Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google/Alphabet are the first companies to reach market capitalizations of over a trillion dollars, with no end in sight for continued exponential growth across the technology sector. At the core of their jaw-dropping success is a revolution in the customer experience, triggered by digital and empowered through data-driven personalization.

The result has been a stunning transformation in the everyday lives of most people on the planet, raising expectations for the benefits brands must now provide their customers. Entire industries from entertainment to hospitality to commerce are conveniently activated in real-time from anywhere with a click, tap, or swipe, the user experience improving with every interaction.

Although great strides have been made to similarly improve the patient experience, healthcare remains a sluggish sector along this road to customer-centricity. Numerous obstacles abound, including the legacy of a paternalistic approach that marginalizes the patient voice; privacy, compliance, and interoperability restrictions that limit the sharing of data; and other factors. The disappointing and often tragic irony of such healthcare digital inertia is the obvious truth that nothing is more important than our health and wellness.

Compounding the frustration is the tangible progress that has nonetheless been made across digital health, from diet and fitness apps for consumers to significant advances in diagnostics and telemedicine for professionals.

One of the silver linings of the global pandemic of 2020 is the acceleration of these digital health trends, encouraging a greater appreciation of how digital technology could further improve the patient experience. A central but often overlooked element of this hopeful paradigm shift is the increasing digitization of market research, and its striking implications for healthcare brands.

The incredible potential for a digital revolution in market research begs the question of the specific gaps digital can immediately fill, and how fresh insights from innovative technology can improve the overall patient experience. So let’s take a look at how healthcare brands usually use market research, and show recent advances changing the way brands learn and grow.

The Role of Market Research in the Patient Experience

Broadly described, the “patient experience” is not only an individual’s reaction to illness and treatment, but an aspirational goal healthcare companies strive to maximize. Metrics are often used to define what a good or even an exceptional patient experience is like, with various indicators of satisfaction often going beyond direct engagement with the healthcare system.

An optimal patient experience is therefore somewhat analogous to a personalized customer experience, where buyers feel their needs are met and expectations exceeded at each touchpoint of the customer – or within the healthcare context, treatment – journey. In both cases, the end-user demands convenience, responsiveness, support, and ongoing guidance.

Patients differ from consumers, however, in that being treated for an illness is nothing like purchasing a product or service. Unlike consumers, who embrace a brand choice as a flattering reflection of themselves, patients consider their treatment as a means to an end, namely getting back to their healthy lives. If nothing else, that makes a good experience even more important.

Healthcare brand teams understand this, and like their counterparts in consumer packaged goods, entertainment, and other industries know the power of market research to try and get that experience right. At its best, market research provides actionable insights into what patients need and expect, and how they react to information from and interactions with their treatment.

With origins that go back to the Golden Age of Radio in the 1920s, market research is ultimately designed to gain transparency into marketplace competitors and trends, audience behaviors and triggers, and the effectiveness of marketing and communications efforts. Tools have ranged from landscape to ATU and SWOT analyses, and fall into qualitative and quantitative buckets.

Healthcare marketers typically rely on a broad arsenal of these research capabilities, choosing a combination that best reveals the hearts and minds of patients to improve their experience throughout the continuum of care. Compromises have had to be made between the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, though, a challenge digital tech is finally beginning to meet.

Either Quant or Qual: An Unnecessary Compromise

Optimizing the patient experience starts with understanding it, no easy task given the uniqueness of each patient, and the complexity of their journey through the healthcare system. From symptom awareness to point-of-care diagnosis, treatment decision to reimbursement, adherence to advocacy, the holistic patient experience continuously morphs and evolves.

Depending on the specific need, brand teams tend to choose between market research methods that have a reputation for being most effective: quantitative research is typically associated with larger sample sizes and the need for speed; qualitative research is used, in contrast, for more focused, hands-on studies of fewer subjects to extract more nuance.

Given the inherent dichotomy between quant and qual, brands often feel forced into a tradeoff: go broad and shallow, or deep and narrow. For example, a team might release thousands of surveys to statistically assess the diabetic patient experience surrounding a new type of insulin, or conduct a far more limited but intensive focus group to ask a tiny N more detailed questions.

Strategic brands with sufficient resources often opt for both methods: they may use quant to acquire a general understanding of the larger patient population, then follow the initial research with better informed one-on-one interviews across a select cross-section of subjects. But even such a hybrid approach frequently falls short of providing the actionable insights brands crave.

Part of the challenge is the methodology of market research itself, which is only as good as its data 1) input, 2) processing, and 3) output. Regardless of technique, the thoughts and feelings of patients must be translated into information researchers analyze and populate into a report the brand team can understand and act upon. Any weak link destroys the entire data chain.

When viewed through this three-step lens, opportunities abound for applying similar technologies the trillion-dollar big tech giants use to improve the customer experience. Although surveys and statistical analytics continue to serve quant researchers well, and first-hand participant observation remains the bedrock of qual, Next Gen market research is worth exploring.

The average human body contains over 37 trillion cells, each a treasure trove of complex health information. Our technological ability to capture biometric data of ever-increasing sophistication and volume is the foundation of the “Quantified Self,” and gateway to digital health ultimately enabling the optimal diagnosis, treatment, management, and even prevention of disease.

A legacy challenge of traditional market research is the need to translate biometrically rich behavioral data into fill-in-the-blanks survey and questionnaire bubbles, unnatural interview and focus group responses, and other limiting formats. Rigorous observational studies can be subject to bias, and force responses from uncomfortable subjects within artificial settings.

In contrast, the tech giants have mastered the science of understanding the customer experience through passive digital surveillance. Arguably controversial and often violative, the ability to monitor every action in real time provides an unprecedented and astonishingly accurate window into the attitudes, intentions, and behaviors of billions of active consumers.

Although these “Big Brother” tactics remain problematic, they reveal the incredible potential for similar data being utilized to better understand the patient experience. Under consensual research circumstances, for example, consider the power of a patient voice recording compared to a written response from a survey or questionnaire. Skeptical of the inputs? Go ask Alexa.

Imagine patients sharing their thoughts and feelings about their experience with a disease state or treatment from their own smartphones. Not only does a voice recording contain 100x or more data than the written word, but no data is lost or filtered during the input process. The data is also acquired conveniently and efficiently, and in a manner that can seamlessly scale to need.

Unlike eye-tracking widgets, heat mapping, and other emerging yet gimmicky technologies, asynchronous telephony-based voice recognition enables low friction, high speed data collection on any device. The digitized input becomes a window to the heart and soul of your patients, potentially revealing the essence of their experience with the right data processing.

Step 2: The Digitization of Data Processing

Aftermarket research data is acquired, whether in alphanumeric form from a survey or as a multivariate input from an observational study, the information must be processed. For quantitative research, where by nature the amount of data is relatively large and the analysis is statistical, the sophisticated application of mathematical algorithms is usually involved.

For qualitative research, data processing can be more subjective and ad hoc. One of the many perceived benefits and possible weaknesses of qual is this “human touch,” where experienced researchers collect the data and correlate it with similar inputs from analogous scenarios. In either case, the research is only as good as the processing remains objective and accurate.

Given these differences between quant and qual data processing, brands again feel that certain trade-offs are necessary: mountains of information from quant surveys are anonymized and statistically processed for generalized insights about the patient experience, while more dimensional, deeper data sets from smaller samples in qual might deviate from broader norms.

Innovative digital technologies can again come to the rescue: Imagine a platform that combines human (linguistic) analysis with an AI-powered processing interface that utilizes machine learning tools. Such a hybrid approach can reveal vital patient attitudinal insights from deep biometric voice data otherwise lost or never inputted in the first place through mere surveys.

By layering advanced sentiment analysis on top of transcribed textual responses, dimensions of additional emotional detail, subtle nuance, and behavioral indicators become transparent. While survey responses or observational feedback might communicate the what and how of the patient experience, emotional insights reveal the resonant why behind patient behaviors.

All too often, the data processing step of market research is ignored or considered a “black box” sandwiched between traditional inputs and outputs. A combination of sophisticated software and human-powered analytics can bridge the gap between signal and noise to extract patient experience insights precisely tailored to reveal underlying needs and fulfill unmet expectations.

Market research can input the best data and process it with accuracy and finesse, but if the insights are incomprehensible or confusing then the entire effort is for naught. The whole point of such research is to better understand and hopefully improve the patient experience; to do so, brands need not only receive intelligible insights, but simple and prescriptive recommendations.

Big tech again leads the way, having developed dynamic dashboards for their customers. From Google Adwords and Analytics to Tableau to Microsoft Azure, the presentation of data results in a visual, intuitive, and compelling way is the hallmark of digital supremacy. Gone are the days of generic PowerPoint slides of bar graphs and pie charts, as digital storytelling takes the prize.

Unfortunately, most quant and qual outputs demand significant attention and effort from the marketing team. Not only should the results be intuitive and straightforward, but key findings and recommendations must resonate and be impactful. Insights, however broad or detailed, must ultimately lead to specific action. Brands want the why, but they really need the what next?

Yet another advantage of biometric data as input is layered, dimensional output. Otherwise, it’s garbage in, garbage out. Processed voice data, to continue our tech example, lends itself well to a dynamic dashboard with insights that drive prescriptive action: from study design to endpoints to a lexicon, emotional connection is arguably one of the best indicators of future behaviors.

Megabytes of actionable intelligence across multiple modalities also lends itself to sophisticated digital features, including advanced search, audiogram creation, and listening studios. Being able to play source files instantly connects brands back to the raw input; hearing the subjects speaking for themselves infuses the output with transparency, credibility, and patient passion.

“Without data,” W. Edwards Deming once notoriously said, “you’re just another person with an opinion.” And without a visual, intuitive, and KPI-driven dynamic interface, your brand is lost at sea regarding how patients feel about their condition and its treatment – and the steps you need to take to ensure their voices are heard, their needs met, and their expectations exceeded.

Getting to the core of the patient experience through custom-designed market research is a winning strategy. Adept brand stewards identify research opportunities across functional teams and the product life cycle, from clinical trials and R&D to primary and health economics and outcomes research, et al. Tailored combinations of quant and qual are the industry staples.

But what if your quant study suggests insights that need a further evaluation? Or your qual observational project reveals anomalies that need to be tested? The current gap in market research capability is a service that scales as fluidly and rapidly as quant, while offering the depth and dimensionality of a thorough qual. You need agility, but with the extra firepower.

Although privacy and other ethical concerns continue to plague big tech, many of their proven innovations for understanding the customer experience are capable of responsibly transforming market research. These include voice recognition, AI and machine learning, and dynamic dashboards that can take both quant and qual to a whole new level with a bold third option.

Ideal use for such capabilities to better understand the patient experience include situations where patient recruitment is time-consuming or tricky; additional research depth is required with minimal ramp-up time; campaign stimuli need testing during the creative development cycle, and any other research scenarios where quant may fall short in-depth, and qual in breadth.

Innovation springs from creativity thrown at an unmet need. Harnessing the innate power of the patient’s own voice, a fresh approach to market research gives additional flexibility and strength to the arsenal of tools already at a brand’s disposal. Taken together, all healthcare stakeholders can be heard and brands more responsive by embracing the potential of biometrics and data.

“The patient needs an experience,” said Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, “not an explanation.” When done right, market research helps explain what that optimal patient experience should be like, and recommends how brands can assist in creating it. By extracting learnings from big tech and the customer experience, the digitization of market research can bring out the best in each.

Transforming the Patient Experience Through the Digitization of Market Research

While marketing research has evolved over time, we don’t often see new technologies that turn the industry on its ear. The notion of truly listening to your research introduces a way to connect with it on a level as profound as face-to-face discussions. The method is a conversational analysis platform we’ve developed at inVibe, and the results are actionable insights from voice-based customer feedback and the spoken word. Employing an automated interview process that is then analyzed by advanced machine learning and a team of linguistic experts, inVibe adds a unique layer that can supplement, and even replace traditional research methods.

Judi Profant, Director of Medical Affairs for 

, engaged inVibe to recruit 25 physicians for a research project designed to understand the type of guidance physicians prescribed during a particular course of treatment with their patients. One of the key aspects of the methodology that stood out for Profant was the participation level in the research study.

“We didn't want to ask physicians to come to a research facility. We knew that wouldn't happen,” noted Profant. The reduced burden on respondents – enabling them to participate at a convenient time and in a less cumbersome manner equated to significantly improved participation levels. “All 25 physicians responded to every question they were asked,” she added. “Not a single physician participant hung up before the end of the electronic interview. That was really impressive.”

Ultimately, Profant and her team “were able to capture the information of the patient-physician voice and how they spoke to the patient. It was representative of a physician guidance experience in clinical practice.”

a standardized questionnaire wouldn’t capture whether a physician took a collaborative or a directive approach. But in a voice recording it's abundantly clear whether the physician is being directive and giving clear guidance.

Working with inVibe has given us valuable information that we wouldn't have been able to capture otherwise

Listening: The Newest Competitive Research Advantage

Despite the many human-centered models and social listening capabilities, the healthcare industry still struggles to include the voice of the patient. Organizations need methodologies that reduce key barriers to listening – enabling them to create better products and services that deliver greater human value.

inVibe partnered with Rare Patient Voice to solve this challenge. In 2013, inVibe introduced the first-ever Automated Voice Response (AVR) platform to empower patients, caregivers, and physicians to tell their stories anytime, anywhere, and extract insights through linguistic analysis.

The same year, Rare Patient Voice was established to help patients share their experiences with organizations developing products and services.

These two organizations partnered to provide a way for patients to share their voices while delivering sharper insights, streamlining processes, and reducing costs. Working with the Rare Patient Voice patient panel, inVibe deployed their AVR solution to automatically conduct interviews with over 250 patients and caregivers across 15 diverse therapeutic conditions. The questions were designed to inspire people to share deeply personal stories. Here are a few examples:

What are some perceptions about your condition that make you cringe?

What do you wish people wouldn’t say about your condition?

If you could travel back in time and meet the person you were when you were first diagnosed, what advice would you give?

                                       Download the PDF study 

In less than two weeks, inVibe was able to automatically conduct hundreds of interviews and collect thousands of minutes of voice responses to a series of eight unique questions which evoked interesting and useful emotional content. For example:

Speech emotion recognition (SER) algorithms detected acoustic differences across therapeutic areas such as Cystic Fibrosis, Type I Diabetes, and Sickle Cell Anemia, indicating that even in chronic conditions, patients experience varying levels of engagement (

inVibe’s linguistic experts noted meaningful differences in how patients described “How I Feel,” “What I’ve Learned,” and ultimately, “Who I Am.” These subtle patterns in word choices and intonation can help deepen our understanding of the patient experience as well as explain, and even predict behaviors.

In addition to capturing patient’s responses to thought-provoking questions, inVibe's linguistic experts leverage AI to extract powerful insights from the voice data. You can access all the patient stories that were captured at 

inVibe is a full-service voice research company that helps healthcare organizations generate meaningful evidence and gain actionable insights by unlocking the signals in the human voice. 

Rare Patient Voice, LLC provides patients and caregivers an opportunity to voice their opinions through surveys and interviews to improve medical products and services. RPV has over 100,000 patients across 485 different conditions. 

Reducing Barriers to Amplify the Patient Voice

Hearing is Believing

Here at inVibe, we tend to obsess about the importance of storytelling, and we’re particularly passionate about making sure patient voices are heard.

As inVibe’s Director of Research Kathryn Ticknor noted in 

PharmaVOICE’s 2nd annual Patient Perspectives edition

, “patient stories may be among the most powerful tools for fostering patient-centricity — as well as the most easily misunderstood. In a world where big data is king, we can be quick to dismiss storytelling under the label of ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘small sample sizes.’ Yet, as human beings, we are hardwired to respond to narratives at a deeper emotional level than we ever could to a series of numbers.”

And what exactly is behind that hardwiring? What makes stories so sticky?

The power of storytelling comes from its inherently 

 nature. In healthcare, this is in stark contrast to the 

 dynamics of the intake form, exam room, or satisfaction survey. Storytelling is rooted in a uniquely human format that encourages patients and caregivers who may not be fluent in “medicalese” to participate and share more fully and authentically than they otherwise might.

Stories also stick because our brain is built to learn by 

. Humans process emotional stimuli first and foremost through the auditory system. As a result, we react to the 

 faster and more empathetically than we do to written text. Without these cues, the challenges of decoding and correctly understanding natural language multiply — as do the potential traps for brand decision-making. As researchers and marketers strive to be more patient-centric, it is vitally important to move beyond just hearing 

 it is said. In many ways, listening becomes the “System 1” of emotional analytics — helping us to quickly understand a speaker’s intention, mood, and attitude at a deeply human level. By taking time to listen to patient stories, we move from “anecdotal evidence” to a framework for empathy and understanding.

 to find out how inVibe can help you listen better.

The Power of Patient Storytelling

inVibe fielded a mixed-methods survey asking physicians to answer the same set of three questions.

Two sets of responses were recorded from each physician:

First, open-ended, written responses followed by voice recorded, qualitative responses – allowing for fluid, authentic, and more comprehensive captures of respondents’ attitudes, sentiment, and experiences.

When comparing the written responses to the audio transcripts of the voice responses, we found that Gastroenterologists have a lot more to say about etrolizumab and the treatment of ulcerative colitis (UC), using on average over four times more words per response when speaking than they are when writing.

While Gastroenterologists’ written responses express positivity toward etrolizumab and the general prospect of another biologic option for UC – especially with a novel MOA – their spoken responses reveal a more complex and richly detailed view of their awareness, attitudes toward etrolizumab’s potential role and use, and their own treatment decision- making behaviors.

Insights from the voice recordings include Gastroenterologists’ verbal focus on the benefits of etrolizumab’s “gut action,” some hope for first line biologic use, the attractive convenience of subcutaneous administration, andthat vedolizumab adoption may already influence the perception and future use of etrolizumab.

Q: Have you heard about a treatment in development for UC called etrolizumab? It’s a humanized IgG1 MAb targeting the beta 7 integrin subunit that’s currently in phase 3 trials. What have you heard and what are your overall thoughts on this potential new treatment?

Q: If etrolizumab were available on the market today (with FDA approval), would you prescribe this medication to your patients? Why or why not? And if so, which patient types would be ideal candidates?

Q: What are your overall thoughts on the current treatments available for ulcerative colitis? Which medications do you use and why?

We have shared a teaser of our findings, but what inVibe delivers to its clients is even more informative, interactive, and actionable. Along with a comprehensive strategic report of findings and actionable recommendations, clients also have access to an interactive dashboard, which allows them to listen to the audio responses from each participant, along with AI-powered 

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) analytics.

 Just as the research method we choose dictates the type of results we receive, the type of data we collect dictates the quality and depth of insights.

Physician's Voices vs Written Responses

The Difference a Voice Makes

 into your 2021 business strategy can have several immediate and long-term benefits for your organization. In addition to providing a more efficient, effective, and nuanced primary market research solution, voice research also delivers some unique advantages in a pandemic-plagued world where conferences, relationships, and partnerships have all gone virtual.


So, for 2021, we offer you three unique ways that voice research can help your organization stay connected and get ahead by listening better.

What if you could hear exactly what your customers are thinking about your clinical data, product efficacy, and support services?

 In today's remote environment, where companies' face-to-face interactions have been severed with the people who matter most to their business, it's become increasingly difficult to understand what's going on inside your customers' heads.

inVibe’s automated voice research platform can help you collect and analyze meaningful customer feedback about your organization’s data and its competitors— while also providing an authentic barometer of how customers think and feel.

In the absence of in-person meetings and conferences, voice can also be the bridge you need to make the most out of your remote collaborations with buyers, physicians, and others within the healthcare ecosystem that fuels your business. Analyzing voice responses from your customers can provide you with actionable and meaningful insights that other data collection methods lack. So if you are looking to gather precise and nuanced responses from the people that matter the most, tap into the voice of health.

The best way to predict the future of your business is to take a proactive tracking approach by listening early and often. inVibe's voice research platform can give you unique insights into 

indicators that affect your products’ development, distribution, and consumption and track changes in emotional cues from customers over time.


Standardized, recurrent voice-tracking can provide your company with multidimensional data insights that explain, predict, and analyze your customers' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Early tracking of emotional trends through voice will give your company decision-making confidence while the competition will be second-guessing themselves.

Whether your company is working with internal or external stakeholders, one of the primary benefits of voice research is that it is 

. Voice breaks through the barriers of complex healthcare ecosystems and helps companies extract the most value out of their relationships with customers 

Advocates, patients, physicians, caregivers, sales teams, advisors, employees, and anyone with crucial insights about your company and products can help you supplement your data with their voice feedback, either on-demand or throughout the year. Voice is new, fresh, and human — and it opens the pathways for companies to rapidly and efficiently tap into their internal and external brain trust. When you listen to what makes those close to your company excited or concerned, you position yourself to be a part of their story and learn what needs your organization can meet before anyone else does.

inVibe's voice-powered market research platform helps life science companies capture deep, emotional insights by leveraging linguistic experts and artificial intelligence to measure message resonance, test creative campaign concepts, and map customers' lexicon landscape — helping inform communication at all stages of the product life cycle.

It's time to kick-off 2021. It's time to rethink how we connect with all those that matter to us. 

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 3 Things You Can Start Doing Now 

Voice Research

With the year that many felt would never end finally drawing to a close, pundits from all industries will pounce on the opportunity to make obligatory pronouncements intended to tie the year up with a bow, designed to lure readers from hyperbole-rich headlines to underwhelming narratives in an effort to try to end a bleak 2020 on a high note.

However, I do stand by the proclamation in the headline. This was indeed 

, but not because there are now over 4.2 billion digital 

-assistants in the world, or because almost 160 million people made sure their 

 were heard in the 2020 presidential election — but because now, more than ever before, 

. People need to believe that what they think and say matters. People want to know that institutions, the government, politicians, their friends, colleagues, companies, and brands are listening to them. After all, it’s their voice that connects them to the world.

But if no one is listening, does our voice really matter

? Would Shakespeare’s Macbeth be right in saying that our life is nothing more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? I beg to differ. Because if our life is indeed 

, be it a furious scream or a faint sigh, then it does indeed have great significance. Not because I say it does, but because the moment you hear those utterances emanate from a fellow human being, your heart and mind sync up with theirs, and you are able to feel them greatly and understand them deeply. The human voice has the power to connect us, inspire us, heal us, and transform us.

I have personally seen the profound significance of voice in the seven years since founding 

. By listening to thousands of hours of patient and physician voices and extracting insights from their responses, I have learned how much 

 we say them. This year, in particular, has really underscored this point for all of us.

This year we also heard more clients wanting to listen to the voice of their customers 

. We heard patients and physicians wanting to share more than they ever have, talk for longer periods of time, divulge more intimate insights, and reveal deeper truths about themselves. This year we saw the demand for 

 grow exponentially, spilling beyond standard primary research solutions and into an entirely new world of voice applications. This included peer-to-peer physician portals, rare disease patient communities, and advocacy insight platforms. To keep up with the demand, we grew our staff by 50% and doubled-down our investments in advanced machine learning analytics, clinical-grade voice diagnostics, and linguistic talent that is helping us develop entirely new products and platforms.

2020 has brought us a world of struggle and suffering: for individuals, communities, and companies. Yet through it all, the people’s voice has been an indispensable bastion of progress, a sign of our survival, and a battle cry of equal rights. Perhaps it’s too soon to prognosticate, but I believe 2021 will finally be the year where we open up to the importance of 

 — not just to what is being said, but also to 

 it’s being said. To that end, if you are one of the many organizations looking to recoup the losses of 2020 and setting your organization up for a transformational 2021, I humbly submit this advice: 

A Letter From inVibe’s Founder, Fabio Gratton

The Year of Voice

A few weeks ago, inVibe Labs’ Head of Listening Beth Baldys had the amazing opportunity to present with Tiffani Shovlin from Taiho Oncology at Intellus Worldwide Virtual Summit 2020. In alignment with the conference themes of using new methodologies to better understand and empathize with physicians and patients, the duo co-presented a recent case study where inVibe’s voice research platform was used to do just that.

, inVibe shared how they combined their novel voice-response technology with advanced linguistic analysis tools to help better understand and predict future behaviors of Taiho’s key stakeholders.

When Taiho decided to embark on this research with inVibe, they were preparing for a new product launch, which promised to be an oral treatment for a rare hematologic condition where the only available options to patients involved infusions that were administered five or seven days in a row every month.

“If I had used traditional methodologies to garner healthcare professionals’ perspectives on the product profile,” Tiffani explained, “I would have only heard very clinical responses that focused on the efficacy metrics and adverse event profile.” Instead, she wanted to get better answers to more complex questions, like ‘

What would drive product adoption usage from all stakeholders

How would healthcare professionals perceive the product’s potential quality of life benefits

and do those differ between physicians and nurses

What emotions played the biggest role in their decision-making process

novel automated voice-response interview methodology

, inVibe captured nurses and hematologists sharing their reactions to the product profile — which varied greatly between the two audiences. The acoustic and lexical analysis revealed that nurses had a heightened understanding of and empathy towards the patients’ emotional experience, and as such, they favored the new treatment for more than just its efficacy profile. 

 they said it revealed that they strongly valued the freedom and psychological impact the therapy could have on the patients’ quality of life.

On the other hand, hematologists didn’t appreciate the emotional benefits of the treatment as much and instead focused on its presumed efficacy. Accordingly, their responses showed less lexical and acoustic enthusiasm for the new product. This was also driven by the lower value they placed on the product’s quality of life impact.

All of these findings (and many more) translated into important actionable strategies that the team utilized to prepare for their launch.

Assessing the Market Opportunity for a New Rare Cancer Treatment by Uncovering Linguistic and Emotional Reactions from Hematologists and Nurses

Using Speech Emotion Recognition in Market Research (Case Study)

on June 2020 by Beth Baldys and Tiffani Shovlin.

Can the way healthcare professionals speak reveal their attitude about specific medical treatments?

What if you could evaluate the market opportunity for a rare cancer treatment by decoding the acoustic and linguistic data from hematologists and nurses to understand how they truly feel about an upcoming cancer treatment?

Well, you actually can. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to 

 as they explain how inVibe helped Taiho get rich insights from stakeholders by leveraging their deep listening voice research platform.

 and tap into the world’s top language experts and the industry’s most advanced speech emotion recognition algorithm to get actionable linguistics insights from the spoken word.

Case Study (Recorded Webcast): “Assessing the Market Opportunity for a New Rare Cancer Treatment by Uncovering Linguistic and Emotional Reactions from Hematologists and Nurses"

One of the most valuable tools organizations possess for discussing, developing, and advancing ideas is the good old fashioned workshop. This is where companies bring together multiple stakeholders — internal or external — often in a physical location craftily designed to foster open and rapid idea exchange for dynamic discussions and breakouts that oftentimes span hours, if not days.

So while it’s all but certain that such in-person gatherings will be 

 for the foreseeable future, the critical think-tanking activities businesses use to generate ideas, solve problems, and achieve consensus 

. In fact, one might argue, they are needed now more than ever before.

Participants, guided by a virtual moderator, can review content, digest relevant information, and voice their opinions by simply pressing record and talking.

For years, inVibe has been helping organizations reimagine how they listen to their customers through its voice research platform, enabling healthcare companies to seamlessly and asynchronously share stimuli with physicians, patients, and caregivers and then collect their perspectives through a series of automated interviews guided by virtual moderators.

Essentially, inVibe streamlines the oftentimes tedious, resource-intensive, and logistically-complex task of conducting qualitative interviews so that companies can collect insights from dozens, if not hundreds of participants, in a fraction of the time.

All of the responses are aggregated, transcribed, and made available within hours via an interactive dashboard that offers a powerful search tool to help easily organize the unstructured qualitative data.


So now, in light of the current environment that has forced most activities to go “virtual,” we’ve taken out the ol’ hammer and anvil and given new shape to our tried and true market research instrument. Now companies can use 

 to asynchronously collect insights from internal teams, external partners, advocacy groups, patients, caregivers, physicians, KOLs, and other advisors — before, during, and after “live” meetings.

With inVibe, getting input from your team or advisors is as easy as sending out a link to a password-protected portal where participants, guided by a virtual moderator, can review content, digest relevant information, and have ample time to contemplate a thoughtful response — before simply pressing the record button to voice their opinions.

So whether you want to collect insights from 5 team members, 20 advisors, or 100 members of the global field force, inVibe is here to help.

. We can get you up and running in just a few days.

Reimagining the In-Person Workshop

Medical conferences are starting to go virtual — virtual exhibits, virtual sessions, virtual abstracts, and even virtual happy hours. But one thing that’s virtually impossible to virtualize is understanding what physicians are 

 at a virtual conference without real-world interactions.

But just because you can’t see the emotions on your customers’ faces, doesn’t mean you can’t measure what they’re feeling. At inVibe, we’ve created a 

frictionless qualitative research solution

 that enables companies to understand what their customers are thinking at virtual events simply by listening to what they’re saying.

Analysis of Phase 3 Study Results one year prior to drug approval revealed an extremely high level of interest and excitement by physicians about the product. Twelve months later, first-quarter sales of the approved product were over $215 million for Roche/Genentech.

, inVibe can help you generate meaningful evidence and gain actionable insights by unlocking the signals in the human voice. Here’s how inVibe can help in a virtual conference world:

Gather feedback from physicians on various abstracts shared at a conference

Analyze language to understand exactly what physicians are excited or disappointed about

Measure confidence in physicians when speaking about data presented based on proprietary speech emotion recognition technology

 so we can help you capture, analyze, and understand the real voice of customers in real-time to help inform decisions that matter most to you.

Virtual Conferences. Real Insights.

. And yet, we’re taught to believe emotions are highly 

: Good things make us happy. Bad things make us angry. Scary things make us afraid. Straightforward, right?

So, it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that, as the coronavirus spread throughout the U.S. between January and March — bringing with it increasing levels of illness, death and financial hardship — our speech emotion recognition tools would detect steadily-rising levels of 

Instead, the current crisis triggered some to panic, others to fume, and more than a few to scoff. To make matters more complicated, our analysis revealed not only a 

Which begs the question: why is it that a single, shared global experience such as COVID-19 creates such a diverse spectrum of emotional responses?

 By organizing the people, objects, and ideas that exist around us, we simplify our understanding of the world so that we can more effectively and efficiently grapple with it. Our experiences are processed in similar fashion. When faced with a novel situation, people subconsciously scan their memories for the closest 

The problem, of course, is that most of us have never experienced 

 the current COVID-19 crisis. This novelty throws a significant wrench into our brain’s ability to readily retrieve emotions from its well-categorized index of past experiences. Instead, our brains enter a near-continuous state of “recalculating” — shuffling through multiple past experiences and emotions as it attempts to process the ever-evolving barrage of new information.

"It's Reminding Me of a Plague from the 15th Century."

inVibe’s COVID-19 Voice Tracker research

, we observed respondents actively trying to anchor the coronavirus to anything that was remotely recognizable or relatable. Early on, many people compared and contrasted COVID-19 to the seasonal flu, describing its symptoms either as “worse than” or “not as bad.” Over time, comparisons to other outbreaks began to surface (e.g., H1N1, HIV/AIDs, Ebola, etc.) yet these did not necessarily correlate with an increase in fear, as one might expect. These “reference events” were oftentimes highly dependent on the respondent’s personal association with those experiences.

inVibe’s speech emotion recognition (SER) analysis of research participants’ voice responses plots their emotional reactions on a two-dimensional Valence/Activation chart, where valence represents an individual respondent’s relative “positivity” or “negativity” toward the topic being discussed.

As mentioned earlier, emotion is not a static state. In fact, as the coronavirus has become less and less “novel,” we are able to measure an increased 

 in the emotional reactions individuals exhibit over time. Their language reveals 

 being taken, rather than hesitant or mixed emotions. In addition, opinions expressed previously were frequently reflected upon with mild embarrassment as 

How Longitudinal Voice Tracking Studies Can Help Organizations

Longitudinal Voice Tracking studies allow us to more precisely interpret an individual’s changing landscape of emotional reactions based on both the 

 of the experience. By more precisely understanding how these emotions evolve, organizations can better tailor their communications and interventions over time.

Researchers have come to realize that emotions are primary drivers of behavior, yet there is still a limited understanding of how or why. Social scientists call this the “hot-cold empathy gap”: our tendency to 

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