Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
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Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
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September 17 is World Patient Safety Day, an event launched by the World Health Organization to inspire global solidarity and concerted action to improve patient safety across the globe. This year we have a lot to discuss about medication safety.
Emerging from the depths of the COVID pandemic, we are starting to see how the global healthcare crisis inspired new innovations and conversations around patient safety. One of the big trends to emerge was the newly active role patients are playing in their own healthcare journeys.
We’ve talked for years about the importance of engaging patients in healthcare conversations, but the pandemic pulled this trend into the spotlight. Quarantines and closed offices made healthcare professionals hard to access, causing patients to rely on their own research and outreach to get answers to product-related questions.
That research, coupled with the 24/7 coverage of the pandemic and vaccine trials, brought a new level of confidence and awareness to the general population. Patients who had never previously shown interest in clinical research were suddenly paying attention. They also became savvier at finding information via pharmaceutical websites, call centers, and chatbots that use artificial intelligence to respond to customer queries using natural language processing.
It changed the patient-healthcare dynamic, creating new opportunities for patients and pharma companies to interact. Patients felt empowered to educate themselves about treatments and risks, and to seek out information about medications when their regular healthcare providers weren’t available.
Increased patient engagement generated a flood of inquiries to medical information call centers, which was difficult to handle at first. But innovative companies saw it as a catalyst to reimagine how they provide information to the general public and what they can do with the information they collect.
Patient feedback is an important aspect of the shift in how Medical Information teams capture information and communicate about healthcare products. In many cases, when patients call a call center, they indicate an adverse event (AE) as the context for their query (e.g., “I took this medication and then I got a headache…”). It should however be noted that they may not refer to such queries as “adverse events” or even understand what the term means. However, these interactions provide medical information teams with a direct line to capture AE information that can be used to support product safety and/or lead to adjustments to improve a product’s safety profile.
It is never good news to learn about an adverse event, and it can be challenging to determine which reports are linked to product use and which ones are unrelated. But the larger the sample size of reports, the more knowledgeable pharma companies become about the safety of their products for all populations. That is a positive trend to further enhance patient safety.
The flood of calls enhanced patient safety while creating new channels for pharma to engage with patients and provide optimized customer support. In addition, it gave pharma companies an opportunity to interact with patients directly, providing customers with the information they value at the moment they need it.
But to make the most of this opportunity, pharma companies had to rethink how they communicate with these callers, and what language they use to answer their questions. Traditionally, medical information (MI) agents and MI chatbots field calls from trained healthcare professionals who know what questions to ask and what information they are looking for and prefer concise, scientific language.
But patients calling MI call centers have vastly different needs and preferences. Their knowledge about a product and healthcare in general varies wildly and they tend to prefer more colloquial language using terms that are relevant to their personal needs.
To adapt, medical information teams had to rethink how they interact with these patients and how the smart AI chatbots they use must adapt their responses based on subtle cues and provide as close to a ‘human-like’ experience as possible. It’s a more complicated environment that requires agility in interpretation and response while still ensuring every answer is as thorough as needed as well as accurate.
The pandemic taught patients that the information they need is out there. But if they find a pharma company’s site too complicated to navigate and the product language too technical or jargony to understand, they will look to other less valid, less safe platforms to get their questions answered.
Pharma companies that don’t want their customers, both Healthcare Providers and patients, seeking product information on Twitter or TikTok should use this trend as a reason to overhaul their customer engagement strategies, and adopt more agile processes and AI chatbots that can accommodate all customers’ needs. It will lead to a safer patient experience and allow pharma companies to establish a reputation for being a trusted source of healthcare information for everyone.
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