Dawn Lacallade: How Big Data Complements Online Communities

Big data and online communities can be combined to encourage medication adherence, a new and powerful tool for pharma, according to the social strategy creator Dawn Lacallade.

Lacallade, of Liveworld, spoke to Healthcare Analytics News™ at the Digital Pharma East meeting in Philadelphia. She focused on how online communities can help support patients and provide them with information about their disease and treatment. Data analytics can further help inform how those communities are leveraged.

“One of the best parts about being a part of this industry right now is we have data. We have tons of data,” she said. One observation that data has given the industry? “Fifty percent of patients don't take their medication as prescribed, and 1 in 5 prescriptions never get filled.”

The data provide the insight, but they don’t explain it. She said that while the natural hypothesis might be cost, it’s actually primarily a result of fear: patients Googling side effects and becoming convinced that they will suffer all of them, rather than having the context of the actual frequency of those side effects. That’s where online communities and social networks can come in.

“When you peel back the onion from the data insight, you can actually use social and community as a way to find the why in those insights. You can actually create programs to try to solve that,” she said. “You start to be able to attack the problem…That's a place where data and these communities that are focused around a disease or disease state can clearly tie together and add value.”