Changing behaviour: Expanding the market for a hospital antibiotic by discovering early use opportunities
Problem context
We encounter multiple situations in medicine where drugs, therapies or devices are saved as a ‘last resort’ despite the fact that early use could improve patient outcomes. Often, this is not a well considered treatment decision made for specific patients, but is instead based on a broader heuristic such as ‘saving the best for last’.
Our client had developed a pioneering new drug for the treatment of highly resistant hospital infections and came to Insight Dojo for help in positioning this product in Europefor appropriate early use.
Our approach
We deployed a multi-staged approach.
The following approach was taken:
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Iterative qualitative insights with over 70 physicians including Infectious Disease Specialists, ICU specialists, Microbiologists, Haematologist-oncologists, and Pulmonologists across EU5 countries to understand the patient journey, treatment algorithms, develop hypotheses for early use opportunities and a potential physician and hospital segmentation
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Quantitative research and the application of machine learning algorithms with 250 physicians to validate the segmentations and size the opportunities
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Multiple co-creation workshops with the client throughout the course of the project
As infection control is a complex area with multiple stakeholders, protocols, high stakes, and low information, we employed a variety of techniques to understand decision making and uncover the specific unmet need that the client’s antibiotic could address. This included simulating ‘real-life’ patient scenarios in the interviews, conducting ‘mini-groups’ with stakeholders of different roles from the same hospital to understand in-team dynamics, and using the MouseTracker, a means of tracking mouse movements, to reveal mental dynamics and implicit associations.
These techniques helped us to develop the hypotheses on ‘hot states’ (times along the patient journey where physicians felt an unmet need for a new treatment) and on segmentation inputs. These were then sized at the quantitative stage.
Insights and Impact
Our solution to encourage appropriate early use had four components:
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Recognising the ‘hot states’ early in the patient journey. We identified pre-existing situations early in the patient journey where physicians have sub-optimal treatment options, and have an unmet need for a new antibiotic (e.g., when encountering a difficult pathogen).
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Identifying ‘on-the-ground’ change leaders. In the complex and highly protocolised area of antibiotic treatment, not all physicians are equal in their ability to recognise the ‘hot states’ and use new antibiotics appropriately . We identified two early adopting and influential segments physicians with very different profiles and needs
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Identifying hospitals that were best set up to facilitate use. We found that hospital factors such as size, diagnostic testing equipment and recent adoption of other new antibiotics determined whether a hospital is likely to adopt and use our client’s product.
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Mappingthe strengths of the product to fit physicians’ real unmet needs. The client’s product had several clear objective strengths (e.g., high tolerability) over competitor products. However, we uncovered that these factors were not always a clear driver for choice of the drug. We ensured the products strengths were linked to a clear benefit for the physician in each ‘hot state’
Based on our insights, the client had a clear direction on the opportunities to pursue and how to target physicians and hospital for maximum effectiveness. The physician segmentation specifically formed the basis of their messaging and helped to structure an adoption ladder that is being used for customer engagement planning.
