Understanding 'Natural Language'

Our Client had a pipeline oncology drug with some atypical side effects. They were unsure how important these effects would be to prescribers compared with other side effects from existing cancer drugs.

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The key to preparing our client for their market was to identify how physicians would describe the side effects to patients--and if they would mention them at all.

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Our client also needed to know the order in which physicians would present these atypical side effects in presentations to patients. Would physicians sequence the possible side effects based on their disruptiveness, likelihood of occurrence, or likelihood of interrupting treatment? No one knew.

Traditional approaches to this kind of problem are abstract (and a bit lame), with moderators asking docs, "How would you describe this side effect to one of your patients?" These usual approaches often lead to overgeneralized answers that fail to take individual patient traits into account. Those approaches couldn't tell our client what would happen in real-world interactions.

Our Client had planned ahead and developed a number of internal patient profiles. Working from these, we built a methodology exposing each oncologist to professional actors who had been trained to play metastatic cancer patients with very specific individual stories.

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• Each "character" was devised to have a unique level of education, extent of disease, number of prior drug regimens, number of dependents, etc.

• Each also had a unique set of personal priorities, e.g., ability to spend time being physically active, living until a child's graduation, not having side effects that interfered with cognition.

• We trained actors from local theater companies in four US cities (and later in EU markets) and worked to prepare them for their "roles."

• Physicians first did an upfront interview section with a moderator, then consulted with two actor-patients, and ended with a moderator debrief. These debriefs proved transformative, providing a context for each physician's behavior in the simulated patient encounters.

The oncologists loved having someone to react to, rather than something, and dove into the exercise with gusto. Without any prompting, they were customizing how they educated each patient about all of the available treatment options.

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The client was able to see stark contrasts in how physicians described each of the treatments, which side effects they mentioned, and whether they actually presented all available options (as they had initially claimed to) or narrowed the selection to one or two treatments that they felt were the "right fit."

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The data were compelling, though they were at odds with what the client's team expected. Armed with knowledge of how physicians would present their new oncology drug's side effects, our client was able to revise and improve their approach before the drug's launch.