Ipsos Healthcare Unveils 'Therapy Mining' Text Tool

Ipsos Healthcare has introduced a text analytics tool called Therapy Mining, which collects, codes and analyses data from blogs and posts on online patient forums.

Therapy Mining is a collaboration between disease specialists in the group's Global Therapy Monitors team, and methodological experts in its Healthcare Advanced Analytics team. The technique has been developed to address the pharma and disease-specific language and abbreviations used by patients. According to Ipsos, subscribers to the new tool can gain insight into the most important topics of discussion, key issues, concerns, emotions, impact of diseases, and unmet needs. The study also examines patients' perceptions of drug categories, brand buzz, and brand associations within a specific category.

The first study focuses on diabetes discussions in the US and UK, with plans to roll out across other therapy areas and markets. Victoria Allan, Research Director, Global Therapy Monitors, comments: 'Text Analytics offers exciting new opportunities for pharma and device companies to better understand the patient journey, explore unmet needs at each stage of the patient journey, and monitor brand buzz and perception. They can also follow up patient communication campaigns and measure campaign effectiveness among 'hard to reach' patient audiences'.

Web site: www.ipsos.com .