Continuous Listening to Patients and Healthcare Professionals at Heart of 7i Group and Confirmit Collaboration
Confirmit and Alderley Park based 7i Group Ltd, a specialist healthcare consultancy, have formed a strategic collaboration to harness their Market Research and pharmaceutical sector knowledge and expertise. The collaboration will enable an enhanced patient-centric approach to drug development and the evolution and delivery of medicines, devices and treatment protocols.
7i will use Confirmit’s text analytics solution, Confirmit Genius, to listen to what patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) are saying publicly about treatments, collating, analysing and interpreting unstructured data from sources such as patient forums and blogs to identify themes and sentiments. This data is gathered in strict accordance with GDPR regulations (including informed consent) and Market Research codes of conduct, and is then combined with proactively generated structured feedback from surveys, SMS, voting apps and other data sources in Confirmit Horizons. This will allow 7i to present pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies, and healthcare providers, with deeper insights into the attitudes and beliefs of patients and HCPs via Confirmit’s real-time dashboard, Reportal.
Andrew Sellick, Managing Director at 7i Group said: “Publicly sharing thoughts, opinions and experiences online is increasingly part of everyday life. It is often the environment in which patients and HCPs are most likely to express their views on a medicine or device in a ‘real world’ setting. It is logical, therefore, to harness this publicly available evidence to get a better understanding of the true patient experience. There is also a great opportunity to gather opinions from HCPs and to share this insight with healthcare companies and healthcare providers, enabling them to improve treatment protocols, medicines and medical devices.
“We believe that the combination of Confirmit’s leading-edge technology with our expertise in healthcare will enable the development of a new, innovative approach to generating ‘in-the-moment’ insight from patients and HCPs alike,” he said.
“Continuous online listening, combined with the more traditional market research approach, will provide valuable insights which will ultimately contribute to improved patient outcomes. It is this drive to enhance the lives of patients that is at the heart of the collaboration between Confirmit and 7i Group,” Sellick added.
Commenting on the collaboration, Tim Hannington, EVP at Confirmit said: “We look forward to working with 7i in providing the pharmaceutical industry with the holistic view it requires to put the patient at the heart of improving existing medicines and future drug development. We are confident that Confirmit Genius will provide the sentiment analysis capabilities 7i requires at scale and that Confirmit Horizons will support 7i’s expansion into new territories as it enters new markets.”