Healthcare markets
Healthcare encompasses markets from pharmaceutical and development of medications, to medical devices, and on to service providers.
Our projects help businesses navigate the complex structures to identify how efficacy and efficiency drive decisions and recommendations on medicines, devices, processes and protocols to ensure the right products are tested, and taken through approval processes using techniques like conjoint analysis.
Unlike most standard markets, products and services in healtcare are often chosen by experts, but consumed by patients, making decisions complex and multileveled, with a full range of regulatory oversight and challenging inter-market relationships between specifiers, influencers, regulatory bodies and end users. All with different international standards and health services to contend with.
Treatments and devices
Bringing a medicine or device to market is a long and costly process requiring demonstrable clinical benefits, but also in an area where there is an available clinical need. The process for achieving approval takes time and money.
Identifying the right specification or 'Test Product Profile' requires forethought and planning. For medicines there are typically there are trade-offs between dosage and efficacy and safety, and factors of use - such as the dosing method can have a large impact on the acceptability of a new-to-market product.
Choosing what to take forwards into clinical trials or testing on the route to approval, is a key decision and means understanding what is likely to drive decision making when the product hits the market post-approval. Testing the wrong product or wrong spec can be an expensive mistake.
Consequently, research approaches like conjoint analysis where features can be tested 'in vitro' prior to going to 'in vivo', allow an understanding of the trade-offs specialists and experts would make for 'virtual' products enabling the TPP to be optimised for the market, before taking into a clinical trial. Similarly, qualitative research and pre-trial assessments provide key feedback to chose the right product to take into the trial and approvals pipelines.
Instruments and processes
Away from frontline patient care, healthcare service providers in areas such as pathology or histology, face increasing demands on the range of tests they can provide, systems for tracking and quality, and the throughput and output of those tests.
Instrument and service providers need to understand workflow and handling requirements and optimise machines for ease of operation and faster turnaround. As ever, there is always a balance to be made, both in terms of functionality, capacity and handling, but also in terms of price and levels of technical integration.
Trade-off techniques such as conjoint analysis allow different options to be tested 'in virtual' to guide the development of new instruments and services. And then to help develop the key communication elements for those services as the product is taken to market, and to establish optimum price points.
Protocol management software for clinical trials
While most of our projects in healthcare markets relate to designing products and services, we have also provided tools to help ensure complex clinicial trial protocols are specified correctly and monitored correctly.
In areas like oncology, new treatments have to be fitted into standard of care protocols, often creating complex relationships of timing for dosing or treatments around factors like measurement and monitoring, visit schedules, and pre-existing treatments.
Our protocol management software is able to combine these different timing factors and so to advise on an optimum protocol schedule per patient, with the possibility of automatic notifications and compliance checks.
For help and advice on marketing and research in healthcare markets contact info@dobney.com
