What’s Pharma’s Key to Success in 2021?

What's Pharma's Key to Success in 2021? By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH What commercial and clinical trends can we expect to shape pharma and biotech as the pandemic continues into 2021? What can your company do to make 2021 a better year? In August, Deloitte surveyed 60 marketing leaders of biopharma companies and published the findings. Fully 80% of respondents expected changes in “consumer attitudes, behaviors, and spending” to have the biggest impact on their company over the coming year.1,2 This supports Deloitte’s 2019 report anticipating a “consumer-centered future of health,” including the consumer’s increased willingness to [...]

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Jan 2021By |0 Comments

Does Your Marketing Campaign Go Full Circle?

Does Your Marketing Campaign Go Full Circle? By Jeff Terkowitz Imagine being able to learn about your audience, test your messages with that audience, directly reach your target audience and then evaluate the campaign - all in one place. It’s possible. But let’s back up. Advertisers already understand the value of knowing their audience and testing their messages. The power of research-backed health communications is used at the federal level too in outreach campaigns. The “Pink Book” is the primer that the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and all government agencies [...]

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Dec 2020By |0 Comments

Top 5 Ways Online Patient Communities Can Reduce the Cost of Clinical Trials

Top 5 Ways Online Patient Communities Can Reduce the Cost of Clinical Trials By Jeff Terkowitz Trying to rein in clinical trial costs? You’re not alone. A JAMA research study of 138 trials for novel therapeutics found that clinical trial costs ranged from less than $5 million to $346.8 million, with a cluster of trials coming in between $12-33 million -- and that was for trials in 2015-2016.1 Let’s agree on two things: It hasn’t gotten any cheaper, and finding qualified participants is still an issue. Here are five ways online patient communities can reduce the costs [...]

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Dec 2020By |1 Comment

How Do You Elevate Your Patient Insights Strategy?

How Do You Elevate Your Patient Insights Strategy? By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD MSPH You know what you want to say about your product, but are you still looking for the right way to say it? Successful DTC advertising relies on finding language that resonates with target patients. A recent study demonstrated just how profoundly a choice of words affects patient treatment decisions. A survey cited in the JAMA in March showed that 400 ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) patients chose different theoretical treatments based on descriptions alone. When DCIS is presented as “abnormal cells,” 69% of the [...]

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Nov 2020By |0 Comments

Recruiting Rare and Oncological Patients? Top Pharma Turns to Inspire

Recruiting Rare and Oncological Patients? Top Pharma Turns to Inspire By Jeff Terkowitz Did you know that 80 percent of Inspire’s members agreed to receive information from Inspire about clinical trials? That’s about 1.6 million members with conditions in oncology, rare diseases, autoimmune disorders and chronic conditions who want to know if and when trials affecting their condition might be recruiting. Pfizer needed to find rare patients with genetic resilience to lung cancer. On Sept 23, the Breakthrough Staff at Pfizer wrote, Normally, discovering a small cohort or one or two families who meet such criteria might [...]

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Nov 2020By |0 Comments

Launching a New Drug During a Pandemic? Successful Launches Included a Rapid Pivot to Social Media

Launching a New Drug During a Pandemic? Successful Launches Included a Rapid Pivot to Social Media By Paul Nash How has the pandemic affected pharmaceutical product launches? Experts say that social media and research have been the key factors for this year’s successful launches. In a webcast on the PharmaVoice Webcast Network, “The State of Product Launch During and Post COVID-19,” speakers Maya Desai, Director at Guidehouse; Lead Launch COE, Eduardo Schur, Partner and life sciences global practice lead, Guidehouse; and Justin Zamirowski, Chief Commercial Officer, Better Therapeutics, described key results from their studies into recent pharmaceutical [...]

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Oct 2020By |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

A dazzle of zebras: Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes

A dazzle of zebras: Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes By Hannah Eccard On their website, The Ehlers-Danlos Society explains why people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes (EDS) call themselves zebras. “Medical students have been taught for decades that, ‘When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t expect to see a zebra.’ In other words, look for the more common and usual, not the surprising, diagnosis.” 1 People with EDS are the unexpected zebras. This rare connective tissue disorder characterized by joint hypermobility, skin elasticity and tissue fragility has recently, through the efforts of The Ehlers-Danlos Society, become more well known. Unfortunately many people [...]

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Dec 2018By |1 Comment

Can social media help uncover insights about the patient journey?

Can social media help uncover insights about the patient journey? By Monica St Claire Does patients’ social media content truly reflect the real world experience of patients in general? Can it uncover insights about the patient journey? This question tends to come up when someone is new to this type of research. It’s a good question. Social media’s pervasive presence has been documented by Pew Research, among others, finding that Facebook is used by 74% of Americans on a daily basis, over half saying it is used more than once-a-day, and that 73% of Americans use multiple [...]

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Oct 2018By |0 Comments

Implementing patient centricity?

Implementing patient centricity? By Monica St. Claire Over 1,000 employees from bio-pharmaceutical, medical device and associated supplier companies responded to the Aurora Project’s recent Patient-Centric Benchmarks Survey. Of those respondents, 91% said patient centricity is important, a 6% increase from 2016. But only 30% believe the industry can make it a reality. Knowing how to be patient centric seems to be the missing ingredient. Only 22% of respondents agreed with this statement, “We know exactly what and how to teach [patient centricity] to our people.”1 While many articles call patient centricity a “mantra” and “cliché,”2 Inspire [...]

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Sep 2018By |0 Comments