Why do patients choose, adopt, and adhere?

Today’s guest post comes from Zitter Health Insights.

Zitter describes how patient behavior increasingly affects healthcare spending. In response, Zitter Health Insights now offers Consumer Connect, a market research platform that tracks, stores, and analyzes data entered by thousands of patient panelists.

Read on for some surprising consumer insights on brand selection, costs, and other topics. Or, click here to learn more about Consumer Connect.

Why do patients choose, adopt, and adhere?
By Zitter Health Insights

As patients face increasing pressure to share the cost-burden of their care, the U.S. healthcare market has started looking for ways to become more consumer-oriented. This is a tectonic shift for the biopharmaceutical industry, which was built on driving sales to healthcare professionals and payers.

Driven by the various public and private health insurance exchange environments, high deductible health plans, and flexible spending solutions, consumers are faced with an unprecedented number of ways to make decisions about their care and about the disposition of their healthcare dollars.

Despite this view, we found that accurate information about the deep granular factors that influence patient decision-making in relation to a wide spectrum of healthcare journeys and experiences is essentially unavailable. While transactional data is available, it doesn’t answer the deep granular questions into the ‘Why?’ – why patients choose, adopt, adhere.

Generating insights into the patient journey has been the focus of a project we launched this year. We developed a unique consumer market research platform that tracks, stores, and analyzes data entered by our thousands of patient panelists. Panelists complete frequent, mobile, in-context surveys that coincide with a “healthcare event”—for example, when they’re leaving a doctor’s appointment, using a pharmacy, or taking their medication at home.

We’ve recently learned from our panelists that:

• About 21% of patients ask for a specific brand medication at the doctor; 41% of them learned about the requested drug from online research, friends, or social media

• Showing the power of patients as consumers, in 91% of cases, the patient’s doctor prescribed the requested brand

• Doctors generally bring up the cost of medications first, but the gap is narrowing overall

• About 17% of patients who have an annual household income of $65K-$75K say that the out-of-pocket cost of their medication is “more than expected”

• Although pharmacists discuss a less expensive therapeutic alternative with around 18% of patients with HCV, almost all of them end up purchasing the drug originally prescribed by their doctor

• Patients with an annual household income of $50K-$74K say they are least likely to refill their current chronic medication when it runs out

We believe that this type of exploration into the minds of patients will provide our clients and partners with the power to truly make patients first.

Click here to learn more.