Article: 3 trends the healthcare market research industry should watch out for over the next decade

As we head into the 2020s, Associate Director Ellie Forde considers the key trends that might impact healthcare over the next 10 years and the possible impacts on market research.

My colleague Rachel Howard wrote a blog at the end of last year reviewing her predictions in 2010 for the coming decade. As we head into the 2020s, I thought it might be timely to consider the key trends that might impact healthcare over the next 10 years. With technology advancing at an ever-increasing pace, these may be many, but I want to focus on what I believe are three of the big ‘watch outs’, and those I am personally excited about.

1. AI in healthcare - the revolution continues

AI, machine and deep learning continue to be major areas of interest. We entered the year to news that DeepMind, owned by Google, has employed AI to diagnose breast cancer as well as, if not better, than medical professionals. Whilst the technology requires more research and approval before it can be more widely used, it brings the application of AI as a diagnostic tool tantalisingly closer.

Pharma companies already rely heavily on digital tools to develop strategies in areas such as drug development through to commercialisation, to help increase their return on investment and patient engagement – and I predict AI will accelerate this process and revolutionise how we approach healthcare and marketing.

What does this mean for Market Research? AI offers us real potential to disrupt the status quo. While it will not ‘automate’ how we run projects, it does help us deal with big volumes of unstructured data. Natural language processing tools can recognise the category of text, analyse syntactic structure, and offer insights into the overall sentiment of what a respondent has said about a given topic. When applied on a large scale, these can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to analyse qualitative responses. AI algorithms can be used in forecasting to make more accurate predictions about future behaviour, and we are currently using the technology in facial analysis, using software to analyse human reactions to visual stimuli. Another possible use is with respondent engagement – creating virtual worlds where participants can engage with Virtual Recruiters, Moderators and other respondents during interviews / workshops. The applications are endless and I believe we will see significant use of AI in the coming decade.

2. Untreatable becomes treatable – new hope for orphan diseases

With global drug sales in this space estimated to reach $500bn in the next couple of years, the opportunity for rare diseases has become significant. Manufacturers are attracted by more favourable market conditions, marked by longer market exclusivity, reduced regulatory fees and tax incentives in many countries. I predict that the rare disease space will hit its ‘golden era’ in terms of drug development in the next decade, primarily driven by emerging biotech companies. This will help broaden access for many patients awaiting drug revolutions to help treat, and even prevent their disease. Advances in gene and cell therapy has made hopes for treatments more possible for diseases caused by a single gene mutation, such as Spinal Muscular Atrophy, which now has two treatments approved for clinical use in the United States.

What does this mean for Market Research? The increased demand for running market research in rare diseases will mean these studies require even more expertise. A deeper understanding of patient needs will continue to be a key objective for the research – so I predict that we will get smarter at finding hard-to-reach patients and developing novel methods of eliciting insights, such as techniques employing principles of behavioural science, or ethnographic approaches, or even using AI.