Challenge
The phrase “go with the flow” may signal moving along with the pack, but in patient-centered research that’s the exact approach you need to take to obtain unique, game-changing insights. The Patient Flow Model is an important tool for understanding exactly how patients progress from diagnosis through each stage of the treatment cycle for a disease. This tool can help you to make the most effective decisions in critical business areas.A leading global pharmaceutical company wanted to understand the level of knowledge that rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients had about their disease, as well as determine the existing Models of Care (MoC) for RA patients in 23 countries worldwide. In this context, a complete and well-defined MoC reveals patient perceptions about how healthcare services are organised and delivered, and follows patients’ needs through the healthcare system as disease progresses.
In order to obtain a comprehensive RA patient perspective, the company sought to collaborate with Patient Advocacy Groups (PAG) in each of the 23 countries targeted and needed a partner to help them accomplish this goal. The company engaged Kantar, a global innovator in patient research that’s providing robust data, unique insight and real-world answers to some of the healthcare industry’s toughest questions.
Approach
In this client engagement, Kantar developed a new online-based research platform from scratch – instead of implementing a standard market research approach using a telephone or online survey. This allowed us greater flexibility to create and adapt the questionnaire in ways that made sense to patients, to improve turnaround times for implementing the survey in local languages, and to provide our client with real-time access to our progress and the results of the research. Plus, the platform featured a dedicated host server with the most advanced security systems. As the study commenced, we shared a link to the platform with each PAG participating in the study. Patients were invited by the PAGs to access a 15-minute questionnaire. Through this approach, patients were much more inclined to participate in this study versus others that recruit from panels.Our platform was the centrepiece tool of the study – used to create the survey, to generate the links used by the PAGs to invite patients to participate in the study, and to control fieldwork and generate field update reports and impactful graphs. At the global level, results were shown in English, while at the country level results were shown in local language so local teams could also access the results. By the end of the study, more than 2,500 patient interviews were conducted.