Social Media Analytics in Life Sciences

W H I T E PA P E R

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Table of Contents1. 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

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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

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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.

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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

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• 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,

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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.

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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

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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 MedicineCompany

Analysis & OutcomeReporting

• Deep Domain Knowledge• Subject Matter Expertise• Knowledge Process Outsourcing

ID & Monitoring Of Patient Groups

Treatment Feedback (Efficacy)

ExpectedSide Effects

Treatment (Brand) Sentiment

Competitor Information

UnexpectedSide Effects

Corporate Sentiment

Treatment Misinformation

Adverse Drug Reactions

Data AssimilationStructured &

Unstructured Data

Customized DictionariesRegulatory, Medical,

Patient-reported

Val

idat

ion

& C

ompl

ianc

e

AnalysisAnalytics, OpinionMining & SemanticsProcessing, Ontology

Translation

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/pharmaceuticals/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

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pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and healthcare companies. Prior to joining IGATE he gained extensive research, development, and commercial expertise working in both the R&D and commercial business units of a large pharmaceutical company. He holds a BSc (Hons) Pharmacology degree and PhD from the University of Wales College of Medicine.