When conducting market research in the healthcare and pharma sectors, you need access to the right information, as well as a way to separate relevant insights from extraneous noise. Maintaining a competitive advantage necessitates being the first to know of regulatory activities, new drug approvals, clinical trial pipelines, disease landscapes, BD&L, and commercialization decisions.
Unfortunately, traditional market research is a largely manual, time-consuming process. It involves toggling between different platforms, parsing through pages and pages of data to find relevant information, and simply reacting to market events rather than taking a proactive approach. This inefficient process results in too much time spent on searching and not enough spent on analysis and strategy. This eventually leads to knowledge gaps and missed opportunities, which makes it very challenging to stay on the leading edge.
However, market research has been evolving over the last decade, and leading companies and investment firms are moving away from outdated, manual methods. Instead, they are turning to a more centralized approach to research and are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help them filter through the noise, inform more confident decision-making, and share market intelligence with their broader organizations.
Below, we dive into some of the top challenges facing knowledge workers when conducting traditional market research in the pharma and healthcare sectors—as well as the solution for each challenge.
Lack of Access to Specialized Knowledge
When conducting market research in the healthcare and pharma sectors, relying on public, unvetted sources available on the web or news outlets is not enough. Instead, you need access to premium, high-quality, differentiated sources that, together, give you a complete picture of the market landscape and help you get the competitive edge.
It’s also critical that the information you are accessing is up to date and reflects current market conditions in addition to historical data. In this industry, innovations, M&A deals, and clinical pipelines can move quickly and have lasting repercussions on the market, which is why you need to always be on top of new developments.
Unfortunately, access to specialized, differentiated insights can be difficult to come by, or it sometimes involves consulting multiple sources and manually toggling between them—a time-consuming and inefficient task.
Solution
AlphaSense is a platform that stands out from the rest because it provides access to premium, specialized insights all in one place. In our platform, you will find:
- Healthcare news, industry reports, company reports, and regulatory content from sources such as PubMed, World Health Organization, MedlinePlus, and FDA
- Over 1,500 research providers including Wall Street Insights®, a premier and exclusive equity research collection for corporate teams (healthcare included)
- Expert call transcript library that offers access to thousands of insightful interviews with doctors, customers, competitors, and industry experts
With AlphaSense, you can conduct better, more efficient market research and get a competitive advantage by relying on insights that you won’t find anywhere else.
Reactive Approach to Research
Historically, market research has been a reactive process—you would learn about an event, a new product, or an M&A deal after the fact, and then scramble to adjust your strategy to maintain a competitive edge. The problem with this approach is that you are unable to get ahead of the trend and end up missing key opportunities.
The much more effective approach is proactive research, but this necessitates having access to qualitative and quantitative data that signals upcoming changes in the market landscape. It also often requires having a way to separate the signal from the noise—dialing into the insights that are actually pertinent without getting bogged down by irrelevant details. Traditional market research, with its manual searching and disparate sources of information, is not enough in today’s world of fast-paced markets and information overload. Proactive research is key in order to get a competitive advantage, mitigate risk, and improve strategy and business outcomes.
Solution
AlphaSense is the one tool you need to take your research from reactive to proactive. Our AI technology understands your needs and recommends critical healthcare data sets, market trends, and emerging companies that are important for you to know before anyone else does. When diving into specific documents, our sentiment analysis feature identifies changes in sentiment in documents like earnings calls, which can signal impending market shifts.
AlphaSense also has real-time monitoring and automation capabilities that keep you informed of any relevant updates to topics, trends, or companies of interest to you. These include automated real-time alerts, customizable dashboards and watchlists, and recommended reads. Finally, AlphaSense is available in mobile app form, allowing you to stay up to date on critical topics, wherever you are.
Siloed Content
Traditional market research in the healthcare and pharma sectors involves manually toggling between different sources of information, with regulatory documents, company documents, news, and other content all found in disparate locations. This inefficient process makes it nearly impossible to get a complete picture of any topic, trend, or company, which in turn makes it highly likely that you will miss relevant information, or fail to see important connections or patterns in the data.
For analysts, not having a centralized platform through which they can access insights means consistently running against access barriers (such as paywalls or privacy restrictions) against the most exclusive and insightful sources, such as broker research or expert call transcripts. This slows down the research process and makes it hard to find differentiated insights.
Solution
AlphaSense is an all-in-one platform that contains the full gamut of data you need for healthcare and pharma research. By having access to company documents, healthcare news, and regulatory information—in addition to premium, proprietary content sets like Wall Street Insights and Expert Insights—all in one place, you can conduct deeper, more efficient market research and ensure you never miss out on a key insight.
Related Reading: Pharmaceutical Insights
Time-Consuming Process
In today’s world of information overload, it’s impossible for research professionals to read through every single data source relevant to a given market research project. Not only are there simply too many sources to parse through, but a single document can take hours to read and dissect—with no payoff guaranteed.
When you rely on manual, fragmented searching, you are looking for a needle in a haystack, not only wasting precious time but reducing the likelihood that you will actually uncover insights that matter. This can lead to hitting a limit on the amount of market research you are humanly able to perform, as well as likely ongoing increases in salary costs for the firm as staffing is scaled to meet research needs.
Solution
AlphaSense provides several advantages in this respect. The centralized platform allows you to get instant access to any and all sources you need for market research. Additionally, AlphaSense offers several advanced AI search features that accelerate and enhance research. Some of the main time-saving features are part of our generative AI (genAI) suite:
This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the content is sourced—combining high accuracy with easy verification. We apply this same technology to our collection of expert calls and broker research.
Our genAI chat experience transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Our chatbot is trained to think like an analyst, so it understands the market research intent behind your natural language queries. Whenever you search for information, our genAI is available to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.
Inefficient Search Experience
When it comes to market research in the healthcare and pharma sectors, public search engines are not enough. Their search results aren’t tailored to unique researcher settings and preferences. Rankings can be arbitrary. Most critical sources don’t show up on Google because they are private company documents.
Sources found on public search engines also require manual sifting (and heavy reliance on CTRL +F) to find keywords or data points rather than those insights being extracted automatically. It’s an impractical method amidst the sheer amount of data researchers encounter, and it’s one that undoubtedly leads to missed insights and incomplete context.
Also, traditional search engines are not built to identify variations in business language or the exact language that is useful for conducting successful market intelligence.
Solution
AlphaSense comes equipped with an AI-powered search engine that is designed to help you quickly extract all the most crucial insights for your research, while filtering out the excess noise. Our search helps ensure you leave no stone unturned and substantially reduces your risk of knowledge gaps.
AlphaSense offers the following AI search features to increase efficiency and enhance quality of research:
This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has the ability to understand both the keyword and search intent behind any of your queries, factoring in search results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for “TAM” will also bring back results on “addressable market” and “market size.” This eliminates the need to manually use CTRL+ F to find specific search results—which is not only time-consuming, but can easily lead to missed insights.
Sentiment analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments.
This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.
As described above, our genAI features Smart Summaries and Generative Search dramatically increase the speed and accuracy of your research by providing instant summarized answers to your market research queries—with citations to the specific snippet of premium content where the answer comes from.
From there, you can easily verify any generated answer, or use the citation to dive deeper into the source and get additional context for better understanding. Overall, these features help you spend less time on searching and more time on analysis and strategy.
Solve Your Market Research Challenges with AlphaSense
AlphaSense can save you hours per project by centralizing the insights you need and delivering them to you with intelligent, AI-based smart search technology. Features like Smart Synonyms™ and sentiment analysis recognize the intent behind your search and zero in on the most important insights contained within each source. Generative AI accelerates your research and helps you to quickly get smart on any topic or company.
Automated alerts and customized watchlists ensure you never miss an update about the companies and topics you care most about. Advanced filtering features help you easily get to the types of content you need for your specific research.
These features and more are why G2 has rated AlphaSense a leader in market intelligence for corporations and financial institutions alike for several years in a row. See for yourself how AlphaSense can transform your research. Start your free trial today.
Content Marketing Specialist
Fueled by empathy-driven storytelling and good coffee, Nicole is a content marketing specialist at AlphaSense. Previously, she has managed her own website/blog and has written guest posts for various other publications.
Read all posts written by Nicole Sheynin
