Inspire expanding research solutions in aim to better inform patient-focused drug development

08-Nov-2018 - Last updated on 08-Nov-2018 at 16:23 GMT

(Image: Getty/Irina_Strelnikova)

The health care social network Inspire is expanding its research solutions to help life science stakeholders integrate the patient voice and experience into research.

Inspire creates and manages support communities for more than one million patients and caregivers, representing approximately 3,600 conditions.

The company’s Integrated Insights Platform is based on a mix of primary market research and secondary data analytic capabilities and solutions, as well as Inspire’s member partnerships, explained Monica St Claire, the Inspire Insights product lead.

The expanded solutions include Insights Discover, the company’s proprietary content, and Insights Engage, a suite of research methodologies. This includes survey and virtual patient interview options, which enable life science stakeholders to engage directly with the community’s 1.5m members.

“Among other things, our access to, and our connection with, our community means rapid recruitment and overall project delivery,” St Claire told us. “It also includes social listening research and tracking options that not only include the Inspire community activity, a private and proprietary database of more than one billion words, but it also now includes full open and publicly available social media sources and content.”

St Claire said the “Inspire-plus-public-social-media-listening reach is unmatched in the industry.” Inspire also has a team of health care linguists and social media analysts which design and deliver the various research initiatives.

“In short, we can quickly match the best data and best methods with key client and partner questions and needs, and this results in high-value, custom research that is targeted and efficient,” she explained.

Moving forward, St Claire said Inspire is “sharpening” and growing its data science department as well as its advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities. As part of this, the company will continue engaging in research partnerships with various US institutions.

“This will expand the Inspire health care database with more strategic and relevant content, structured and unstructured,” she said, “as well as the ability to turn that data into meaningful, and even predictive, intelligence.”