Brand New Consumer Insights for the Healthcare and Pharma Industry

When it comes to healthcare, what topics does an average consumer care about most? How do they talk about how their healthcare experiences online? What impacts their daily lives most?

From regular doctor’s visits to the management of longer-term illnesses, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries touch all of our lives in important ways.

People from all walks of life discuss their various healthcare customer experiences online, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to analyze and gain a better understanding of the industry as a whole.

With the staggering amount of data from and about consumers available, brands and businesses from all industries can research and pinpoint key insights about audiences and audience segments, including healthcare.

Below shows insight on custom audience segments based on personal healthcare experiences as it relates to ailments, disease states, symptoms, side effects, treatments and alternative medicines:

You'll find analysis of these audience segments and more in the latest pharmaceutical and healthcare industry research.  Here a few of the biggest takeaways inside the report:

Doctors are the Most Mentioned Healthcare Topic by Consumers

For brands looking to understand their customers’ values, expectations and experiences, they can leverage the massive amount of unsolicited consumer conversations online to find those answers.

When individuals are talking online about health-related topics, they are talking about doctors and healthcare plans the most. These two topics are the most mentioned amongst online audiences. Specifically, conversations mentioned doctors grew by 39% between January 2017 and July 2018.

You can see more key details about how consumers discuss their symptoms, prescriptions, side effects and more on certain websites or social channels inside.

Cancer Patients Mention Fatigue More Than Any Other Chemotherapy Side Effect

How can you improve aspects of customer care you provide? By listening closely.

Using social listening, you can concentrate your searches to customized groups of people who have identified in online posts or in their bios as belonging to a certain group or having a certain  conditions or situations.

You can use this audience segmentation capability to search within a custom audience segment of cancer patients to see how they felt about common treatment side effects such as:

• Fatigue
• Nausea
• Mood swings
• Hair loss
• Constipation
• Bruising

Surprisingly, research found that fatigue - not hair loss - was the most commonly discussed side effect.

You see here that the general population discusses hair loss the most, but cancer patients are much more concerned about fatigue. You can't base your understanding of specific groups on assumptions. This data is crucial for healthcare organizations to know what ailments, symptoms and side effects actually impact the lives and consumers of patients the most.

Social Listening Shows Blue Cross Blue Shield & Humana are Consumer Favorites

It is critical for you to understand how consumers feel about and perceive your brand or organization and how they feel about their experiences along the life cycle or journey.

Do consumers express confidence more often towards one company over another? How many conversations mentioning a particular brand or product also contain mentions of ‘cost’ or quality?

How do they feel about your brand?

For instance, when looking at brand health measurements for some of the top healthcare providers, Blue Cross Blue Shield earned the highest marks in trust and confidence, while Humana wins out in brand favorability from consumers.

Online Conversations from Arthritis Patients Focus On Rarer Medication Side Effects

Perhaps there is a customer pain point or frustration you didn’t realize was a major concern.

Often times, information about these key customer experiences are hiding in plain site: within online and social conversations. You can uncover this information to find the details to better suit the needs of consumers.

For healthcare, you might not expect certain side effects to rise to the top of patients’ conversations. With the analysis of unsolicited data, different topics may rise to the top that can help both providers and brands understand consumers more.

Analysis of arthritis patients’ discussions of side effects from particular prescription medications, shows that hair loss - a noted rarer side effect - was among one of the most discussed side effects.  Consumer conversations can even provide which medications are mentioned most when arthritis patients talk about these side effects.

Consumers share their experiences with products all over the web. Using these insights, you can learn how they’ve reacted to or feel about your product. For any pharmaceutical brand, understanding this part of the patient journey is critical.  

Diabetes Patients Seek Non-Pharmaceutical Methods To Manage Symptoms

Which competing or alternative products or companies will consumers seek out that you need to keep your eye on?

Whether or not you offer everything customers need, it is inevitable that alternative or additional solutions will be sought out by your target audiences.

Healthcare and pharmaceuticals are greats example of this. Whether to avoid unpleasant side effects or the rising costs of prescription drugs, patients may seek out alternatives to manage or alleviate their symptoms.  

Particularly for type-2 diabetes patients, whose condition may be onset later in life due to behavioral factors, low-carb diets can be an important component to managing and relieving symptoms.

Many see dietary changes as the best opportunity to reverse the condition or its symptoms.

But which diets do diabetes patients discuss most often? What diets are gaining or losing popularity?

Merely the third most discussed only a year ago, the ketogenic diet rose to the top amidst hundreds of thousands of conversations from the custom audience segment of diabetes patients.

Conclusion

The pharmaceutical and healthcare industries touch all lives in important ways. The sheer number of voices affected by them can make gaining useful insight into what’s most important seem impossible.

But the impossible is possible.

You can use the right technology to uncover a treasure trove of new insights and hidden trends in the healthcare and pharma industry.

If your brand needs answers like these, Infegy Atlas is the best-in-class social listening tool for the job.

Now you can even go beyond social listening to include your own custom data sets - like medical records or patient verbatims collected during doctors’ visits - to gain even more insight.