By Maxine Bookbinder 

July 6, 2015 | Treato, a social media insights company that describes itself as the world’s largest “patient voice” source, has announced it will apply its big data infrastructure and technology to social media networks, giving patients a platform to discuss treatments and allowing the medical and business communities to gauge real-time patient attitudes, view social trends, and gain insights into their—and their competitors’—advertisements and products.  

“Real change for improvement of the healthcare system will come from the outside. It’s where IT meets health. We are one of many companies forcing new thinking,” says Ido Hadari, CEO of the healthcare insight company Treato, which has collected, indexed, and analyzed more than 2.1 billion patient and caregiver online conversations.

Treato recently announced the launch of the Social Media Application, an addition to its core platform, which applies the company’s big data infrastructure to social media listening and analyzes social media trends, favored networks, top influencers, and company and competitor brands.  It also allows viewers to gauge patient sentiment, combining algorithms with social listening and determining which topics are trending which way.

Hadari tells Clinical Informatics News that Treato is the “first company to create the technology to give a voice for the health consumer.” He states that, to date, Treato has analyzed billions of conversations on public health forums and blogs, regarding 26,000 drugs, 14,000 medical conditions, and hospitals, clinics, tests and procedures worldwide. The company, with offices in Israel and New Jersey, is expanding online to non-English speaking countries and recently launched the Hispanic insight solution, offering pharma marketers insight into the health concerns, experiences, and consumer interests of the Spanish-speaking population.

Specifically, the announced social media monitoring application is a supplement to its focus on cyber blogs, forums, and communities to track and analyze why a sentiment is trending a certain way, what therapy, medical advertisements, or healthcare issues are praised or panned, and what consumers think and feel. “Was it (an ad or drug) working or not?” says Hadari. “Was the response positive or negative? The Internet knows first.”

The company delivers insights separately to consumers and the healthcare industry. Treato.com is a free, online portal offering consumers a single resource to access patient thoughts, experiences, and attitudes. According to Hadari, more than 2.5 million patients and caregivers worldwide access Treato.com monthly to find out what others are saying about their symptoms, conditions, and treatments.  Tracked discussions include consumer attitudes on topics ranging from vaccine controversies to cancer treatments.

Medical professionals can follow trends and gain insight into consumer attitudes on Treato IQ, a “patient intelligence platform” that helps companies to understand the “why” and “what” behind patient behavior in real-time and allow pharma to formulate business and marketing decisions; the Treato IQ platform can be customized to fit a particular business’s needs. “The trajectory of a conversation is a great way to monitor what’s going on,” says Hadari. Currently, thirteen out of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies use Treato services, the company says. 

One example was a pharma’s slogan, “feeling refreshed in the morning,” for a weak bladder product.  On social networks, patients complained that they were sleep-deprived and did not care about or relate to “feeling refreshed”; they simply wanted more sleep.  The company revamped the campaign. 

Treato collects approximately one million conversations daily, filtering for spam, ads, inappropriate comments, and third-party “plants” and then analyzes and organizes them. Algorithms, statistical analysis, and human reviewers strive for an accuracy rate in the high 90s. 

Treato helps the business community decipher patient lexicon, understand patients’ unmet needs in clinical trials, gain input into marketing strategies, monitor brand “hits,” target specific demographics, and track consumer responses to treatments.  

The Treato website states that information should be regarded as a qualitative, not quantitative tool, giving companies insight into consumer attitudes. It also notes that, according to the international law firm Alston & Bird LLP, pharmaceutical companies are not required to report adverse findings "due to the non-specific nature of the information" and patient anonymity. 

However, a pharma might choose to explore a unique comment about, for example, a new treatment for a rare disease. Only public forums are monitored, no identifying information is revealed, and conversations are quoted from the sites.

Hadari says the company, which launched commercially in 2011, has spent “over 100 man-years pulling data on everything health and then analyzes it. We are the world’s most comprehensive source of patient insights from billions of online conversations. You can go to WebMD to find out what pharma says. You go to Treato to find out what people like you say.”