Ahead of a significant Alzheimer’s Disease therapy launch, a major pharmaceutical company wanted to support interest and awareness of the new treatment by creating a best-in-class digital launch experience for neurologists and PCPs who diagnose and treat patients with Alzheimer’s Disease.
The company needed to understand what neurologists and PCPs currently relied on for information gathering as well as their receptivity to new platforms and digital tools to support future testing, diagnosing, treatment and monitoring needs.
To secure insights, the company partnered with Escalent to conduct qualitative research with prescribing neurologists and referring PCPs.
Escalent hosted several conversations with PCPs and neurologists exploring current digital habits and preferences and captured information-seeking processes via a series of tasks that moved them along the journey of learning about a new treatment:
Escalent analyzed the data through a behavioral science lens to add depth to the findings around information-seeking biases. For example, we recognized that physicians are creatures of habit — they trust, use, and gravitate toward sources that were introduced during their medical training. This kind of behavioral inertia is known as Status Quo Bias, which describes the preference to stick with the same processes, patterns and decisions made in the past to avoid new complications.
Escalent’s findings provided the client with a comprehensive understanding of how most physicians gather information – it identified which websites and platforms they prefer today and outlined the evaluation criteria HCPs use to deem a resource preferred. Behavioral science principles uncovered underlying HCP habits and illuminated “watch outs” and considerations to ensure successful development of a digital launch program.
Escalent provided and workshopped multi-layer recommendations with the client team to give both a high-level path forward and deep dives into the following specific elements: