How do patients master everyday life with their ailments? How are they doing with their treatment? What things are going well, and where are they facing challenges? What should support and information services look like in order to be of actual added value for the patients? Produkt + Markt has developed the online discussion forum IN|SPIARY, a tool aimed at focusing on patient centricity in healthcare research. IN|SPIARY provides you with authentic and insightful answers to these questions, bringing you much closer the patient.

How IN|SPIARY works

IN|SPIARY is a closed online community, which is individually set up by Produkt + Markt for certain projects and is usually limited to a time period of e.g. two weeks. Our experienced employees moderate the community for the duration of the project. Community participants are carefully selected according to indication and demography and include real patients from all over Germany, but also doctors, physicians as well as other healthcare professionals. Usually there are 15 to 20 highly motivated participants who discuss different issues and complete various tasks on the platform following an individually defined schedule.

For patients, for example, this may include documenting their daily routine with the disease, evaluating new possible services offered by pharmaceutical companies, or jointly brainstorming new concepts. Due to the use of photos, videos, or audio files, patients are hardly ever limited in their creativity, thus providing us with preferably comprehensive and realistic insights into their everyday lives. Quantitative elements such as short surveys may be integrated additionally as well.

Your benefits

Thanks to a rather long implementation period, patients are able to immerse themselves in the respective topic and intensively concentrate on the questions. In addition, there is usually a lively exchange between the participants right from the start; they often grow together like a “little family” and solve their tasks with a lot of commitment, fun and creativity. These group dynamics may be particularly useful to generate ideas, but also to test and optimise existing ideas.

Any time, our moderators are always able to react to contributions by the participants, to cut actively into the discussion and to control it when necessary. As our customer you can directly observe the activity in the community and even become active yourself. Would you like an interesting aspect to be discussed in more detail? Would you like to give new food for thought or do you need an evaluation of an idea developed on the basis of patient feedback? No problem with IN|SPIARY.

In comparison to group discussions, online communities have the advantage that the participants actually have time to think about their answers. Due to this fact we usually achieve a very high response quality. In addition, the purely virtual exchange actually minimises social desirability and peer pressure. As a result, we receive very open and honest answers to rather sensitive issues as well.

Nevertheless, IN|SPIARY is not limited to exchanging ideas as a group: moderators can also communicate specifically with individual participants and are therefore able to explore interesting topics in depth just like in an individual interview. This way we reveal the patients’ experiences, attitudes, and needs for you, so that you can best respond to them with your products.

With IN|SPIARY you can:

• immerse yourself in the daily lives and environment of your target group and experience authentic, inspiring insights
• control the discussion according to your needs
• test existing ideas or have the community develop new ones and benefit from the participants’ great creativity.