Inspire’s MS Community Overcomes Patient Isolation with Peer-to-Peer Support and Experience By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Over 15,000 members of Inspire have interest in, searched for, or have posted about multiple sclerosis (MS). Members have written over 4000 posts and more than 2000 searches have been conducted on MS. Pharmaceutical marketers [...]
What Touchpoints Influence Drug Compliance for Chronic Illnesses? By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Recent marketing research from Google shows that it takes 50-500 touchpoints to influence a purchase decision. While the study focused on common non-medical purchases (headphones, airline flights, beauty products, and candy), the authors point out an important shift [...]
Getting the Real Story from Patients By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Humans evolved in a storytelling milieu where stories taught and explained the world around us. Our brains carry this legacy, research shows that the brain can store more information and retrieve it more easily when it is in story form. [...]
Getting the Most from Online Surveys By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Do you wonder about online surveys? Are they reliable? Is there bias? A recent article by the Pew Research Center For Weighting Online Opt-In Samples, What Matters Most? 1provides guidance to allay those concerns. Pew experimented with different procedures for [...]
What is a Virtual Advisory Board product? By Monica St. Claire Almost 60 percent of all clinical trial protocols have at least one amendment. Amendments lower the numbers of recruited patients as well as increase the cost of clinical trials according to Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development Impact [...]
