Top 3 challenges in pharmaceutical and healthcare market research

Market Logic Team

What if you could significantly reduce the time it takes to go from healthcare market research to actionable insights for your decision makers?

As an insights expert in the healthcare and pharmaceuticals industry, you know how time-consuming healthcare market research is compared to market research in other industries.

You’re navigating complex, stringent pharmacovigilance and regulatory compliance processes that can become unwieldy, especially when a product hits the market. Combine that with continual changes in the regulatory landscape, and you’ve got significant time-spend dragging on your insights.

In this article, we talk about the top challenges insights professionals face when it comes to market research in pharmaceuticals and healthcare industries. We offer some solutions that focus on streamlined research management processes, repeatable and scalable workflows, and agile insights technology, so you can increase insights-to-decision speed while staying 100% compliant.

Top challenges insights professionals face in healthcare market research

Challenge 1: Pharmacovigilance & government regulations

Compliance with pharmacovigilance regulations can feel a bit like shooting at a moving target, except much more complicated.

Evolving international and national requirements and growing data volumes and sources can make reviews, approvals, and reporting so complicated and unmanageable, insights teams end up facing a number of hurdles:

Delays in reviews, approvals, and reporting slow your products’ time-to-market.

Excess process overhead drags on your projects and the actionability of your insights.

Complex workflows make it hard to see the real-time status of your compliance.

In the end, it prevents quick, competitive business decisions that get your amazing medicines and healthcare products to those who need them.

Challenge 2: Complex workflows

Because the healthcare and pharma sector are so highly regulated, your organization’s insights teams end up with complicated research workflows that can become chaotic across teams, business units, regions, countries, and products.

For example, primary market research with physicians and patients requires multiple levels of approval with important considerations like adverse event reporting, pharmacovigilance third party due diligence, and ethical and privacy protocols.

So, even before research starts insights teams in the healthcare and pharmaceuticals sector face challenges other sectors don’t:

Lengthy research approval times that can take weeks to months before primary research can get started.

Arduous manual documentation insights teams often must complete manually.

Postponed time-to-market due to cumbersome workflows.

Once research is approved, your team must continuously document all your market research activities and report to different agencies and authorities in countries where you conduct research or promote your healthcare and pharmaceutical products.

With workflows so complicated, pharma market research can become increasingly chaotic and difficult to manage.

Challenge 3: Research & knowledge management

Your team’s insights are critical to the success of the business. You’re the voice of your customers—the patients, doctors, and healthcare professionals who rely on your products to meet their needs.

You want your insights to reflect the true voice of the customer, framed in the right context, so your stakeholders can make good customer-centric business decisions that remain compliant with regulations.

The problem is, your organization has an enormous (and growing) amount of internal and external knowledge about how your customers feel about your products, their ailments, and the environment, so it becomes difficult to synthesize and connect the dots in an understandable way for your stakeholders.

Insights teams at large, multinational healthcare firms face common healthcare research and knowledge management stumbling blocks, like:

Research duplication because there’s no easy way to search the organization’s knowledge to see what’s been studied before.

Time-consuming knowledge synthesis because all your structured and unstructured data sources live on different platforms.

Lost insights—your teams’ insights reports end up buried in inboxes and hard drives because you don’t have a centralized place for people to find past insights.

Solution: Automated, compliant healthcare market research alongside end-to-end knowledge management

Pharmacovigilance and government regulations is the critical thread that runs through all your market research and insights efforts in the healthcare industry. It represents one of your biggest challenges.

One way to overcome market research challenges is by leveraging technology to implement a repeatable, scalable, and robust research and knowledge management processes.

You need agile workflows and checkpoints that standardize your market research and insights management activities, so the steps are always clear and you’re always compliant in the countries you conduct market research in.

When you bring insights management, research management, and regulatory compliance automation altogether under a single platform, you’ll see several benefits:

Quick access to expert multidisciplinary knowledge because all your knowledge assets are searchable in one, centralized place.

Reduced research spending because you can quickly search and see what your organization already knows and prevent duplicate research.

Faster project completion times because automated workflows streamline approvals and project tasks.

Your solution is to leverage an insights platform with features specifically built for pharmaceuticals and healthcare insights teams.

The Market Logic solution: A insights platform and approval engine made for pharmaceuticals and healthcare

Market logic is the only insights platform on the market that connects you to all your knowledge assets while also meeting regulatory compliance criteria.

With our insights platform, you can increase your speed-to-insights with enhanced healthcare research management and insights engagement, all while staying 100% compliant.

Along with our insights platform’s sophisticated solutions in data and knowledge capture, insights development, and business engagement, we’ve developed a series of features to support compliance, collaboration, and reporting processes typical for the pharmaceuticals and healthcare industry.

Approval engine and approval reminders. Build-in various approvals (medical, legal, procurement, etc.) that trigger approval steps when certain conditions from your project workflow are met. You can automatically assign experts to approve content based on conditions (e.g., countries) and automatically remind approvers, vendors, and internal team members when inputs are due (or overdue).

Project milestones and reminders. Define a standard set of tasks and milestones for your projects, and streamline and manage your research projects so the outcomes are clear and you stay compliant.

Personal and team activities inbox. Use your customizable project inbox to monitor all yours and your team’s market research activities in one place. Approvers also have their own personal approval request inbox.

Scheduled automatic exports. Save time by scheduling automatic and recurring exports of your market research activity for compliance reporting.

Research vendor performance reports. Gather quantitative and qualitative feedback on your vendors’ performance and export performance reports to empower your insights and procurement teams.

By leveraging technology that connects all your knowledge assets and insights with automated healthcare market research management, you can make customer-centric, 100% compliant decisions.

Learn more about our Market Logic-powered insights solution for pharmaceuticals and healthcare sectors. Or book a demo for an inside look.