Graham Mills, co-founder and managing director of techspert.io, discusses the importance of digital opinion leaders in healthcare.
Healthcare has a long history of working with experts to inform, influence and guide business and treatment strategies. It used to be relatively straight forward to identify these experts, or key opinion leaders (KOLs) – the right academic credentials, published in relevant journals, peer-reviewed by equally esteemed colleagues, clinical trial involvement, speaking at conferences and a professional CV made up of positions at storied institutions.
These traditional channels often act as gatekeepers, with KOLs fitting an expected traditional profile.
The next generation of knowledge leaders
However, in today’s digital era, legacy criteria aren’t the only way to identify experts.
Now, a new generation of healthcare knowledge leaders use online channels to educate, influence policy decisions, offer and access professional and peer support, and develop their own understanding. We call these digital opinion leaders (DOLs).
The ease of access to online channels is giving a more diverse array of professionals the opportunity to share their expertise and transcend geographical and academic barriers to lend their voices to primary market research. This offers businesses fresh perspectives in cutting-edge topics.
In addition, DOLs’ own understanding is being cultivated by their exposure to new ideas proliferating through digital channels.
Finding the right experts in a world of noise
Despite the rise of digital opinion leaders, the challenge of finding the right experts still remains. We are drowning in information. The World Economic Forum estimated that on any given day 500 million tweets and 294 billion emails are sent, and five billion searches are made. This is posing a threat to life science businesses looking to identify and work with the most relevant and influential experts, as they run the risk of not being able to find the right minds for their projects.
Enter expert networks – they provide investors, industry, and professional services firms with access to critical insights sourced directly from experts.
Until now, companies have relied upon these networks whenever they’ve needed an external source of expertise. They submit a brief and the network responds by putting forward a list of experts signed up with them that may be relevant. The limitations of this approach are clear. The system is closed-loop, reliant on putting forward the experts already in the network rather than the very best experts for the task at hand – a case of who you know rather than who you need.
Furthermore, the world of life sciences is constantly changing. Some local experts have access to new insights or groundbreaking research that others elsewhere in the world are yet to hear about. Some experts are simply more knowledgeable than others, or at least, their scientific knowledge is more up-to-the-minute than others.
Introducing AI to uncover DOLs
While technology has exacerbated the information overload challenge, it can also provide a solution. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be deployed to rapidly sort and analyse data, from papers and posts to new positions and grant information announcements to identify potential experts that meet the needs of a business.
Such technology can drastically reduce the time spent finding knowledge leaders, while still providing a broad and diverse spread of expertise. It goes beyond simply highlighting the latest information and gives access to the minds behind the material. This is important – while published thoughts will have a degree of insight, the real value lies in the process behind those outputs. There’s also the fact that technology sees no borders, removing the geographical or cultural restrictions that might once have kept experts and businesses apart.
What’s more, AI learns from the data it’s sorting, continuously getting better at optimising the results it produces.
How matching experts to businesses really works
It’s an approach already being deployed by a variety of businesses in life sciences and pharmaceuticals to reach experts and inform their strategies.
For example, a healthcare market research company was developing a marketing campaign for their end client on CAR T-cell therapy and multiple myeloma. To ensure that the project would resonate with the target audience, and to inform an effective online advertising strategy, the business needed to reach relevant DOLs in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. Using technology built on AI, the company was able to filter out irrelevant specialists and focus on those DOLs with direct expertise and a significant online presence to get the right insights.
These included a research director at a cancer organisation who uses their online presence to share and learn about new medical innovations and treatments, and a Clinical Research Fellow in Multiple Myeloma and CAR-T cell therapy that regularly posts and influences others online.
In another instance, a consulting firm needed to engage with US and EU-based breast cancer and oncology DOLs for market research purposes. Specifically, they wanted experts with active online presences reaching a global audience, and who used a mix of both public and medical gated platforms. The purpose of the discussion was to drill down into their experience with digital communication, their motivations driving online engagement and their connection (if any) to pharma.
By using AI, the firm engaged with a Professor of Medicine with more than 330,000 followers on Twitter and has 300 scientific publications on oncology. It was also able to speak to an oncologist that had authored 40 articles in the field of oncology, had a significant online presence and had relevant research interests.
With the amount of data and information currently available, neither of the businesses in these examples would have been able to identify and engage with experts as quickly through a manual process. As DOLs grow in number and influence, being able to work with the right ones is going to be critical to maintain a competitive edge. With an AI-driven approach, companies can find the expertise they need and incorporate the resulting insights faster, and with greater results.
Written for Health Tech World by Graham Mills, co-founder & managing director, techspert.io
