March 3, 2021

Pharma Business International Interview

Pharma Business International

Pharma Business International spoke with Jo Halliday, CEO of Talking Medicines, the world’s first social intelligence company designed specifically for the pharmaceutical industry.  The full article can be found here on page 10-11

Tell us about Talking Medicines?

Formed in 2013, Talking Medicines is the world’s first social intelligence company designed specifically for the pharmaceutical industry.

At Talking Medicines we capture, curate and structure the global voice of the patient on social media, forums and connected devices, mapped to a curated database of 130,000 regulated global medicines. By translating that voice into actionable intelligence, we help pharma deliver a greater return on investment for marketing, and better health outcomes for patients.

Talking Medicines has recently developed PatientMetRx, an AI-powered social intelligence service which will give the world’s leading drug brands insights on patient experience. Can you tell us more about why pharma needs a platform like this for the sector to move forward?

For a long time, there has not been a direct relationship between pharma health professionals and patients due to regulatory and compliance barriers which are in place to protect patients.

Whilst these limitations are in place for all the right reasons, not having a direct relationship with patients has meant that it has been very difficult for drug developers to understand confidence in their product and learn about user experience to improve development and expand support available to patients.

The data driven tools that other industries use to measure customer experience haven’t been available to pharma at scale and the industry has relied on indirect feedback from clinicians, patient advocacy or ad hoc focus groups.

The pharmaceutical sector spends $30Bn on marketing each year in the US alone* without really knowing if that investment is doing any good, PatientMetRx allows pharma companies to fill that intelligence gap with reliable data that will help drive decisions for the business.

How does PatientMetRx work and what does it provide customers?

PatientMetRx uses text mining technologies, collected from a multitude of online channels from high volume sites such as Reddit and Twitter to more specific patient centric data sources such as forums or connected devices. This data is then processed by EVA, our proprietary AI machine which combines machine learning and natural language processing technologies to filter text at scale, isolate the voice of the patient, and finally match that voice to  a curated database of 130,000 regulated global medicines.

By blending data available through a variety of different sources, we are able to make meaningful evaluations on patient confidence and provide social intelligence for the world’s leading drugs brands on a scale and depth never before possible.

Designed for the Pharma sector with awareness of their regulatory and compliance challenges, PatientMetRx delivers high quality sourced data delivered on an easy-to-use online dashboard.

What can pharma marketing professionals expect and how can they use the data provided through PatientMetRx within their business?  

PatientMetRx distils what patients are saying online and more importantly, what they are feeling, into powerful data insights which are fully pharma compliant.

What we’re able to do with PatientMetRx is de-risk social data collection for pharma by offering arm’s length and agile data collection from wherever the patient is speaking and decoding it to align to medicines.

The platform then provides pharma marketing teams with a Patient Confidence Score to benchmark each medicine, offering a systematic way of understanding trending patient confidence in their drug brands.

Users can also view volume for patient voice by selected medicine, customise dates and produce PDF reports. A Pro subscription adds the ability to select up to 10 brands to view trending patient confidence over time.

PatientMetRx will enable pharma to accurately measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, reduce budget, improve market competitiveness and deliver better health outcomes for patients.

Why is now the right time to for pharmaceutical companies utilise technology to better understand the needs of the patient?

Like many industries, the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that the pharmaceutical sector has had to adapt their marketing and communication strategies while accelerating digital transformation plans including the adoption of new technologies. Traditional channels for patient sentiment have been unavailable and so collecting information about a drugs performance has been challenging.

Over the past year, businesses are finding that technology can provide enhanced support for optimized patient outcomes and identify opportunities for growth where more traditional methods are not possible.

It is clear that science and technology can work together for better patient outcomes and the digital advancements in AI and new ways of collecting information means that now is the time for us to all work together for collective change.

Ends

*https://apnews.com/article/f44a7baa710d458ca50edd66affc1b91

 

 

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