InSites Blog

The InSites’ Health Study 2010 has arrived! Want to learn how to engage in the conversation with empowered patients? Visit the InSites health report and find out how European patients differ from their Chinese, American, Russian… fellow-patients.

Some key facts: more than 80% of internet users looks for health related information online. For the connected patient, Dr. Google is the first entrance (95% of users) and Wikipedia is the primary content source (followed by government sites, medical portals and pharmaceutical websites). Information on websites from the industry is considered equally trustworthy as content on Wikipedia.

Patients are mainly interested in (looking for / sharing information about) treatments (existing and new), side-effects of medication, symptoms of the disorders they suffer from, and the impact of their quality of life.

50% of all patients discuss their health and conditions with other people (friends, family, physicians…). 30% has already shared health information online. Overall, Asians discuss more on health online. Conversations by American (USA) patients are more likely to deal with prices and reimbursement.

6 in 10 online patients are member of a social network (up to 80% in Brazil!) and 3 in 10 participate on disease communities (up to 60% in China!) such as PatientsLikeMe. The popular social network Facebook is also the most dominant one when health is concerned.

And what about the future? 1 in 2 digital patients is interested in consulting a doctor online! 1 in 3 patients would consider buying medication in an online pharmacy. 1 in 5 would be interested in automatic text reminders on their mobile phone not to forget their medication intake.

As an InSites employee & new joiner of the InSites Health team, I was very curious to see our Health knowledge & experience summarized in the InSites Health Smartees.

‘Never skip breakfast’ is one of the basic health commandments, so we started the workshop with a sumptuous breakfast! The other guests and I were fully ready for the start of a highly efficient workshop!

• The patient can no longer be ignored – 43% of patients look for online health info every month

There’s a lot of movement in the world of Health. Some evolutions are less impactful from a market research perspective, but others are ‘incontournables’. One of them is the way in which patients are stepping forward and are engaging a lot more in conversations about their health (offline & online), which is a true revolution in the Health sector and is deeply changing the relations between the HCP, the patient & the pharmaceutical company.
The first way to anticipate this new situation is to monitor and to know ‘your tools’ as a Health Conversation Manager. My colleague Magali Geens, InSites Consulting Health Director, gave us a view on the 2010 Health Study: Social Media Use in Health. The audience, renowned people in (European) health care marketing, was especially excited about the results because this year the data were extended from Europe to the rest of the world.

• Do not fear – but learn from patient conversations & act!

Health marketers learned how they should engage in the conversation with the empowered patient: track search behavior on Google, find out whether competitors already use ‘sponsored links’ (e.g. no pharma company has yet bought a ‘link’ for the Dutch term ‘hoofdpijn’ (‘headache’ in English)), read conversations about treatments, side effects etc. between patients on communities, social networks…
I think the most important thing I learned was that pharma companies do not need to be afraid of online patient conversations – on the contrary, it is an opportunity for them to learn from these conversations and think of ways to optimize the HCP-patient-pharmacy relation within the given context.
Some more arguments: conversations are more often positive than negative; patients are very open to be activated online by the HCP & the broader industry (e.g. 48% is interested in a doctor who can be consulted online!)

• The answer is out there… Tapping into the conversations of connected patients and caregivers

After a refreshing break, Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert taught us how to answer health-related questions without asking questions to patients… You could literally ‘sense’ the enthusiasm of the audience upon encountering the added value of social media nethnography on the basis of two cases in Health Research. The presentation clearly inspired people as there were a lot of questions about how to do it in practice and for which business goals it is relevant (e.g. brand analysis, online marketing, evaluating ad impacts…)
One slide of the presentation highly enlightened me: the summary of the advantages of social media nethnography. In short: there is a reduced interview bias (no single question is asked to patients), really new insights (new questions pop up based on answers found), the answers are surrounded by a ‘rich’ context (patient language, spontaneous answers in the ‘heat of the moment’), emotions are measured and you can go back in time…

• How to forecast prescription behavior of HCPs

Within the continuously innovating market research industry, we may not forget that as a research agency, we still massively conduct ‘traditional’ online quantitative research.
Sarah Mertens from AstraZeneca presented us the research design and learnings of a pan-European Physician study. The goal was to quantify current prescription behavior and future switch intention among specialists of a product x and to understand drivers & barriers to switch from current treatments to product a.
I learned here that close cooperation between the client & the research agency was very important for the success of the study. In order to have a 100% solid & valid design, some smart elements were built-in (e.g. reliability of measurement was double checked: self-reported prescription behavior was almost an exact match of the up-to-date available prescription data).

At the reception afterwards, all attendees were fully engaged in conversations about patient conversations and I … I was really proud to be part of the Health Team of InSites Consulting!

Interested in the presentations?

The healthcare market is using an amazing range of social media to develop new products, gather data, and speak to patients and healthcare professionals.

If you sign up for our free Healthcare Smartees in Ghent (BE) on 17 June, you’ll hear providers like AstraZeneca Europe explain how they use these techniques in real life, what they’ve learned from hard experience, and discover the practical advantages of techniques you’ll be able to bring to your work.

Smartees are free workshops for marketers and marketing researchers, led by internationally recognized researchers. They’re smart food for clever researchers, offering the chance to discuss industry developments with colleagues in a relaxed atmosphere.

On Thursday 17 June our Director of Health Research, Magali Geens, will also be presenting our 2010 Health Study called Social Media Use in Health. The study updates previous research and this year has also expanded in scope to include worldwide data. It shows how healthcare providers are using everything from Facebook to Twitter to understand their customers and start a conversation.

Sign up and reserve your place for the Health Smartees here.

The Big Apple was the place for the 2010 ESOMAR Health Conference. During the breaks the appropriate amounts fresh fruits (not including apples though) and herb teas were served. Obviously in the evenings, NY’s recommended restaurants easily made up for this with copious meals and – for some – more BMI-threatening dishes. Honestly, I was actually a bit shocked by the ‘size’ of some health marketers and researchers alike attending this health conference…

In the introduction Finn Raben, the new quick-witted ESOMAR Director General (male, Irish, and not to be mistaken for a cop – US practical joke) revealed that Health Research now accounts for 12% of the total market research investments. The big chunk of this budget is spent on research among health care professionals. Today’s biggest challenge for pharma and health providers is that care is moving out from the clinical environment into patients’ and consumers’ homes, their PCs, their mobile phones… and health research is bound to move there as well.

Rod Falcon, first and most inspiring keynote (Institute for the Future, USA), anticipates that we will soon be tracking people’s moods and biometrics to better understand their medical condition and needs. Reasonably it will take some more time before we all start measuring our blood pressure daily (although my 81-year old grandfather already does!) and upload it online. However, already today user-generated health information can no longer be ignored by the health industry and its research providers.

We may indeed be a couple of years apart from massively uploading proper biometrical data; we already post huge amounts of health conversations online and we do this at critical moments (e.g. when we experience unusual symptoms, when we receive a new diagnosis, after an attack, after a prescription change…). This content is freely available for us, health researchers, to analyze and better understand health management in this new empowered society where patients demand involvement and want to understand more about their (family members’) disorders, diagnoses, and treatment options.

When scraping, analyzing, or tracking their online conversations about illnesses, HCP relations and product use, pharmaceutical companies (including the research agencies that do this on their behalf) obviously have both legal and ethical obligations to report and act upon irregularities such as drugs’ adverse effects. Mind you, this is by far the most obvious reason for many actors not (yet) to engage in observational research online. Other reasons include ‘no interest in patient research whatsoever’ (how much longer can this be justified?) and ‘having no idea about the current research possibilities’ (the conference was a good step forward closing this knowledge gap).

Merz Pharmaceuticals (and The Third Eye) and UCB Pharma (together with Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert from InSites Consulting) – first movers to engage in ‘social media netnography research’ in the industry, put their best feet forward on stage to overcome the existing knowledge barrier. With a lot of passion and practical examples they explained how they embraced the insights gathered on social media content and put it to practice in their organizations.

Questions received about the ethics of such ‘big brother’ practices were confidently bounced back to the audience by Rudi Van Campenhout (UCB) and the Merz team: ‘Is it maybe more ethical to know that a lot of questions and frustrations are out there about our brands and products and to just shut our eyes to them? Isn’t it more human to start listening (obviously only on freely accessible platforms!) to understand how we can act upon this in the future?’

Clearly some people in the room remained in doubt (because personally they have never engaged in online conversations about their overweight, cholesterol levels, restless leg, cardiac arrhythmia, hair loss, pregnancy, impaired vision… online? Or because regulatory and pharmaco-vigilance seems barriers too difficult to take?). But fact that our Health 2.0 paper – Social Media as the Central Nervous System for Learning about Epilepsy – received one out of two conference nominations for the ESOMAR Health Excellence Award shows that many minds were opened to these new views!

I would like to end with a quote by Rudi Van Campenhout for the sceptics: ‘I mean it if I say that the Web 2.0 journey was not only insightful, but also very fun (…) it also gave me the opportunity to get to know ESOMAR as an organization and I really liked it.’

Also our Young Research of the Year Annelies Verhaeghe – we also tend to call her our World Champion Research in the category -30 (in years and in BMI), shined on stage presenting her award-winning paper “And they lived happily ever after… – Analyzing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality-of-life.’ Still not convinced? Just read it!

At the ESOMAR Healthcare Conference at the beginning of this week, InSites Consulting was well represented with two speakers sessions. On Monday Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior R&D Manager and ESOMAR Young Researcher of the Year presented And they lived happily ever after…, her award-winning presentation on analysing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality of life.

Later that day Niels Schillewaert, Managing Partner co-presented Health 2.0 with Rudi Van Campenhout of UCB Pharma. The presentation illustrates how social media content can serve market research and the health care industry by means of a real-life case about epilepsy. A new research paradigm of social media research is developed and outlined. Having scraped over 39.000 unique online conversations, the natural language and sentiment of people towards the disease is demonstrated.

ESOMAR nominated InSites Consulting and UCB Pharma with the ESOMAR Excellence Award – Best Paper 2009/2010. Congratulations to our Health team and let’s keep our fingers crossed for the Award Ceremony.

In total 2,800 patients participated in the European Health study by InSites Consulting. Seven out of ten participants indicated the ability to differentiate generic medicines from brand medicines. While generic medicines contain the same active ingredients as patented brands, we still discovered that 44% of patients who claim to be familiar with generic medicines do not believe this.

However this does not detract from the effectiveness patients ascribe to ‘white products’. 83% believe that generic medicines are equally effective as the original formula.

“Fact is that generic medicines must contain the same active component as the original product,” explains Magali Geens, Director Health Research at InSites Consulting. “The formula may however deviate somewhat from the original brand formula. The extent to which deviations are permitted is of course strictly regulated.”

Read the full article online, contact Magali Geens for more information or download the full report.

The full program of the ESOMAR Global Healthcare Conference is final and InSites Consulting is chosen to present not less than two cases.

On Monday 1 March 2010, Annelies Verhaeghe (ESOMAR Young researcher of 2009) will present ‘And they lived happily ever after…‘. Her award-winning paper on analysing user generated content on social media to increase the elderly’s quality of life.

The same day Niels Schillewaert will co-present with Hans Schmeits and Rudi Van Campenhout of UCB Pharma. Health 2.0, social media as the central nervous system for learning about epilepsy.

Find out more about the conference here.

On Thursday 8 October, Saartje Van den Branden and I represented our Health research team at the second Health Care Marketing Congress of Stichting Marketing “HEALTH… yes we CARE!”.

The House of Marketing kicked off with a very interesting survey among health care marketers. The findings of this survey were the building blocks of the other presenters. Interesting to see for us was that:

• It was confirmed that health marketers feel that we are more and more moving towards stakeholder organizations instead of physician centric organizations. From our European patient survey 2009, we already knew that the power of the patient is increasing. Now we learned that also the power of hospitals and pharmacists is growing at cost of the influence of the GP.

• Also, a need for an efficient segmentation of the market is deemed among the top marketing challenges. Marketers should choose the right target groups even more. Indeed, our 2009 survey revealed there are different groups of patients which require a completely different approach. Some of them are very open towards medical communication, whereas others are not. One group we identified, the health experts (26% of Belgians and 29% of Europeans), have a healthy lifestyle and are very involved in collecting health information. These people are more than others looking for info on diseases and medication and require special attention.

• The budget of health marketers is decreasing and the health marketer trust index is on a very low level. This results in an increase of direct marketing, online marketing, lobbying, price promotions and patient support groups. This is mainly at cost of sales visits. Again, efforts are expected to be more and more in favor of patients. The reach of the Internet as an information channel is very high and satisfaction about the information found online is almost as high as information provided by pharmacists. Health marketers should therefore really consider this medium and they should know what information patients and care givers are looking and what they are telling about their brands online.

• Leveraging valuable customer data is still a challenge. So we, market research agencies, have also challenges to overcome!

Interested in more information about our Health Research team? Click here

Last week I attended the DigiPharm Conference in London, a Health Network Event for modern Pharmaceutical marketers. Yes, they do exist! I was really pleased to learn that so many inspiring people engaged in this truly Forward Thinking event.

Funny yet firmly, Heather Simmonds (Director PMCPA) reminded the room that THE CODE OF PRACTICE also applies in the digital marketing playfield. For those who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about: “The Code” is for Pharma a bit what The Bible is (or maybe used to be) for good believers: those who trespass the rules risk excommunication from Pharma heaven for ever and a day. And Heather is one of the guardians of The Code, but unlike many had anticipated – (‘oh God, yet another of those boring legal lectures…’), Heather reprimanded the room for what they did not yet do (rather than for their alleged sins).

“Please raise your hands who has all the information online that can be perfectly shared within the boundaries of the Code…”

Less than 5% of the hands were raised! All these marketers eager to launch YouTube channels, bond with patients on FaceBook, and do PR on Twitter (check out Boehringer Tweeting all you Tweeters), they blushed with shame having to admit they might consider applying web 1.0 first.

Many left the room full of good intentions to use 1.0 to its fullest extent and start observing 2.0. My guess would be that many will start on PatientsLikeMe.com. Thank you James Allen Heywood (Co-Founder and Chairman) for the best presentation of the conference!

Contact Magali Geens, Director Pharmaceutical Research for more information (magali.geens@insites.eu)

Last Thursday, InSites Consulting organized its first Health Smartees. More than 20 professionals from the healthcare industry listened to presentations of Magali Geens, our Director Healthcare Research, Rudi Van Campenhout from UCB and Annelies Verhaeghe, who presented a client case.

Magali kicked off and presented the results of our 2009 Pan-European patient study. This study revealed 4 actionable patient segments, which allow us to really understand the needs of different patient profiles. It showed us the increasing involvement of certain patients in their relationship with healthcare professionals. Today, it becomes very clear that pharmaceutical companies have to change their current sales and communication approach and start taking into account this new patient. Neglecting this influence might lead to a big loss in business potential.

Therefore, understanding patients and speaking the language of the patient is a key priority for healthcare marketers these days. In order to answer this need, InSites Consulting developed a ‘Daily 2.0’ website for Merck Serono. During the Smartees, Magali gave a demonstration of this tool: it allows Merck Serono to have live and continuous updates of patient news that appear on the internet. Through a smart system that relies on RSS feeds, marketers receive frequent updates of patient information to “keep the finger on the pulse”.

However, it shouldn’t stop here. More than just observing, InSites Consulting helps companies to analyze these patient conversations on the internet. For UCB, Annelies Verhaeghe conducted an online patient nethnographic study in the field of epilepsy. The analysis of more than 30.000 patient conversations leads to new insights and understandings towards their patients. Rudi Van Campenhout and his team are now translating these findings into concrete actions.

During the coffee break and lunch, the discussion about the “empowered patient” and the different patient segments continued, and clients started wondering how they could start implementing this in their own business. This really motivates us to keep on ‘Taking health research forward’!

For more information, you can contact Saartje Van den Branden (Saartje.vandenbranden@insites.eu) or visit our Smartees website.