Top tips for optimizing your brand’s performance with real-world demand assessments

The health care industry currently faces challenges in maintaining the same productivity levels in research and development as in previous years. As such, it is more crucial than ever before to gain a deeper understanding of the journeys of healthcare professionals and patients when prescribing and receiving treatments, with greater emphasis being placed on providing an accurate estimation of demand and prescription trends.

The initial step in this process is selecting the appropriate methodology, which will vary depending on the product and market in which it will be launched.

Making this decision requires a balance to be struck between a broad scope and a high level of detail. The more information available about the product and market, the more specific and comprehensive the demand assessment can be.

Making prescription decisions at a patient level

By focusing on the practical decisions made by patients on a daily basis, physicians will be better equipped to gather more real-world data that can provide demand assessments with greater precision. 

Considering prescription decisions at the patient level will enable researchers to gain insight into a patient’s past treatment journeys and offer more suitable future treatment options.

Asking the right questions

There are three types of questions to ask physicians to help gather this data:

• What actions do you regularly take?: The most widely used method is based on fixed patient types, which involves determining the typical actions taken for a specific patient type. An example of this is conducting studies where doctors are asked to evaluate product variations for several patient types.

• What is the likelihood of prescribing a new product to your patients: This approach is called natural variation, where respondents fill out patient record forms and indicate their likelihood of prescribing a new product to those patients. This method aims to gather information that is as close to real-world data as possible.

• What are the characteristics of your patients?: Known as forced variation, this method aims to understand a wide range of patient characteristics to determine where a new product would fit in. This approach can use actual patient record forms or simulated forms created through a conjoint design. 

In our piece with PM 360 with Richard Goosey, Head of Analytics at Research Partnership, an Inizio Advisory company, shares more of his top tips for strengthening market research and planning to ensure a successful pharmaceutical product launch. 

Read more: https://www.pm360online.com/top-tips-for-optimizing-your-brands-performance-with-real-world-demand-assessments/