I’m Gilda Teissier, Marketing Director at EvidentIQ and I recently met with Emilie Pain, Data Scientist at Carenity, part of the EvidentIQ Group.

Whether to develop new products, services, design clinical trials or marketing strategies, first-hand access to patients and caregivers is increasingly becoming a cornerstone for life sciences industries.

By collaborating and engaging with patients in the decision-making process, health providers can make better decisions regarding a patient’s health. Therefore, having access to accurate information reported by patients and caregivers is essential to understand patient experience and be patient-centric, identify unmet needs in terms of products, services and information, test concepts of services and campaign messages, define Target Product Profiles, and optimize the design of clinical trials (study materials, endpoints, protocol assessment).

The only problem sometimes is that having access to this information can take time and a lot of resources. PatientLive® is a platform that responds to this by giving access to real-time Insights in a fast, autonomous and simple way.

Today I have the pleasure to interview Emilie Pain, PatientLive® Product Manager. She will help us understand better the need of patient-centric information and how PatientLive® helps us meet that in a quick and accurate way.

Gilda: Which are the main challenges of healthcare providers when it comes to access and use of patient information?

Emilie: Access to information directly reported by patients is long and complex for healthcare providers due to regulatory constraints. They need a third party that allows them to have quick access to patient insights on a regular basis to understand patient experience, to test new materials, and to listen to patient expectations and thus create patient-centric materials.

Gilda: What is PatientLive®?

Emilie: PatientLive® is a unique solution that allows customers to quickly survey an online community of 500,000 patients and caregivers in the US and Europe via quick polls (1 to 5 questions).

“PatientLive® is a unique solution that allows customers to quickly survey an online community of 500,000 patients and caregivers in the US and Europe via quick polls”

This tool, unique on the market, provides access to accurate patient insights in a compliant way. It also allows our customers to target specific patient profiles (country, condition, addition of a screener question).

The polls implemented through this platform allow quick and easy access to patient insights, which are complementary to traditional marketing surveys or real-world studies (non-interventional studies, preference studies, etc.) conducted by Carenity.

Gilda: Who is PatientLive® for?

Emilie: PatientLive® is a solution dedicated to the life sciences industry, such as pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, medtechs or healthtechs companies. It can be of special interest to market research/business insights, commercial/marketing, patient engagement, medical affairs, market access, research and development, clinical development, and clinical operations teams.

Finally, it can also help consulting firms, market research agencies, and communication agencies to support the life sciences industry in their strategic decisions and actions.

This solution is available in the US and Europe (France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy).

Gilda: Which conditions can be targeted?

Emilie: PatientLive® is available for 36 conditions. These conditions include oncology, such as breast cancer or lung cancer, but also immunology (e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, lupus), respiratory (e.g. Asthma, COPD), endocrinology (e.g. type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, obesity), gastroenterology (e.g. Crohn’s disease), dermatology (e.g. psoriasis), etc. A detailed list can be found at the PatientLive’s site.

Gilda: How does it work?

Emilie: Once a customer has defined a topic, they can implement their poll on the platform.

PatientLive® offers the possibility to ask up to 5 questions per poll. There are 5 types of questions available: single choice, multiple choice, scale from 0 to 5, text field, numeric field and test of images/videos.

PatientLive® offers the possibility to ask up to 5 questions per poll.

They can also create a screener question to target a sub-population. A screener question is a question to which the answer must be either «Yes» or «No». For example, a screener question can be “Are you treated by insulin therapy?”. Only the respondents who choose «Yes» as answer are considered at the display of the results.

Once the poll has been created, a validation is made by the Carenity’s Data Science team before the poll goes live.

Then, invitations to participate are sent to patients and poll results are available once the first respondent has answered. 

Gilda: How much time does it take to obtain results and how are they delivered?

Emilie: The period can vary from 1 to 15 days, depending on the condition, the screening questions and the targeted number of respondents.

The results are available in real time on the site. Starting from the first responses customers can visualize the results thanks to our dashboard. Our customers also have the possibility to download the results (raw data, tables of results, or report) in real time.

Gilda: Can you give us a specific example of how the results can be integrated by pharmaceutical companies?  

Emilie: The results of a PatientLive® poll can be integrated by pharmaceutical companies through different ways, but one of the most concrete examples we have is from a poll we conducted among diabetic patients which evaluated a new advertising campaign and allowed our customer to adjust the wording of this campaign. I can also think of polls conducted to better understand patient experience (disease/treatment burden, quality of life), to identify patients’ unmet needs in terms of products, services and information, or to measure patients’ perception of products, devices or services.

Gilda: Are there any specificities in the use of the data by clinical teams or CROs?

Emilie: The results of a poll can support clinical teams in the definition of the Target Product Profile, in the evaluation of patient’s acceptance of the protocol evaluation parameters and flow chart, in the definition of study endpoints valuable from a patient perspective, in the optimization of the design of the clinical trial, etc. For instance, we have recently conducted a poll evaluating patient understanding of the information notice that was planned to be used on a clinical trial. It helped our customer clarify some parts of this information notice. 

Gilda: You previously mentioned that consulting firms, market research agencies, and communication agencies can also use PatientLive®. What are the type of polls they conduct?

Emilie: They mainly use our tool to differentiate their proposal and pitch by incorporating patient insights, to assess the feasibility of their studies, to optimize the design and the questionnaire of their patient studies, to generate patient insights to enrich their results and recommendations, and to test concepts of services or campaigns. To give a more specific example, a poll was conducted among breast cancer patients in order to evaluate the proportion per stage and thus the feasibility to conduct a study among metastatic breast cancer.  

Gilda: Thanks a lot for your time!

For more information about PatientLive® click here.

I’m Gilda Teissier, Executive Marketing Director at EvidentIQ and I recently met with Michael Chekroun, Founder and CEO at Carenity and Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at EvidentIQ Group for this interview.

COVID-19 has been among us for more than a year now and it has impacted the life of every person in the world. It goes without saying that certain populations have been more affected than others.

Carenity, part of EvidentIQ group, is a leading digital patient platform with 500,000 patients and caregivers worldwide. In the context of COVID-19, Carenity’s mission has been more than ever to support its patient community and to help healthcare actors quickly access the best possible data to provide the highest quality of care to patients. In this sense, Carenity has set up an online survey to measure the impact of COVID-19 on access to care and quality of life in real-time for chronic patients, a population that is particularly vulnerable in a context of pandemic and lockdown. While attention is primarily focused on those affected by COVID-19, the risk of poor, insufficient access to care for chronic patients is real, with potential dramatic consequences. Will chronic patients be the collateral victims of the epidemic?

This survey was conducted at three different periods in the following 6 countries: France, the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US. The first survey was conducted during the first lockdown in Q2 2020, the second after the summer 2020, and the last from December 2020 until April 2021. The results from all three surveys have been shared with both the patient and healthcare communities. Today we have the opportunity to get some deeper insights on the key results thanks to Michael Chekroun, Founder and CEO of Carenity and Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at EvidentIQ Group.

Gilda: Michael, what made you conduct this survey in the first place? and who did you interview? Was it a special group?

Michael: The pandemic suddenly sent the world into a state of shock in early 2020. The sense of uncertainty was amplified by the lockdown measures that followed in many countries. At Carenity, we wanted to know what impact this crisis would have on patients with chronic illnesses, both in terms of access to care and impact on their quality of life, to find quick solutions to protect an already fragile population.

“We wanted to know what impact this crisis would have on patients with chronic illnesses“

Gilda: One of the central questions was about patients’ intention to be vaccinated. What did you find out about people’s willingness to get vaccinated and what do you think are the reasons?

Michael: We surveyed over 3,500 people in Europe and the United States. The results show that there is a strong motivation to get vaccinated. 48% of respondents said it is because they were at risk, 46% wanted to protect others and 41% just wanted to protect themselves from the virus. That said, the survey indicates that the willingness to be vaccinated differs massively between countries.

“The willingness to be vaccinated differs massively between countries”

Gilda: When it comes to medical consultations and healthcare professionals, have you seen an improvement in the situation with regard to medical visits or procedures being canceled or postponed since the first lockdown? What do you think is the reason for this?

Michael: Nearly half of those surveyed reported that their medical visits or procedures were canceled or postponed during the 1st wave of the virus, during the spring of 2020, while 75% reported experiencing the same difficulties in late 2020 and early 2021. It is difficult to estimate the long-term impact, but many physicians are already concerned about the deteriorating health of their patients.

Gilda: There are many digital solutions now offering teleconsultation services. Based on the barometer’s findings, do you think there is a real market out there for video consultation platforms?

Michael: Yes, absolutely. Roughly 67% of patients in the US would be willing to use telehealth consultations and in Europe 47% of respondents are open to telehealth. I see a bright future for these innovative services, as the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the adoption of telehealth services by the general public and health care professionals.

Gilda: Physical and mental health have been an important element and a casualty of this pandemic. Have these two aspects also worsened for people living with chronic illnesses and to what extent?

Michael: The pandemic is expected to have a long-term effect on the mental health of people populations around the world, especially the youngest and most fragile. Again, it is difficult to estimate the long-term impact, but we can already see that the number of digital solutions related to mental health is booming. It is one of the most followed subjects by VCs in the US.

Gilda: Information is essential when faced with uncharted territory such a pandemic, and most of all when living with a chronic condition. Has people with chronic conditions been given enough information? What do patients think?

Michael: Information is not the problem. We have been literally inundated with information about the virus, its impact, its variants and its treatments. So much so that everyone feels able to judge the effectiveness or the safety of a particular vaccine. Moreover, a majority of the patients surveyed consider themselves well informed about the virus or the vaccines. The challenge now is to understand the long-term impact of this virus, the effects of which can last several months and which experts now call “long COVID”. Even if we can see the light at the end of the tunnel thanks to vaccination, we must remain cautious in a field where knowledge evolves daily.

“The challenge now is to understand the long-term impact of this virus”

Gilda: Thank you Michael

Do you want to discover all the results? Join us on June 17 at 17h CET for our webinar on The Impact of COVID-19 on Patients with Chronic Illnesses! Register here