OBSERVANT LLC HEALTH SCHOLARSHIP
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 Ms. Verrocchi receiving her award from Executive VP
Dr. Erik Coats
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NEW OFFICES: BOSTON & LONDON
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We have moved to our new office space at Reservoir Place, 1601 Trapelo Rd. in Waltham, Massachusetts. This new space will allow us to accommodate the firm’s expansion.
For directions please see our website.
London UK Office
We are pleased to announce the establishment of our London corporate office in May this year at Garrick House, 26-27 Southampton Street , London. This expansion of our infrastructure and the addition of our UK-based Director Ms. Penny Mesure will enable us to more effectively and efficiently execute global research. Moving forward, watch this space for exciting European-specific initiatives.
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NEW SENIOR STAFF
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The company is pleased to announce following senior appointments:
 John Hartman, Ph.D., Vice-President:
John is a social scientist and statistician whose research has focused on the analysis of cross-national healthcare data; and his programming work has emphasized how best to present complex relationships to his clients in intuitive and actionable visual forms. See John’s bio.
 Penny Mesure, Director based in the UK:
Penny specializes in the provision of actionable insight to research managers, while working in strategic partnership with C- Suite Executives to help them better understand their ROI from Marketing Budgets. See Penny’s bio.
 Lana Limpert, MA, Director:
Lana has designed, managed, and moderated custom qualitative studies for major pharmaceutical and biotech companies for over a decade. Lana’s qualitative expertise includes emotional mining research, innovative projective techniques, and moderation of sensitive topics. See Lana’s bio.
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NEW PUBLICATIONS AVAILABLE
- Sales Management: The Lesser of Two Evils., an article by Mike Feehan, CEO and Neil Bergquist, Director was published in Pharmaceutical Executive and examines physicians’ fear that prescription-data restrictions might force sales reps to mine for personal info.
- Its Own Reward: The Learning Benefits of Conducting Non-Client Research, an article by Lana Limpert, Director and Mike Walsh, Senior Analyst uses Observant LLC’s independently funded qualitative study with oncologists as a backdrop for an exploration into the benefits of self-funded research projects. Published in QRCA Views.
- A Recursive Regression Approach to Forecasting, With an Analysis of Predictive Failure, an ART conference poster by John Hartman , Vice President; Steven V. Cameron (Columbia University); and Erik Coats , Executive Vice President, described a novel method for analyzing time series such as monthly prescribing data that are commonly purchased by pharmaceutical companies. The new method could be used to improve clients ability to forecast future market share from past prescribing data.
- Going Beyond the Numbers to Measure the Effectiveness of a Pilot Sales Program, a case study, examines a mixed methodology approach to measure the impact of an innovative pilot sales program.
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NOTE FROM THE PARTNERS
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As we grow in staff and expand into new offices, Observant LLC continues to reach out more to the research and industry community. We continue to publish research and healthcare insights through our in-house research program, which we believe contributes to our culture of methodological excellence.
We wish our clients all the best over the summer and look forward to an exciting remainder of the year. |
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RESEARCH COMMENTARY:
Approaches to Pharmaceutical
Choice Models |
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| Choice Models are such a staple of market research that many market research buyers treat them as a commodity—something that any market research firm can do well and so choice of a vendor should be driven by price alone. Yet differences in quality and value emerge in multiple areas, such as selecting the right analytic approach, task burden, data cleaning and selection of most appropriate attributes and levels. Moreover, some suppliers can rely too heavily on “off the shelf” software that does not require or even allow for sufficient customization to specific project parameters and business needs. Below are a few areas that we believe are critical to getting the most out of choice model pharmaceutical research. |
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Selecting the right analytic approach: Physicians prescribing decisions are fundamentally different from other decisions more commonly addressed in market research. In the consumer package good world people are assumed to make a single purchase decision to best meet their personal needs. In contrast, physicians may make different decisions for different patients, taking into consideration layered factors such as managed care availability and likely patient compliance. Therefore analytic approaches derived from CPG and other areas will not always work in the pharmaceutical space |
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Task burden: Consequently, choice tasks can be extremely fatiguing for respondents. Too often decisions about task design are based on more on analytic concerns that respondent-experience concerns. This can result in poor data quality, which no amount of analysis can fix. |
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Data quality: No matter how well designed, inevitably some respondents will speed through the choice task giving poorly considered answers. Identifying and cleaning out such data can significantly improve the quality of findings |
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Selecting attributes and levels:The attributes and levels included in research must align closely with business objectives. But other factors should be taken into consideration, such as whether certain combinations of attribute/levels are illogical or whether the number of levels across attributes is consistent (sometimes adding an extra level helps with modeling, even if the extra data provided is not needed) |
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| As the old carpenter said, ‘mark twice before sawing’ – sophisticated design at the front end considerate of the special needs of the pharmaceutical market will obviate final analytic concerns. |
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Erik Coats Ph.D
Executive Vice President |
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John Hartman Ph.D
Vice President |
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