As the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic, our lives have been transformed by increasing online engagement and information sources. Most of our patients, key opinion leaders, researchers, medical affairs teams, and investigators, whose insights we rely on for drug development, already had an active digital presence, and the pandemic has only amplified their reliance on the digital world. For anyone conducting clinical research, that means 1) that the digital information pool is increasingly rich and 2) our ability to quickly extract insights from these digital interactions is more important than ever before.

So, how can we keep on top of this information and extract the right insights at the right time? Introducing the IQVIA Natural Language Processing (NLP) Insights Hub, which can efficiently capture voice of patients, stakeholders and providers – right when we need it the most. The NLP Insights Hub is IQVIA’s single resource that seamlessly integrates disparate sources and delivers fast, reliable answers. Insights across a spectrum of scientific and healthcare sources, from journal articles to social media posts, are tapped to quickly bring important contextual information to the surface. As patients become increasingly vocal, taking on an active role in their healthcare, massive amounts of valuable data are being produced online:

• Medical Science Liaison interactions can be captured to understand direct feedback and inform medical affairs insights
• External articles, including news or quotes from key opinion leaders (KOLs)
• Medical information requests can help identify gaps in knowledge or key topics
• Social media is increasingly used for pharma sentiment analysis, as patients and other stakeholders share opinions that can guide decision-making

There was a time when the kind of data gleaned from these sources was considered “soft data”, more of a nice-to-have than essential. Now, we know better. If an environmental analysis of the digital landscape isn’t a component of your commercial strategy, you are behind the curve and at risk of miscalculations in decision-making. The good news is that the NLP Insights Hub makes digital strategizing easy by combining in a single place the insights from these disparate data sources that represent the views and sentiments of different groups, including patients, physicians, competitors and key opinion leaders. Users of the NLP Insights Hub can:

• Deploy federated NLP across data sources to generate insights from the combined information without requiring all the data to move to a central location
• Combine visualizations of extracted data and metrics from advanced searches embedded with domain expertise
• Design KPIs that are thematic and use the NLP Insights Hub to implement those metrics

The NLP Insights Hub is a fantastic tool for quickly capturing important conversations, questions, or statements happening digitally that can inform strategic action. Users initially get a high-level view of what is happening in a given landscape, and then they can use the derived insights to ask deeper questions, find specifics, and form strategies and action plans in response.

The technology behind the IQVIA NLP Insights Hub has already proven its value in a real-world setting. Roche used the same technology, developed by Linguamatics, for a social media text mining analysis to enhance its understanding of symptoms that impact Parkinson’s patients. By using NLP to analyze social media data, Roche researchers were able to quickly collect and analyze patient-reported outcomes. Had they tried to capture this sort of information using primary market research and patient interviews, the process would have been time-consuming, resource intensive and expensive. They also reported that they reaped more meaningful patient insights using NLP versus the standard approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic may be driving up digital interactions, but the truth is that the digital universe has long been replete with the patient and stakeholder insights we need in drug development. Offering a rapid, intelligent way to capture these voices is only one of the Hub’s many functionalities. There are many others, including informing clinical trial design, early drug discovery, market surveillance and more, which I’ll be covering in future blogs. As you await those, I invite you to watch our NLP Insights Hub webinar and visit our product page to learn more.