Inspire’s MS Community Overcomes Patient Isolation with Peer-to-Peer Support and Experience

Inspire’s MS Community Overcomes Patient Isolation with Peer-to-Peer Support and Experience By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Over 15,000 members of Inspire have interest in, searched for, or have posted about multiple sclerosis (MS). Members have written over 4000 posts and more than 2000 searches have been conducted on MS. Pharmaceutical marketers wonder if patients discuss medications with each other online. The answer is a definitive yes. Patients also discuss what they learned online about treatments with their health care provider. It is not unusual for members to reach out after just being diagnosed. “I was just [...]

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Jan 2020By |0 Comments

What Touchpoints Influence Drug Compliance for Chronic Illnesses?

What Touchpoints Influence Drug Compliance for Chronic Illnesses? By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Recent marketing research from Google shows that it takes 50-500 touchpoints to influence a purchase decision. While the study focused on common non-medical purchases (headphones, airline flights, beauty products, and candy), the authors point out an important shift in the concept of marketing touchpoints: Today, people are no longer following a linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase. They are narrowing and broadening their consideration set in unique and unpredictable moments. In fact, the authors of a study titled “Chronic Illness Medication [...]

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Jan 2020By |0 Comments

Getting the Real Story from Patients

Getting the Real Story from Patients By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Humans evolved in a storytelling milieu where stories taught and explained the world around us. Our brains carry this legacy, research shows that the brain can store more information and retrieve it more easily when it is in story form. Narrative is easier to understand, is more engaging, and is an effective tool to communicate science to lay individuals.1,2 Personal narratives make science relatable. But mistakes made in the process of capturing a patient narrative can be cumulative. When writing native advertising (sponsored content), copy [...]

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Nov 2019By |0 Comments

Getting the Most from Online Surveys

Getting the Most from Online Surveys By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Do you wonder about online surveys? Are they reliable? Is there bias? A recent article by the Pew Research Center For Weighting Online Opt-In Samples, What Matters Most? 1provides guidance to allay those concerns. Pew experimented with different procedures for weighting results from surveys with online opt-in samples to discover which techniques best reduced bias on estimates. They compared online results with the results given for 24 benchmark questions drawn from “high-quality federal surveys,” public surveys that were conducted using more traditional methods. This was [...]

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Nov 2019By |0 Comments

What is a Virtual Advisory Board product?

What is a Virtual Advisory Board product? By Monica St. Claire Almost 60 percent of all clinical trial protocols have at least one amendment. Amendments lower the numbers of recruited patients as well as increase the cost of clinical trials according to Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development Impact Study from 2016.1  Obtaining input from patients and caregivers early in the protocol development process could prevent many amendments. This is just one reason to consider an Inspire virtual advisory board. Virtual advisory boards provide clients with a long-term opportunity to engage with key patients [...]

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Aug 2018By |0 Comments