Voice of the Patient Analysis
In a previous post (Listening to the Voice of the Patient), we made an account of ongoing initiatives by public administration, hospitals and pharma companies intended to listen, understand and engage patients in the whole healthcare system. We also provided evidence that forums are a paramount source of information when talking about the Voice of the Patient Analysis.
As it was already shown, the Voice of the Patient (VoP) can be analyzed from multiple perspectives. In this post, we cover the point of view of the Pharma Industry.
Voice of the Patient: Market Intelligence for Pharma
Marketing areas of Pharma companies are among the most interested health agents when analyzing forums from the VoC point of view. Posts in forums can be processed to:
- Uncover facts or opinions about drug properties, side effects or episodes of interaction with other drugs
- Compare drugs or treatments from different competitors
- Analyze brand and corporate reputation
- Discover typical demands of information
- Trigger reputation alarms
- Profile stakeholders: HCPs, patient associations, NGOs, regulators, etc.
Voice of the Patient: analyzing clinical evidence
Obviously, electronic health records and insurance claims represent the richest sources of clinical information. However, information extracted from forums may point to difficult points, revealing:
- Cases with suspicious or incorrect patterns of prescription or dosage in daily clinical practice.
- Misconceptions or misunderstandings of patients around the dosage or effects of medication.
- Adherence or rejection problems.
Voice of the Patient: health protection
Patients express themselves freely in forums (even sometimes anonymously). It is quite frequent discovering, for instance, cases of drug sharing between individuals (reselling surplus drugs after ending an expensive treatment). This kind of behavior may represent a risk for the health of patients (apart from the possibility of being considered unlawful).
Text Analytics applied to the Voice of the Patient
Text Analytics makes possible the automatic processing, tagging, and extraction of insights regarding the topics mentioned above. This information can be crawled from open sources and combined with other internal sources, following the architecture shown in the figure.
The basis for analyzing the Voice of the Patient is the highly customizable set of Text Analytics APIs provided by MeaningCloud:
- Extraction of entities (drugs, brands, medical concepts)
- Content classification according to relevant client-defined taxonomies
- Content Clustering to group related contents.
- Facet-oriented sentiment analysis, to distill opinion and sentiment about specific aspects of a particular drug or treatment.
- Automatic profiling of stakeholders (HCPs, influencers, etc.)
Delivering value through Voice of the Patient Analysis
Results of the analysis of individual posts are stored and exploited through:
- Dashboards, showing KPIs and insights from the aggregation of analyzed posts through time.
- Alerts, providing action-oriented recommendations.
- Search tools to drill-down aggregated results, to the desired degree of granularity.
Real World Evidence Forum Slides
The application of the Voice of the Patient Analysis technology was the subject of our talk at the Real World Evidence Forum, held in Philadelphia, 17-18 July 2017, entitled “How to extract Health Market Intelligence from the Voice of the Patient.” You can see and download the slides of our presentation from here:
