When clients need a forecast to support expensive or risky decisions, such as the design of a Phase III clinical trial, we recommend that clients consider using primary market research to drive the patient share forecast instead of ESP. These forecasts reflect the behavior of three key groups who determine the commercial acceptance of a new drug:

• Physicians and their willingness to prescribe,
• Payers and their willingness to reimburse, and
• Patients and their willingness to adhere to treatment regimens.

We use primary research with each group to gauge that group’s willingness to use agents with specific clinical attributes. Primary research with any of these groups can be incorporated into the forecast model to reflect the relative importance of the various clinical attributes (and price) as they vary among these three key decision-making groups.

Market Research Capabilities

Equinox Group has extensive experience conducting primary market research with physicians, payers, and patients. We use various methods and techniques to gather information from these key groups, including:

• In-person interviews (one-on-one and focus groups)
• Telephone interviews
• Web-based surveys
• Conjoint analysis
• Collaboration with primary market research companies, integrating the results of their research into our forecasts
• Multilingual capabilities

Unique Strength of Market Research Forecasts

The unique strength of the Equinox Group’s market research forecasts comes from combining the results of physician interviews with the results of our proprietary unmet medical need analysis. Interview data provide a sound foundation to estimate the likely prescribing behavior of physicians, because the data are based on physician-predicted prescribing for several profiles, each with specific clinical attributes (we take steps to ensure these estimates are not improperly inflated).

As new data arise in clinical trials (for either the client’s agent or its developmental competitors), that new information can be quickly entered into the model to estimate the impact on the revenue outlook for the client’s agent.

The following figure shows the key inputs and outputs for a market research simulator that predicts patient share. In this example, several clinical input assumptions can be easily changed. Given the new clinical assumptions, the model re-estimates the impact on the agent’s share of patients.

Sample Inputs/Outputs Sheet