Ipsos Health - Patient Research

At Ipsos Health, we believe that the patient is an important stakeholder in the assessment of any particular therapy area. They provide a more holistic view of the market dynamic and can help to identify priority stages in the healthcare system.

Patient research has a number of key challenges:

• It needs to be conducted in an ethical manner
• It needs to speak to patients in their own language, rather than a medical language
• And it needs to be multi-dimensional

It is critical that patient research focuses on establishing the emotional, behavioural and environmental factors that impact on behaviour, as well as the rational. To achieve this, we believe it is important to combine different types of patient centric research to provide a wider framework of thinking:

• Rational techniques to form a baseline for the research; helping to create context
• Emotional techniques to help understand unarticulated influences and emotional factors driving behaviour
• Environmental techniques to establish the impact of everyday life factors, and how these change throughout the patient journey

In our view, it is this holistic approach which really uncovers the drivers of patient behaviour and understanding. A specific emotional technique, such as ethnography, is useful on its own for allowing an exploration of a patient’s day-to-day life. However, the real value of this technique is seen when used in combination with other approaches as an inspiration for action and next steps business planning

At Ipsos Health, we have conducted a number of large scale patient studies which have been publically released, for instance PainSTORY: http://www.painstory.org/