KOL interviews at Scout: explorer meets code cracker!
“At Scout, we don’t merely conduct KOL interviews; our philosophy is to explore like Marco Polo and crack codes like Alan Turing”
An interview with Simon Rosenberg, Research Director at Scout
KOL interviews: what’s the Scout philosophy?
Whether you are completely new to a therapy area or have been established for some time, you need to fully comprehend the “thought map” of your KOLs and where this intellectual journey could lead. Advisory boards can give you insights but have their limitations; for me, nothing beats a series of exploratory interviews to find the optimal route map for your messages. At Scout, we’ve carried out thousands of interviews with KOLs over 25 years. We don’t merely conduct KOL interviews; our philosophy is to explore like Marco Polo and crack codes like Alan Turing!
When interviewing KOLs, we have one unswerving aim: to pinpoint what road HCPs go down in their clinical pathway and how they will welcome a new product. What is current practice, and to what extent might this change with the introduction of a new drug? Do they see it as a further ‘tool in the box’, to be used fourth-line, or will it go straight in as the first-line treatment of choice? At every turn, we are mapping the co-ordinates of the clinical decision-making process and establishing where you might face challenges and what activities you might need to carry out. We are super-skilled at gauging where there is a rock-hard consensus among practitioners and where the KOLs don’t have sufficient information or data, and so are a long way from the desired destination.
How do the interviews work in practice?
In this blinded research, we spend an hour putting each KOL in the hot seat, and in those 60 minutes, we ask a myriad of questions. Our medically trained interviewers travel with the KOLs to explore their thought map. If the necessary detail isn’t forthcoming, we pursue and ask in a different way until we track it down. At the same time, we are on constant red alert, listening for the slightest murmur that will impact your product. If the conversation takes a detour, we will follow the KOL’s lead. We are always looking for the undiscovered territory, for hidden patterns that will tell us more about how you will need to address challenges. We don’t just summarise the results of these interviews: we discuss the implications with you before recommending a comprehensive course of action. No matter how complex the journey, we will find the answer you are looking for. We will show you the route to success.
Do you have a favourite project, where you really did feel like Marco Polo?
With KOL interviews, we sometimes do make thrilling discoveries. Take the company which had developed a product indicated for a cancer but only indicated for individuals with a certain genetic mutation. Patients were typically tested for this genetic mutation at a certain point in the disease progression and the results determined which treatment they would receive. During our interviews, we noticed that some KOLs mentioned that a significant number of patients tested negatively for the mutation at one stage, but then positively at a later stage. This raised a lot of unexpected questions and led to the collection of more data on the testing process, making changes to the patient pathway and ultimately resulted in more patients eligible to benefit from the drug than anyone had previously thought. Our final destination was far different than the client had expected.
Or Alan Turing?
In another ground-breaking project, our client’s product was the eleventh biologic to come onto the market for an immunology condition. There was already an entrenched, inefficient and costly protocol among practitioners about which of these eleven to use first and which to bring in when the first failed. Our client’s product did show better efficacy – but would it be enough?
We finally cracked the code by focusing in on one group of KOLs who demonstrated that using the product most likely to succeed from the outset would secure a better treatment outcome overall, and that the cost difference would, in fact, be negligible as the patient would not have interrupted or sequential treatments. By highlighting these findings, we were able to position our client’s biologic as the front runner.
But what is the most exciting destination?
We are perhaps proudest of those moments where we have helped to shape the clinical conversation. While carrying out interviews to discuss patient pathways in a rare blood disorder, we were intrigued to find that there was a wide discrepancy in the definition of ‘severity’ within the disease. The haematologists we spoke to quite literally had completely different understandings of the term. Our client’s product was indicated for ‘severe cases’, but what did this mean? In the weeks that followed, we linked our client up with leading KOLs in the field to develop consensus statements that would define severity. In doing so, we not only determined which patients were most appropriate for their product but played our part in refining the scientific discourse going forwards.
Need to explore uncharted territory?
If you’d like to be part of this fast-paced process, drop us a line. We won’t just give you the lie of the land; we can provide you with a map for success.
