Digital Pharma West 2015 - Optimized Social Media to Find Patients

Digital Pharma West Presentation
Mark Joing & Sandra Shpilberg
June 3, 2015
Optimized Online and Social Strategies to
Find Patients

2CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY |
Nora Therapeutics
Optimizing Maternal Fetal Tolerance for
Successful Pregnancy Maintenance
Novel Therapy to
Reduce the Risk of Recurrent
Miscarriage (RM)
NT100

New Frontier in Reproductive Medicine
NORA’s Focus
Role of Maternal-Fetal
Tolerance
Early pregnancy
maintenance
Late stage
complications
Fertility
Key Interventional Areas in Pregnancy

EARLY STUDIES
Off-label G-CSF
500+ Women during pregnancy
Nora has recruited into two patient trials –
Thrive-IVF and RESPONSE
PHASE 1 – 2013
Healthy volunteers
PHASE 2 - 2015
Recurrent Miscarriage
PHASE 2 - 2014
Infertility/IVF

Thrive-IVF, Nora’s first Phase 2 study
 U.S. Phase 2 study, 20 IVF clinics, patients
undergoing IVF with history of IVF failure
 Partnered with an agency for recruitment
and creative support
 Clinical Operations team and Nora led and
managed the recruitment campaign
 Implemented traditional site-based
recruitment tools
– Fliers, brochures, posters
– Sites post on their own websites and
Facebook pages
– Some local marketing efforts (e.g. local
newspapers, local PR)

Thrive-IVF – Nora’s first foray into online patient
recruitment
 We also implemented a number of study-wide recruitment tools
– Study website
– Facebook page
– Google Search and Display ads
– Facebook text ads
– Blogger outreach
– Clinical Connection
– Pilot radio advertising

Thrive-IVF online campaign provided 30 of 150
patients and shaved timeline by 3 months
Tactic Referrals
Bing 27
Blogger Outreach 4
Clinical Connection 68
ClinicalTrials.Gov 29
Facebook 42
Google 545
Google Display 81
Nora Therapeutics 36
Radio Pilot 69
Total 901

RESPONSE study recruitment plan mirrored the
Thrive-IVF plan
 150 patients with recurrent miscarriage at
20 NHS hospitals in the UK
 We began with a recruitment strategy using
lessons learned from Thrive-IVF (Study
website, Facebook page, Search ads)
Recurrent Miscarriages?
http://www.responseresearchstudy.co.uk
A Research Study for Women
Who Have Had 3 or More Miscarriages

RESPONSE study was slow out of the gate
 Challenges in UK
– Up to 35 days for EC approval of text changes to website or
advertising copy
– Stricter privacy laws (e.g. we don’t collect patient initials)
– Longer and more variable lead time for site initiation
 Initial online campaign focusing primarily on Google
Search advertising only generated 8-10 weekly referrals
 We investigated other options:
– Print, TV, radio
– Facebook ads
 Nora’s new head of Commercial stepped in to provide
input and take the lead with the online and social media
campaign

The Funnel to Finding Patients Online
Define
Audience
Deliver
Impressions
Get Clicks to
Website
Screen in
Website
Send Lead
To Site
 We made a strategic decision to launch a robust campaign to enable patients to
connect to us where they were spending much of their time - online
 We thought of this strategy as a funnel, and our job was to reach and pre-screen
online potential study participants, or “leads”
 Along the way, we crafted and refined each of these five steps

Perfecting The Funnel: Step 1
Define Audience
 We began by selecting an extremely
targeted group within Facebook and
for Google Ads:
– Women
– Ages 18-37 (per trial inclusion
criterial)
– Living in zip codes in UK with an
activated clinical trial site
– Who had either:
• Searched on Google for the
word miscarriage, OR
• Joined a public Facebook
group related to miscarriage

Mine Interest Insights to Find New Audiences
 On Facebook, we expanded our target audience using the Audience Insights
Tool and our intuition. We tried many target audiences.

Deliver Impressions
 Ethics Committee (EC) approval for ad language & creative
 Analyze results on a weekly basis

If Campaign Saturates, Refresh Creative
 A change in creative can enliven a
previously saturated campaign
 The change need not be significant
– even a change in background
color can deliver a boost

Drive Clicks to the Website
 First click: The screener is right on the home page
 We assure the privacy of the information collected

Screen Leads in the Website
 85% of our leads came from mobile phones
 We immediately optimized our website for full mobile use and submission

Send Leads to Sites
 Based on feedback
from sites, added
two questions to the
online screener
 Saved sites hours of
work phoning
ineligible patients

Results
Shaved 6 months from enrollment timeline
 Generated over 1,000 leads in 5 months. The cost was 3 times lower than in the
Thrive-IVF campaign
Source Referrals
Facebook 691
Google
(Search and Display)
305
Miscarriage
Association
64
Flier 21
ClinicalTrials.Gov 3
Total 1,084

Results
Shaved 6 months from enrollment timeline
Facebook
63%
Other
8%*
*Other referrals came from Miscarriage Association,
ClinicalTrials.gov website, and study fliers

Lessons Learned
Collaboration & Continuous Improvement
 Clinical/Commercial partnership to best leverage expertise to implement campaign
and work with clinical sites
 Adopt a mindset of continuous improvement – launch to find out what isn’t working
– Analyze when, where, how
– Experiment with audiences
– Refresh graphics
– Improve website screener
 Leaders must be invested in the success of the campaign
– Can’t outsource the brain or passion to make the campaign successful
Online and social media are cost-effective tools for helping patients learn
about treatments – whether investigational or approved - and shortening
trial recruitment timelines

Questions & Comments

Digital Pharma West 2015 - Optimized Social Media to Find Patients

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