“Patients are no longer tied to their physicians, and they’re certainly not tied to a specific prescription drug,” says Ezra Ernst, a former executive of UnitedHealth Group and Medscape. “With healthcare now, it’s just like with hotels – I’ll listen to my travel agent but I have to go to TripAdvisor to see what everyone else is saying, too.”
That consumer empowerment has given rise to the company that Ernst is now chief commercial officer of, Treato.
Treato is making a business out of finding, organizing and analyzing online patient conversations and turning them into insights for other patients, as well as for the industry players who make products for them.
Today, more than 80 percent of Internet users look for health information online. But they’re not just searching; they’re sharing their experiences, in the form of social media posts, message board discussions and blog posts.
The technology that the Israel-based company has been developing for the past four years starts by crawling some 3,000 forums, blogs and websites every day, looking for disease and treatment stories shared by patients.
“In many ways you find them in small corners of the Internet where they’re having incredibly vibrant discussions,” Ernst said.
He said Treato pulls in more than 1 million pieces of content from those sites every day and then uses natural language processing to break them down and determine which ones are “the good stuff” — patients talking first-hand about their experiences. Ernst said it uses medical ontologies and patient language dictionaries to parse through each paragraph of a post and categorize it on several levels. For example, it looks for words and sentence structures that indicate whether the patient was recently diagnosed or previously diagnosed, and whether she’s talking about a treatment in a positive or negative light.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
That’s a lot harder than it sounds. “Someone may say something like, ‘I love Zoloft, but it made me crazy so I had to stop taking it,’” Ernst explained. “That’s not positive sentiment, even though it may initially seem that way.”
That’s why it took so long to refine the analytics technology, he said. Treato was founded in 2008 but only began serious commercialization efforts last year when it raised a $14.5 million venture round.
The company offers a free portal that patients can use to see what people are saying about specific diseases and treatments. Ernst said that 25 million users logged on last year.
I typed Prilosec, a proton pump inhibitor for treatment of GERD, into Treato’s search. That pulled up a description of the drug, a rating of how it compared to the nearest competitors based on what people were saying on the Internet, and what the top concerns were in conversations that mentioned Prilosec. I could also see a list of the specific posts that Treato’s engines had pulled that data from, sorted into positive and negative sentiment categories.
How Treato makes its money, though, is by selling more specific and customized insights to pharmaceutical companies. There are two paradigms here: viewing data by condition and by brand.
A pharma company working on building a pipeline in neurological conditions, for example, could use the condition dashboard to learn what concerns people talking about Alzheimer’s disease have, and what drugs they’re mentioning most. The platform would also let companies determine where certain groups of patients are having these discussions. For example, those who are recently diagnosed with a disease might aggregate in different online communities than those diagnosed a long time ago. That could help a pharma company target its marketing efforts.
In the brand paradigm, a company can explore why people say they like or dislike certain drugs, why they switch drugs, and whether they’re talking about the drug in a positive or negative light.
Ernst said right now most of Treato’s clients are broadly involved with pharmaceutical companies, from market researchers to brand managers to patient safety groups. He wouldn’t say how much a subscription costs, but says companies find it “comparable with their current market research initiatives.”
Next up for the company is adding a feature that identifies lifestyle topics mentioned in conversations about specific conditions. It’s also adding Twitter into its list of sources, which it had previously left out because of the high rate of irrelevant posts.
The company has also just opened a U.S. headquarters in Princeton, New Jersey.
