Identify Key Opinion Leaders in your therapeutic area. The most important factors in identifying KOLS include reputation, level of expertise, and existing knowledge about your products. Map KOLs in specific therapeutic area by geography using social profiles data and key online posts.
HCPs have become highly active on various online channels. They use these mediums to share their insights and learnings across various topics such as new findings in a specific therapeutic area, the advent of new technologies for diagnosis, research reports, and new data about drug efficacy and safety.
Internet penetration has led to a steady increase in the amount of data published by HCPs. The graph below shows that the citations on MEDLINE and PubMed have been increasing year on year.
The presence of HCPs online facilitates tracking of their research and enables us to build a database of HCPs across therapeutic areas while allowing for real-time updates.
A key opinion leader (KOL) is a respected influencer with proven expertise in a particular field. They are considered thought leaders in their respective fields. In the domain of healthcare, physicians or researchers with prominent experience who frequently publish or share their studies are considered as KOLs.
KOLs are at the forefront of new research in their field, and following them will help pharma companies stay abreast with new studies, drugs, and treatment methods.
Identifying KOLs from HCPs might seem pretty straightforward, but this involves harvesting large amounts of data across multiple data sources and then cleaning them to identify the right KOLs based on various attributes.
SetuServ approach to identifying KOL data
A comprehensive KOL database is built from the list of all HCPs with a digital presence in a Therapeutic Area. The database contains rich data points that are harvested from multiple public and private data sources. The data points include attributes such as:
No. of citations for their articles
The harvested data can be further scored basing the attributes to prioritize KOLs as per the requirement.
Pharma companies can use this list of HCPs to identify the KOLs across therapeutics areas. In addition, KOLs play a significant role in affecting the prescribing decisions made by other HCPs as their opinions and feedback carry a high degree of trust among the peer group. Therefore, identifying these KOLs and nurturing relationships with them will help pharma companies establish credibility and connect with the right HCPs who are similar and impact prescribing decisions.
After identifying KOLs, analyzing their activity on public sources helps unearth deep insights about them and the therapeutic area. But this activity requires scale as a large number of sources are to be mined at regular intervals. This is achieved through SetuServ’s proprietary mining software called as PharmaSignals.
For example, the PharmaSignals platform can identify social media posts of KOLs for a specific drug or a recently published article with the KOL’s citation
