MedPanel Inc.

MedPanel Inc. is running on-line focus groups of 12 to 15 well-regarded physicians. The panels take place over two weeks, at the doctors' convenience. The start-up says its methodology and analysis can bring pharma companies key insights, cost-effectively.

Bringing doctors' opinions into focus

• 625 Massachusetts Avenue, Suite 5

• Cambridge, MA 02139

• Phone: [phone]

• Fax: [phone]

• E-mail: [email protected]

• Web Site: www.medpanel.com

• Contact:Ian Edgar, director of business development

• Industry Segment:Pharmaceuticals

• Business:Online physician focus groups

• Founded:July 1999

• Founders:William Febbo, Ian Edgar, Phillip Febbo, MD

• Employees:15

• Financing to Date:$1.7 million

Organizing a traditional sort of physician focus group is no easy matter, says Ian Edgar, director of business development at MedPanel Inc. Pharmaceutical marketers who want to delve into doctors' opinions may assign the task to an outside company, or charge internal staffers with finding physicians of a certain type. Coordinating the schedules of a dozen or more busy doctors is tough, and requires arrangements that will entice them to gather—for instance in Boca Raton, Florida, so they can play golf over a weekend. All this effort and expense typically results in a two-hour meeting led by a professional moderator who guides physicians through a discussion about, say, their knowledge of and preferences for various approaches to treating high blood pressure or rheumatoid arthritis. When the honorariums have been paid and the event is all over, the drug company sifts through notes taken during the meeting, to distill the key points.

MedPanel's founders believe the Internet-based methods they are developing can simplify the logistics, increase the speed, and reduce the costs of running physician focus groups, while also increasing the quality of end results. "We work with customers for half an hour by phone, then get back to them within a day with a detailed study proposal and a list of doctors that would fit what they're looking for," Edgar says. Drugmakers can sign off on a proposal put together by "teams of people who design studies for a living" or augment it. Once MedPanel gets the go-ahead, it starts the focus group within a day or two.

Edgar says the company talks to the same sorts of people drugmakers currently want to hear from, only in a different way. The company's approach to gathering input from doctors is something like Lotus Notes, the software package that allows people in various locations to work on a single electronic document essentially simultaneously, but Edgar asserts that MedPanel has a proprietary methodology specifically designed to be easy and "clean" for physicians. "It's a pragmatic tool for the task at hand," he asserts, noting that MedPanel has applied for patents on its business methodology.

The cost to drugmakers is less than for traditional focus groups, even though doctors end up earning more cash for their time. Edgar won't reveal precisely how much physicians are paid to participate in a MedPanel, but says that on a time-spent basis, it's considerably more than the honorariums generally paid for participating in a live session. "If they get paid $1,000 for a two-hour focus group, they also have to spend time getting there. If they work with us, they can make significant income from their living rooms, talking about issues that fascinate them," Edgar says. He says the price of a MedPanelcan run from $5,000-60,000 and that the average cost is about $30,000. "We want it to be very reasonable for companies to do," he adds.

Doctors that agree to participate in a MedPanel—generally about 12-15 are invited at a time—are directed to visit a web site when it's convenient for them to do so, and to answer questions posted there over a period of two weeks. When panelists first come into the discussion, they are told the names of all the doctors taking part. "They like to know who's there—their peers or doctors they respect," Edgar says, claiming that the notification can increase the participation rate due to increased enthusiasm. But no one actually knows who is saying what: the comments are identified only as belonging to Panelist A, B, C and so on, or to the moderator, who is generally one of the panelists, selected by MedPanel or the study sponsor.

Because the discussion groups are Web-based, participants can be anywhere in the world. More important, Edgar says, is the fact that doctors respond in an "asynchronous" way, versus in real time. That's key to contacting the opinion leaders that companies most want to talk to, he believes: top doctors "like to be involved," but don't have much time to fly around to focus groups, even if they wanted to. MedPanel's format addresses that limitation and others, Edgar points out. Conversations can grow richer when they stretch over two weeks instead of two hours, and drugmakers as well as doctors benefit from the flexibility: every day, the sponsor can see the direction of the conversation, and inject questions as needed.

"You'd be surprised how much the panelists write, and it all goes into a report," Edgar declares. Over time, he says doctors come into the discussion with reference materials, and some quote articles they've written. Comments are masked, however, to preserve the anonymity that serves an important purpose: disrupting the hierarchy formation that simply can't be avoided in real life. "Junior-level doctors won't give a hard time to people in senior positions," Edgar notes, and discussions hence tend to be more congenial than candid. But when the identity of a speaker/writer is unknown, he says "little fights break out, and these are of extreme interest to our customers. Biases become pronounced, or they get thrown aside."

MedPanel's first contacts were with leading oncologists and urologists, via the personal connections of co-founder Phillip Febbo, MD, who teaches at Harvard University and is an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute . Soon, the initial group of specialists began recommending MedPanel to colleagues across the US and to specialists in other areas. "Our physicians tend to really love working with us; they end up being sales people, recruiters for us," Edgar declares. Lately the firm has begun hiring people to focus on recruiting physicians based on customer needs, and it is making more of a reach into Europe.

MedPanel's database can be used to match remarkably detailed criteria. For example a MedPanelcan draw into an online focus-group 15 oncologists with specialties in leukemia with specified patient volumes per month or year, from specific leading academic medical centers in London, Texas, and California. Companies getting involved in development, versus marketing, are particularly interested in physicians' previous involvement in clinical trials, Edgar notes, and MedPanel can gauge this experience during the selection process. Some pharma firms tell MedPanel they already know the doctors with whom they'd like to speak and simply want to buy the company's methodology.

MedPanel turns around an entire project, including its analysis of the group's discussion in 21 days—as long as it takes some drug companies just to figure out who to call in the first place, Edgar says. The firm's methodology has other benefits beyond speed, he argues, explaining that drugmakers often appoint a single person to conduct one-on-one phone interviews with physicians, and summarize their responses. If discrepancies turn up, all the participants have to be called back, and one-brain analysis is necessarily limited. With MedPanel's approach, "not only are the customer and our team making an analysis as the process unfolds, but all of the other participants are commenting as well," Edgar notes.

Most Web-based tools currently being aimed at physicians are quantitative instruments, such as surveys, Edgar says. By contrast, MedPanel's research is deliberately qualitative, he notes, pointing out that the firm recently won the so-called Mega-Impact award for its methodology from PBIRG, the Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence and Research Group. Some people at the conference sponsored by the professional association were skeptical about the ability to gather qualitative information online, but Edgar is adamant that the Web can and should be harnessed this way, because it permits companies to present and seek feedback in fresh ways. Visual aids such as Power Pointpresentations, streaming video, and pictures of brochures or advertising can all be posted for doctors to assess on the Web, he notes. MedPanel can further extend the value of these visual interfaces, for instance by building in a pop-up survey that may come up if a doctor clicks on a certain place.

The threaded discussion technology that is at the core of MedPanel's methodology creates something of a logic tree, making it possible to see which root questions spark what sorts of responses from whom. MedPanel board member George Hackl, who formerly headed licensing and new product acquisition at Squibb, and then did venture investing for Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. , says he figures major drugmakers will want to use MedPanel for two major reasons: in developing clinical studies, "to be sure they're doing the right study for the right purpose," and in marketing, "to be sure they're emphasizing the right qualities of a drug." Hackl notes that physicians in different countries have different attitudes towards disease and treatments, and "it's good to know about that ahead of time."

The company has hired several experts in outcomes research to help it structure discussions, depending on customer goals. Doctors won't necessarily know who the customer or what the product is, or even the purpose of discussion. "They're just talking about metastatic breast cancer, and we ask questions about how they treat the disease now, with the goal being ultimately to get opinion on a new treatment." The unfolding of the discussion can be vital, he points out, "because if you just ask a question outright, or ask the wrong way, it can ruin your ability to get to the information you want." He notes that doctors who've worked with particular drug companies oftentimes do not reveal their biases, which are nevertheless present. By allowing the discussion to progress slowly, "we can move from biases into facts," Edgar says, explaining that some physicians will see more questions on their screens and thus move faster or slower through the process than others. Once a doctor has answered several key questions, he or she goes on to the next tier of questioning.

"We're marketing MedPanelnot as a replacement for live focus groups or phone surveys, but as a new tool that gives people an opportunity to get rapid access to high-quality information—and that wasn't really an option before," Edgar declares. Increasingly, he says pharma companies are running MedPanel groups several weeks prior to live focus groups, to get subjects on the doctors' minds and give them an interesting way to start the live session. Drugmakers are also using the method in conjunction with phone interviews or massive community-based surveys, so they have fresh data to inject into those discussions. Edgar says some firms are running strings of MedPanels as follow-up to live gatherings, so there's not so much "dead time" between the contact sessions. The firm looks upon these strings as an MP Advisory Panel, because most firms have boards, but no method in place for all advisors to be talking and thinking together."

The company has also developed a larger-scale product called MPMarketCast, which Edgar describes as a form of physician-to-physician marketing, except that the discussion between selected doctors is opened up to a large audience. The idea is for pharmaceutical firms to go beyond the traditional outreach of sales reps by using MP MarketCast to tell several hundred community-based physicians that they can learn more about drug development by following along on the Internet when they have time, as ten opinion leaders discuss the drug, when they use it, and the pros and cons. The audience is able to ask questions of the panelists, and Edgar says that both questions and answers generate valuable material for sales reps. The list of community-based physicians can be supplied by the customer or obtained from MedPanel.

Edgar says he isn't much worried about competition: the methodology could be duplicated, but he believes other barriers will stand—principally, the firm's focus on thought leaders. "As yet, we can't identify other groups focused on that. Some organizations may have some contact with opinion leaders, but it's largely mixed with community-based physicians," Edgar declares. He believes that MedPanel's international capabilities are more developed than its competitors, with the exception of large multinational research groups. MedPanel is also looking to ramp up its appeal through strategic partnerships with groups in the research world. It agreed in April to collaborate with Cozint Interactive Inc., a marketing services company, on surveys in the US, so that it can get quantitative data to integrate into the more qualitative information it gathers. In Europe, the firm has partnered with a small group called Almasan to handle European sales.

For now, Edgar says MedPanel's strategy is to "go deep, rather than wide." Management wants to become as strong as possible doing online focus groups, so that if a larger company wanted to do the same thing it would choose either to work with the start-up—or to buy it—rather than go ahead on its own.

So far, the firm has raised $1.7 million, including venture backing from XR Ventures in Grandville, Michigan.—DE