Last year, we predicted what 2022 would hold for insights management in life science. What did we get right, and what happened that we didn’t expect? Let’s get into our 2022 year in review.
We predicted: insights management will become a core strategic priority
As the year unfolded, we heard more conversations about the need to view insight-gathering as a single strategic process. We heard from organizations that use multiple systems owned by different teams – sometimes across different geographies or business units – to obtain and analyze insights. This approach is one of the most significant contributors to the insight gap, and teams use a lot of valuable time and resources to understand where information lives and who can see it.
We evolved this prediction for the year ahead – 2023 will bring this issue into sharper focus for life science organizations, with a greater understanding of what’s needed to support insights management from a business perspective.
We predicted: expert selection will evolve
Digital opinion leaders were a hot topic in 2022, as life science teams sought input from digitally savvy influencers alongside more traditional KOLs. We expected these rising stars to take center stage in 2022, and indeed, we heard from many industry leaders eager to find and work with this new breed of opinion leaders.
But this trend reached far beyond identifying and recruiting digital opinion leaders – it also branched into social listening and gaining a deeper understanding of disease communities from many angles: experts, patients, and competition. Digital opinion leaders, as it turns out, are part of a broader landscape of what’s happening on digital channels. One of the clearest examples of this was in medical congresses, where teams used social listening to confirm topics of interest, monitor trends during the event, and understand post-congress impressions and conversations.
We predicted: asynchronous will provide flexibility
The role of asynchronous discussions changed as more in-person meetings returned. After two years of primarily virtual interactions, we all craved a return to face-to-face. But the industry soon realized that all the conversations conducted in person with colleagues and HCPs still needed to be collected, analyzed, and shared – in short, the same challenge we had pre-pandemic. We see this trend continuing into 2023 and beyond as life science organizations increasingly seek to operationalize insights in their day-to-day activities.
We predicted: virtual trial activities will increase diversity and boost patient-centricity
This was a hot topic all year and only gained traction with the release of FDA guidelines around patient-focused drug development. At industry events around the US, we heard from audiences who wanted to know more about implementing these practices from the earliest stages of product development. Patient-centered strategies are more than a trend – they’re good business.
Ready to turn the page on 2022? Read our 2023 trends post.
