During a recent client feedback survey interview, a pharmaceutical company executive defined Thought Leader Select’s value in this manner: “We always think we know our physician key opinion leaders in a given therapeutic area. Your company provides immense value not only in validating our KOLs with thorough, objective information on their skills and experiences, but also in pointing out to us that there are other experts out there whom we should be engaging in the development of new medicines.”
A case in point is Thought Leader Select’s recent analysis of a pool of global key opinion leaders in the therapeutic area of infectious diseases for a large, multi-national pharmaceutical company. For the study, the company supplied the names of 32 medical experts they had engaged in Europe and North America and asked Thought Leader Select to profile and compare the skills and experiences of these physicians with those of 23 new thought leaders identified and profiled by Thought Leader Select in those same geographic regions.
The results of the study provided the client company with a better understanding of the skills and experiences of not only their current pool of medical advisors, but those of an expanded pool as well. In the analysis of the new, larger pool of physicians in the areas of development most important to the client, Thought Leader Select enabled the company to engage new teams made up of current and new physicians to advance new medicines to the marketplace.
Thought Leader Select and its client identified the new teams by areas of expertise, clinical practice, publishing, and basic and clinical research. In the categories of areas of expertise and clinical practice, the new pool entailed roughly 40 per cent of the client’s known experts with a fresh influx of 60 per cent identified by Thought Leader Select. In the categories of publishing and research, the results were even more illuminating, with 90 per cent of the top publishing doctors and 80 per cent of the top researchers coming from the new pool identified by Thought Leader Select.
“The key takeaway for our client was that there is real value in what we do,” stated Paul Meade, president and founder of Thought Leader Select. “We started this business on the principal that pharmaceutical company executives should be able to prove that they work with the right doctors for the right reasons. Our work in global infectious disease thought leaders proves that while they were engaging some of the top doctors in the field, there were still many more to include in their critical work to promote new medicines and better public health.”