Medical congresses form an essential part of pharma teams’ medical and commercial strategies. Getting them right – from planning and attendance through to the various post-congress activities – can help teams answer fundamental questions about their therapies, customers, markets, and competitors. Congress insights reporting helps pharma teams generate a higher volume of accurate, high-quality insights that enhance the value of these annual congress activities. But what do we actually mean by congress insights reporting, and how should the process be applied to achieve the best results?
We sat down with Tyler Smith, Senior Product Manager at Within3, to discuss the role of congress insights reporting and to share best practices developed with top pharma companies through their real-world experiences.
Q: What is a medical insight? How do insights differ from observations?
“An insight is something one gets to by looking through a number of observations. People often confuse insights with social data, or what’s being said in one-on-one MSL field interactions. That’s not an insight: that’s an observation.”
“To create an insight, you need to take all of that verbatim data and make sense of it. And more specifically, you need to make sense of it in relation to your strategy. What are your business objectives? At Within3, we use something called key insight topics, or KITs, to tie insights to a client’s strategy and goals – and to train our AI.”
Q: What do we mean by ‘insights reporting’ in medical congresses?
“At Within3, we provide reports that list all the key insights we gathered from a congress as they relate to a client’s strategy. These reports include action plans detailing what they might do next to accomplish their objectives.”
“Our insight reports are updated hourly throughout the duration of a congress, so pharma teams are in there every day. We use our proprietary AI to generate new insights for your specific strategic imperatives. You can download that at any time, take it to your team, and adjust your strategy day over day based on what you’re hearing and learning in real-time.”
“We also offer ‘general insights’, which look across the whole data set to examine things outside the scope of clients’ KITs that we feel they still ought to know about. Sometimes, those outcomes spark new searches.”
Q: What problems do pharma teams face at medical congresses?
“There are a lot of different data funnels related to medical congresses. Pharma teams may be getting data from the field: medical science liaisons (MSLs) talking to key opinion leaders (KOLs), and walking the floor of a congress to get information. Then there are teams of people who look at the data coming in through social listening, looking at the hashtags related to the congress event, and assessing what’s being said. This social data is quantitative as well as qualitative – is there a lot of chatter surrounding our new drug, et cetera? Teams may also be using their own CRMs to document what’s being said at the congress.”
“The problem for pharma teams is: how do we make sense of all that data, in real time, while we’re at the congress? How do we report this back to upper management with an action plan in place? How do we assess what to do next?”
“We help to solve these problems by bringing all of that data into one place. We use AI, so teams no longer have to manually export their congress data into a spreadsheet. And our AI has been trained on their strategy, so we use that context to surface the specific things they’re looking for – rather than them having to go in manually and hunt for it. Historically, teams would surface insights sometimes weeks after a congress had ended. We can help them find those answers while it’s happening.”
Q: What questions can pharma teams look to answer through insights reporting?
“Pharma teams have a lot of questions going into a medical congress, and insights reporting can answer many of them.”
“What’s being said about our clinical trials? Are physicians prescribing our new drug? What cost barriers are patients experiencing – are insurance providers covering our therapies? Are they effective? Are there any adverse effects? What’s the general sentiment around our company? What are our competitors doing in this space?”
Q: Could you share some congress insights reporting dos and don’ts?
1. Know your strategy inside-out.
“Understanding your strategy going into a congress is one of the most important things. It’s important to ensure the whole client team is on the same page – ‘here are the five main things we care about’. ‘Here are the five competitors we care about’. That’s huge. Without knowing that, we’re going to get data that’s general and unhelpful, as opposed to insights tied to the specifics of your key insight topics.”
2. Be open and communicative.
“A willingness to work with your insights management provider is crucial – particularly on the client services side. Cumulatively, they’ve worked on thousands of medical congresses. They know what they’re doing, so be willing to divulge as much information as possible to ensure they establish the right dataset from the get-go.”
3. Check in regularly, and look beyond your strategy.
“Within3 users should regularly check in with their insights reports. We update our data points every hour, so things change frequently. We also offer search functionality that allows users to search for specific topics – whether they’re related to your strategy, or not. Combined with the insights in our general section, that helps pharma teams uncover unprompted findings they never knew they needed.”
3. Take advantage of pre -and post-congress ‘watch periods’.
“Within3 offers a ‘watch period’ for before and after a congress, allowing users to monitor what’s being said both leading up to and following the event. You can log into your site and see how things have changed over time, if sentiment has changed before versus after, et cetera. I would encourage clients to take advantage of those.”
Congress insights reporting in action
Congress insights reporting is capable of generating new insights with a measurable impact on teams’ medical and commercial strategies. Let’s take a look at how one pharma company used Within3’s congress insights reporting and social monitoring solutions to uncover some truly impactful expert voices.
The client’s medical affairs team wanted to use Within3’s congress insights reporting to identify KOLs, and monitor disease community chatter around a major medical congress. By employing social monitoring and other insights reporting tools, the team were able to assess nearly 15,000 posts by 3,000 unique global authors – leading to the discovery of four entirely new expert voices that were previously unknown to them. Furthermore, they were able to examine the sentiment around these posts to understand what KOLs thought about data releases from both their company, and a competitor’s.
You can read the full case study on congress insights reporting and social monitoring here.
If you’re ready to experience the power of congress insights reporting for yourself, schedule a demo today.
