By Robert Gardner

Life science companies can gain a deeper understanding of the patient experience and, in the process, empower their decision-making, through the analysis of unbiased and uncensored discussions occurring publicly on social media and particularly on Inspire.

Inspire has something that no other healthcare social network has – Inspire’s proprietary, longitudinal data. Our new solution, Inspire Insights: Discover, is a social listening suite of products combining the real world patient-engagement of Inspire’s patient support communities with other open-source, publicly available, online social media content from health forums, Twitter, Facebook and more. In so doing, the Discover research product offerings provide a complete and holistic view of the patient experience.

Analytics-fueled discovery by our linguists and research analysts unlocks valuable patient insights that can effectively drive business strategy. The key to unlocking these insights lies in our ability to find, filter and classify these organic conversations, using machine-learning, natural language processing technology.

Here are eight ways you can leverage the new Inspire Insights: Discover solution.

1) Accelerating Product Development

Our Discover research offerings brings the patient and caregiver voice to the drug development stage, ultimately delivering patient insights that improve clinical trial recruitment, retention and overall success. Designed to inform trial design, Discover research offerings can provide data on patient awareness, perceptions, and preferences with regard to clinical trials. In addition to organic insights, our capabilities also include testing and exploring key hypotheses about target patient groups. Discover uncovers barriers to recruitment, from the language that is used in recruiting materials, to the everyday, non-clinical factors that are part of patient and caregiver daily experience with illness, like logistical challenges, travel time, or even parking.

2) Identifying Treatment Challenges through Real-World Treatment Observations

Patients and caregivers online, especially on Inspire, engage in detailed, authentic and naturally occurring discussions about their conditions and their treatment challenges–including side effects, which they may not report to their healthcare providers. In a research study published in JAMA Oncology, we demonstrated we could find within our proprietary longitudinal data unknown and potentially life-threatening side effects years before reported in the literature.

The Discover suite of products also provides intelligence on the “mystery zone,” that time between physician’s visits when life happens, when patients and caregivers incorporate, exclude or compromise on medication-taking.

3) Gaining a New Perspective on the Patient Journey

With the vast amount of health information available, patients and caregivers can now take an array of paths towards treatment, presenting a new challenge for the life science industry. Accessible and available information impacts the speed of health decisions, compressing the time between demand moments and decision points. Keeping pace with demand moments, decision points as well as influencing factors requires continually mapping patients’ journeys.

Our analysis of social media conversations creates, in granular detail, the feelings, lexicon, attitudes and behaviors of patients and caregivers. In the process, we construct a powerful tool that can help product teams and marketers drive messaging, education and innovation that more effectively aligns with met and unmet patients’ needs to enhance the efficacy of their treatment and their overall care.

4) Discovering Personas

By understanding the detailed insights of patient decisions, concerns, fears, attitudes, behaviors, actions and challenges in member postings, our team of linguists and analysts can uncover personas – specific types of patients and caregivers within a community. Coupling organic conversations with other known variables that are particular to our proprietary data, detailed patient personas can be constructed, leading to a better understanding of patient types and their overall mindset.

For brand managers, these newly identified personas allow for strategic targeting, messaging, engagement and education, opening up entirely new audience segments for the brand while at the same time fulfilling unmet needs.

 5) Devising Content Marketing Strategies

Using our advanced social listening capacity, we can provide a deeper understanding to our clients of how patients discuss their products, what questions patients have about products (along with the answers that they receive from other patients) and the language or lexicon used by patients and caregivers. These newly accessible resources can improve content marketing strategies.

6) Obtaining Competitor Intelligence

Patients discuss starting, stopping, and switching medications and devices in great detail online and the life science industry can now understand the “why” behind these actions. Imagine utilizing Discover to assess competitors’ weaknesses, their strengths or even how your brand stacks up against the competition in the eyes of consumers. Along with developing content marketing strategies, Discover research offerings can collect and analyze thousands of organic conversations about your competitors, providing your organization with actionable intelligence.

7) Discerning Brand Reputation

Zeroing in on patient and caregivers discussions on social media, business units can monitor their brand’s reputation as well as market reaction to brand behavior. Diving deeper into these discussions allows brands to extract unique insights, such as the key triggers and barriers to treatments, brand sentiment and drivers of that sentiment.

8) Improving Patient Education

One of the most important advantages of social intelligence relates to improving patient education. Discover can identify opportunities for engagement, providing companies with material on when, where and why particular groups of patients, like communities on Inspire, are active online and available to receive educational instruction.

But even more importantly, analysis of organic conversations uncovers both the illness lexicon of patients and their level of health literacy. Moreover, creating, improving on, and effectively disseminating patient education, entails identifying whether patients access health resources, and if so, what those resources are, as well as distinguishing what patients may be retaining.

With Discover research products, whether you require social listening with a broad touch (like a social landscape), a strategic, deep dive, or ongoing, periodic, listening reports, our team can work with you. Contact us to choose the best option to meet your needs.