data derived from social media sites and forums where real people discuss their experiences with diseases and medicines. In the new era of social intelligence this is more precise and actionable using AI and mathematical models to filter to the voice of the patient by medicine viewed as real time patient confidence scores. Curating data with AI precision provides brand owners with a 360 understanding of patient confidence in their medicines. Of course, given the highly regulated environment in which pharma operates, it is important that all data capture is fully compliant.
The brand insights which social intelligence can provide are driving pharmaceutical companies to listen closer to what patients have to say. With greater recognition of the benefits of social listening, we expect more and more pharma marketing leaders to utilise the technology at their disposal more effectively.
This technology, of course, will continue to evolve and innovate. For example, development of seamless communication in both directions with patients and bring in more molecular and genomic data will further enhance the level of insights that can be provided. In addition, with more investment and research, it will be possible to move from the realm of reaction into predicting opportunities.
If pharma wants to benefit from these opportunities, it must start to embrace this technology now. Only by exploring the boundaries of what’s possible through social intelligence technology will brands truly understand their customers and realise their mission of becoming patient centric.