Life science companies need to ensure their business initiatives take advantage of social media analytics. Read about the challenge of maximizing the opportunity and generating value from real world patient insights.
2. www.igate.com
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Emergence of Social Media Analytics in Life Sciences 3
3. Social Media Analytics: Trends and Challenges 4
• Trends 5
• Challenges 6
4. Point of View 8
5. The Future 10
6. About the Author 10
3. www.igate.com
INTRODUCTION
Life Sciences companies need to ensure that
their business initiatives are positioned to take
advantage of social media analytics. The
challenge is how to maximize the opportunity
and generate value from gaining and responding
to the insightful inferences and sentiment.
Business decisions can be guided by the
assimilated data sets allowing capitalization of
these real world patient insights. Opportunities
exist to raise disease awareness, drive patient
engagement, improve patient safety, promote
collaboration, and position the product (or
company) as the first choice of patients and
healthcare professionals.
Social media and the internet have significantly
changed the way our society manages health. An
estimated 60 to 80% of Internet users search for
health information online. We look up
symptoms on Wikipedia, we blog about
illnesses, and discuss treatment side effects on
medical websites and with friends on Facebook.
It is not just patients or caregivers, other research
illustrates that approximately 70% of doctors use
social media for personal and professional
reasons to obtain new and existing high quality
medical information.
Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies,
health insurers, and hospitals are interested to
understand how we manage our health in the
real world. They listen to patients, care givers,
and customers by monitoring open access social
networking healthcare websites, as well as
Facebook and Twitter. This allows a better
understanding of customer or patient behavior
and helps to gain potential insights that are
typically undisclosed or under-utilized when
applying traditional methods to gather
information. This understanding of a patient’s
journey through illness and treatment is often
termed ‘patient centricity’, as it offers real world
insight into disease awareness and information
seeking behaviors, the personal impact of illness,
and ultimately the satisfaction with their
medicines and/or healthcare provision.
Social analytics is an umbrella term that
includes specialized analysis techniques for
interpreting the interactions and associations on
social software applications. In other words,
social analytics is a way to gather, assimilate,
and characterize data in a meaningful and
actionable way. Life Sciences companies should
ensure that their business intelligence initiatives
are positioned to take advantage of social
analytics to assess community engagement.
While this unstructured data is considered
public, it affords companies the ability to
uncover hidden needs as well as proactively
address potential concerns that may cause
vulnerability or prejudices driven by special
interest groups. In the future, patient-centric
intelligence will go far beyond social media and
will collect and analyze data from the entire
ecosystem of healthcare digital information,
such as medical records, prescribing data,
insurance claims, and health monitoring
technologies and devices.
EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
ANALYTICS IN LIFE SCIENCES
IDC Health Insights found that investments
related to social media analytics solutions are
rapidly growing and are expected to increase
significantly over the next several years while
spending for outbound social media marketing is
lagging.
The Life Sciences industry has been slow to
embrace social media, largely due to either the
lack of regulatory guidance or slow emergence
of draft guidance and perceived vulnerability.
Uncertainty around proper procedures, coupled
with potential liability and risk related to
tracking adverse events and product complaints
is keeping companies from utilizing this channel
4. www.igate.com
as much as they could.
Regardless of the variety of concerns, all
segments of the Life Sciences industry have
started capitalizing on data that is available in
various public social networking sites to improve
patient engagement, share product information,
raise disease awareness, or promote
collaboration and innovation:
• Pharmaceutical enterprises are sponsoring
patient advocacy websites, listening to patient
opinions, and soliciting informal feedback on
illnesses, treatment effectiveness, and
toleration.
• Medical device manufacturers are actively
promoting collaboration portals among their
users to seek real world feedback on device
usability and to encourage peer-to-peer discussion.
• With the broader use of genetic sequencing,
pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies
have started turning to social networks to gain
insight into new areas of personalized
medicine development and rare or orphan
diseases.
Life Sciences companies are also seeking new
ways to measure brand perception, keep tabs on
end-consumer sentiment around products and
therapeutic categories, and gain insight into
competing brand strategy, pricing, promotions,
and other relevant competitive information.
SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS:
TRENDS AND CHALLENGES
The majority of Life Sciences companies are now
using social media sites such as Facebook,
Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and various niche web
portals to build communities for Healthcare
Professionals (HCPs) and patients to connect
with each other. While social analytics are
enabling the tracking of word-of-mouth publicity
on new products that are being launched, crowd
sourcing user experience is helping to conduct
customized market research into disease
awareness, illness impact on health and quality
of life, and quantify real-world illness
prevalence rates. Social analytics are constantly
uncovering the latent needs of users by revealing
patterns in social media data. Consequently the
amount of budget that is being allocated to
social analytics has also increased; companies
are now more interested in learning what is
being said about their brands, treatment options,
and various illnesses. The industry is seeing an
increase in research on leveraging social data,
coupled with direct-to-consumer genetic testing,
to derive personalized recommendations
including treatments.
As niche social analytics vendors are being
acquired by bigger platform vendors, social
analytics may continue to remain an integral
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
offering. Social CRM analytic vendors are
predominantly differentiated by their analytical
algorithms, and the ability to integrate with
enterprise applications. In addition to this, there
are few products in the Life Sciences market that
actually cater to specific business needs such as
patient-centric intelligence, adverse events,
off-label usage, and safety concerns, for
example, adverse drug reactions or safety signal
hotspots. The significant VC funding for the
niche pharmaceutical analytics platforms
highlights the opportunity in this market.
The value of social analytics is clearly gathering
momentum. The MHRA has recently announced
that it will lead the Innovative Medicines
Initiative funded “WEB-RADR” project. This
comprises of European Regulators, academics,
and the pharmaceutical industry in a three-year
project to develop new ways of gathering drug
safety information. New tools will be developed
including a mobile app for HCP and the public
to report suspected Adverse Drug Reactions
(ADRs) to regulators and also to investigate the
potential for social media data for identifying
potential drug safety issues.
5. www.igate.com
TRENDS
There is a rapid growth in the number of Life
Sciences organizations that are testing or
adopting social analytics as a way to
characterize data in meaningful and actionable
ways. Described below are selected success
stories that illustrate the broad utility of social
analytics and how the outputs are being put to
use to address a cross section of challenges
faced by the Life Sciences sector:
Sharing disease, pipeline, and product
information with customers, patients, and
healthcare professionals
• All Life Sciences companies now have a
significant presence on the Internet that is used
to share disease, pipeline, and product
information with patients and HCPs via
corporate and also disease specific (product
independent) websites. Large companies now
have a social media presence as well. In 2012,
there were 11 Pharma Facebook pages, 24
YouTube Pharma sites, and a growing number of
corporate sponsored portals for HCPs, in
addition to more than 30 HCP community
websites.
• Increased use of mobile technologies with
over 40 Pharma–sponsored apps for HCPs and
over 30 for patients. A good example is the “IPF
Sound Challenge”. Boehringer Ingelheim wants
to raise awareness of the rare chronic lung
disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) by
using a mobile app to help doctors learn about
the unique lung “Velcro crackles”, which are
commonly heard in the lungs of patients with
IPF, thus highlighting the need of further
investigation and correct diagnosis.
• Pfizer is using Tumblr to promote the
contribution its employees make to peoples’
health around the globe. Similarly, Roche has
taken an innovative, fun approach to explain
complex science using YouTube with its “drawn
to science” campaign.
Listening to patients voices to help shape
marketing strategy
• GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), in collaboration with
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
listened to the online conversations of parents
on websites including babycenter.com and
whattoexpect.com. They sought to understand
why parents delay their child’s vaccination,
risking illness and even mortality, in order to
gain an insight into the ingrained beliefs about
potential harms of vaccinating children, such as
unsubstantiated reports linking vaccination for
mumps and measles to autism. Key concerns
identified that followed text mining and
subsequent analytics, included safety, timing,
and comfort of the injections. The outcome was
an updated strategy where GSK tackled the issue
by providing doctors with better vaccine
information to give to concerned parents.
Providing an innovative arena to foster ideas
and promote collaboration on scientific ideas
aiding the delivery of innovative therapies to
defeat human disease
• Powerful collaborative tools are being utilized
to bring together academic researchers, doctors,
HCPs, and patients with pharmaceutical drug
developers to share ideas, partner research
projects, and ultimately deliver innovative
therapies to defeat human disease. Examples
include the ResearchGate, partly funded by Bill
Gates and Microsoft, which specializes in
providing a social network where scientists can
share their research and receive feedback with
their peers in real time. Another is the Pfizer
collaborative program with National Institutes of
Health that matches academic researchers with
dozens of pharmaceutical industry-owned
molecules to help scientists explore potential
new treatments for patients with unmet medical
need.
Collecting and unlocking Big Data to improve
disease understanding and collate treatment
side effects
6. www.igate.com
• Patientslikeme.com is a social network for
patients, claiming to have over 250,000
members posting symptoms and treatment
information on about 1,000 illnesses. It was set
up to help patients find treatments for
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It provides patients
and caregivers with an online discussion
platform where they can track illnesses and
symptoms, and share their experiences with
others. The site offers fee-for-data access to
de-identified data to its partners including UCB,
Novartis, Sanofi, and Acorda Therapeutics
whereby it provides information on real-world
patient experience including symptoms and
disease progression. HealthUnlocked and
Alliancehealth are also social networks for
health where patients can find and gain support
from individuals with similar health issues or
concerns. Some of these communities are set up
by leading health organizations in order to
ensure the support received is credible.
• 23andMe is a direct-to-consumer genetic
testing company that combines social media
with customer-driven genotypic data to identify
novel genetic disease associations, with a
primary focus on Parkinson’s disease.
• Treato and Semantelli are two major online
social media listening services that provide
information and analytics to the Life Sciences
industry. Treato is an online collator of patient
reported treatment side effects utilizing Big Data
analytics, and they claim that the system can
predict newly launched product success.
Currently it has over 230 million patients
producing 1,800 million posts on 26,000
medications and 14,000 disease indications.
IMS Health acquired the social media start up
Semantelli and its platform, AETracker software
that allows for social-media "listening" for
adverse events being posted on the Internet.
Providing an early warning system for real
world safety signals
• Monitoring online discussions can detect
unknown side effects and low prevalence
adverse drug reactions (ADRs) much earlier than
existing pharmacovigilance strategies, and can
also identify the reporting of unexpected side
effects. Microsoft demonstrated that logged
search activities by populations of computer
users captured by Internet services can
contribute to drug safety surveillance and
identify unexpected drug-drug interactions. An
unknown drug-drug interaction was identified
leading to hyperglycemia when patients were
concomitantly administered an SSRi
antidepressant with a statin therapy.
• Wool Labs demonstrated that negative
sentiment patterns were evident with GSK’s
diabetes treatment Avandia on forums and blogs
four years before a meta-analysis linked the
treatment to a higher risk of congestive heart
failure, and seven years before its withdrawal in
Europe and severe prescribing restrictions in the
USA. Strong negative sentiment was also
associated with GSK and the FDA as patient
anger grew. Recently generated clinical data has
questioned the findings of this meta-analysis,
raising the question: Could a proactive reaction
to the changes in sentiment have reduced the
impact to this medicine?
CHALLENGES
The Return on Investments (ROI) for use of
social analytics in the Life Sciences industry is
not yet established. This is because in the
current scenario, most use cases are based on
exploratory analytics. Life Sciences
organizations need a protective social media
policy and most companies have a program and
training in place that educates their employees
and customers about appropriate social media
use.
Life Sciences enterprises appear to be struggling
with adoption of technology, in part because
social data is unstructured, voluminous,
7. www.igate.com
complex, and noisy. Patients post in different
languages and spelling of medical terms is
highly variable. Pivotal to success is ensuring
that accurate, high quality datasets can be
generated and “cleaned” following the trawling
of digital sites. This can then be analyzed using
semantics and ontology methodologies to
provide insightful inferences and information
that is suitable for decision making. This
analytical process is a continuously improving
process with evolving technology platforms.
Data ownership and privacy concerns are bound
to increase as the number of participants that are
being monitored for analyses increases.
Life Sciences companies have been slow to
adopt the use of social media channels for
communication and generating publicity for
products, in part due to the slow emergence and
interpretation of regulatory guidance. Many
companies have compromised and have adapted
their social networking sites into patient focus
groups where doctors and patients can discuss
diseases, providing real time data. Companies
worry that they will be penalized at the
regulator’s discretion and struggle with how to
interact with their customers. It is worth noting
that the FDA only issued two warning letters (out
of the more than 170 issued 2008-2012) for
what it views as improper use of social media
channels. One of these was Novartis that was
warned in 2010 for a Facebook like/share
function on the company’s website allowing
people to post product information on a
non-sponsored site.
Healthcare community sites generate 24 times
the social media activity of corporate sponsored
sites. There is a perception that pharmaceutical
company sponsored sites only provide the
information that they want to share, not the
information desired by the patients or caregivers,
and consequently attention is turned to
community data sources. The problem is that
these public sources are often not 100%
accurate and may contain misinformation.
Listening to social media posts and responding
by supplying the desired accurate, up-to-date
and relevant information can help understand
the patient’s point.
Life Sciences companies have to respect
patients’ views and understand that social
networking can also cause harm to a brand if
these views are not incorporated. The most high
profile example of which saw bloggers call for
boycotts of Johnson & Johnson’s Motrin
following a television advertisement that
incensed mothers. The resulting Twitter backlash
led to an apology from the McNeil Consumer
Healthcare marketing team and a withdrawal of
the advertising campaign.
The ability to track and/or monitor patient
communications about drug safety on social
media networks is a significant area of
regulatory concern for Pharma companies. As
social media becomes part of the landscape
reviewed for safety signals, both regulatory
agencies and industry must work together to
understand how best to use this evolving source
of information. In 2013 an investigation by the
European Medicines Agency found that a Swiss
company had serious shortcomings with regards
to social media and pharmacovigilance
practices. European legislation requires
companies to regularly screen the Internet for
potential reports of suspected adverse events
associated with taking their medicines.
Patient reports, identity, and localization are
notoriously hard to track on the majority of
social media networks and solutions that aid
monitoring, reporting, and analyzing are
required. Further, breaking this big world data
down into demographics (or regions) poses a
significant challenge.
8. www.igate.com
POINT OF VIEW
The challenge for the Life Sciences industry is
how to maximize the opportunity and generate
value from gaining and responding to the
insightful inferences and patient sentiment
offered by social media networks. Moreover,
how this information can be used to build
patient or HCP engagement has yet to be
incorporated. Additionally, this opportunity has
to be viewed in the light that social networks are
some of most unregulated, yet the industry has
to operate within one of the most highly
regulated environments.
There are three areas where social analytics can
add significant value across the Life Sciences
industry segment:
1. Patient-Centric Intelligence – providing real
world patient data and learning about patients’
experiences with an illness or a medicine,
informing the patient during the journey from
healthy to diagnosis and back to health, and
improved understanding of disease
segmentation including identification of rare or
orphan disease communities.
2. Competitive (Brand) Intelligence – measures
of brand or product marketing effectiveness,
bioinformatics, competitor pipeline and clinical
trial information gathered from the emerging
access to global clinical study reports (Europe
has adopted a clinical trial transparency policy
from January 2015). Accessibility to real time
data providing up-to-date information on
sentiment and market research. Analytics may
provide explanations for changes in prescribing
patterns observed in prescription and claims
databases.
3. Drug Safety and Pharmacovigilance – real
word benefit-risk data, monitoring and
analyzing digital media for valid new or
unexpected side effects, and assessment of high
quality drug safety information, e.g., adverse
drug reaction postings, off-label use, or side
effect hotspots.
Social analytics will be built into customer
intelligence and market research tools for Life
Sciences companies and the generated outputs
represent a cost-effective market research
channel available for them. It does not require an
army of marketers to conduct interviews with
patient focus groups or HCPs, and can be
performed by a third party akin to business
process outsourcing, further reducing the cost. It
represents a medium to improve the customer
experience by listening to patients and providing
them with the information they desire,
addressing their questions, and providing online
support to patients and caregivers. This
patient-centric intelligence gained from listening
and analyzing social media networks could even
be used to shape product profiles and help
design the next generation of treatments, giving
patients the effective care they want, and avoid
the nuisance side effects that they complain
about on their social networks.
Life Sciences companies have always
communicated with doctors and patients as they
disseminate disease, product, and treatment
information, subject to a regulatory code of
practice. However, with the ever increasing use
of social media networks, digital engagement
has become available. This has opened up the
potential of a two-way communication channel
allowing companies to go to where the patients
are, to listen and then analyze customer
sentiment, safety-related information, and patient
data and then respond or engage in real time.
This may be ideally suited to medical device
companies as they train doctors or patients on
the use of a device, or Pharma companies if their
medically qualified employees offer advice or
answer questions about disease symptomatology.
Currently this is resource-demanding and could
be viewed as a regulatory nightmare. The goal is
to ensure that appropriate advice and correct
9. www.igate.com
information is provided – that is not product
promotional - by appropriately qualified
company representatives.
Those companies that go beyond purely
supplying a pill to one that is providing a
holistic treatment paradigm to patients will
generate real value. This is achieved when an
enterprise takes patient-centric intelligence and
responds accordingly by: 1. Providing
information which doctors, patients, and
caregivers are seeking online, 2. Respond to
changes in sentiment or to emerging safety
signals, 3. Provide an online support service to
answer questions, and 4. Provide ways to
optimise recovery such as healthy life style
advice, mobile applications, and even wearable
monitoring devices. This will drive patient
engagement leading to improved patient
outcomes, increased treatment compliance, and
position the product (and company) as the first
choice of the patient and HCPs. This holistic
paradigm will increase diagnosis rates, increase
numbers of prescriptions and refills, provide
clear differentiation from competitor products,
and ultimately increase product sales.
Required attributes for a social analytics
platform:
1. The ability to provide accurate, concise, and
relevant information.
2. A web-based, easy-to-use platform providing
assimilation, analysis, and visualization of social
media data.
3. Adaptors and crawler components to connect
to, and then retrieve digital data from various
social networking sites such as Facebook,
Twitter, blogs, medical websites, and also
healthcare discussion forums.
4. The ability to assimilate both semi-structured
and unstructured data. The majority of the
textual data will be unstructured, and this
represents one of the main challenges facing
social data analytics.
5. The provision for a clean and usable dataset
ready for downstream analysis using Natural
Language Processing.
6. Flexibility is paramount, as is a design that
allows for continuous upgrading of the existing
knowledge base with new terminologies and
multiple language medical dictionaries.
7. A scalable platform to support high volumes
of social data using big data infrastructure.
8. Data analytics beyond traditional brand or
company sentiment summaries containing
components that support statistical analysis to
reveal signal patterns such as clustering and
associations.
9. A graphic user interface based on open
source software to provide effective data
visualizations.
10. Knowledge-based research and analysis
executed by Life Sciences experts who will
deliver high value social media analytic
outcomes.
Disease Medicine
Company
Analysis & Outcome
Reporting
• Deep Domain Knowledge
• Subject Matter Expertise
• Knowledge Process
Outsourcing
ID &
Monitoring Of
Patient Groups
Treatment
Feedback
(Efficacy)
Expected
Side Effects
Treatment (Brand)
Sentiment
Competitor
Information
Unexpected
Side Effects
Corporate
Sentiment
Treatment
Misinformation
Adverse Drug
Reactions
Data Assimilation
Structured &
Unstructured Data
Customized Dictionaries
Regulatory, Medical,
Patient-reported
Validation&Compliance
Analysis
Analytics, Opinion
Mining & Semantics
Processing, Ontology
Translation
10. For more insight into how the described
attributes could be assimilated into an
integrated social media analytics solution,
please refer to:
http://www.igate.com/industries/lifesciences/ph
armaceuticals/isocial-pharma
THE FUTURE
The future is exciting for the Life Sciences
industry, and more so for patients, with the
prospects of novel, safe, and effective therapies,
personalization of health and medicine, and
improved understanding of the mechanisms of
human disease. Regulatory social media
guidance is evolving around information
sharing and risk-benefit monitoring. Pivotal to
this is the collection, assimilation, and
advanced analytical analysis of vast volumes of
healthcare data collected from open access
databases and social media networks. Already
the availability of healthcare data is
dramatically expanding with the introduction of
Electronic Health Records, opening up access
to all clinical trial study reports (in Europe from
January 2015), the availability of prescription
reports, increasing direct-to-consumer genetic
testing, and broad genomic profiling.
Additionally, development and adoption of
wearable (and even implantable) mobile
technologies that help monitor our health,
disease progression, and treatment effectiveness
will all integrate with social media platforms
and our medical records. The technology
challenge will be the ability to collect, to
merge, and manage the complex and diverse
datasets, clean up the structured and
unstructured data, perform advanced analytics
and then visualize and convert these complex
insights into actionable strategies.
Social media and the Internet will help provide
dramatic healthcare improvements over the
next five years, with benefits ranging from
personalized medicine and a holistic
patient-centric approach to illness and its
treatment. This will be achieved through Big
Data analytics and digital engagement. Life
Sciences enterprises need to go to where the
patients are, to listen and analyze, then respond
or engage in real time to changes in sentiment,
safety signals, and requests for information. The
emergence of social data as a rich source of
information has necessitated Life Sciences
companies to look for vendors with
industry-specific expertise and proven experience
to deliver measured value in social analytics.
Information Sources:
• Research by IGATE Business Analysis Cell;
compiled from publicly available information
sources of leading analysts, including Gartner.
• Social and Mobile Pharma – the State of the
Digital landscape, FirstWorld Dossier, 2012
• IDC Health Insights Releases IDC
MarketScape on Social Media Analytics
Vendors for Pharmaceutical Companies
• Guideline on good pharmacovigilance
practices (GVP) Mod VI, 2012;
• Social media ‘likes’ healthcare – From
marketing to social business, 2012;
• Technology Overview for Social Analytics for
Public-Facing Social Media; Pharma
Marketing Blog
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Wayman, PhD.
Director, Life Sciences and Healthcare Consulting
Chris is based out of the IGATE London office
and is currently responsible for providing
thought leadership and solutions to Life
Sciences and Healthcare clients with
commercial, R&D and IT challenges. He has
over 18 years of Life Sciences experience and
has provided strategic, technical, and
technology solutions to a number of
www.igate.com