Advancing KOL mapping in healthcare through technology
KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) is a term widely used in the healthcare industry, they provide key insights into the development of healthcare trends, regulations and policies. When partnering with a KOL, they create awareness of an organisation’s brand, product or service.
KOL mapping is used to identify the shared networks between Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and organisations, providing an in-depth look at the landscape of a particular treatment area.
With the rise of DOLs (Digital Opinion Leaders), as well as KOLs, mapping these growing connections takes time but technology has allowed us to automate this process by visually bringing together data in one space for easy and continual analysis of the market.
Mapping the networks between KOLs is a powerful way to understand their connections, on both a regional and global scale, their interests and activity in a particular treatment field, as well as any relationships with trade bodies or press. It is about providing intelligent and actionable insights, and enhancing business, marketing or engagement strategies.
The benefits of automating KOL mapping
By using machine learning to automate your KOL mapping process, you can spend more time exploring and dissecting the data to create better outputs that can be used in your business, marketing, or engagement strategy. What this means is your team doesn’t need to research all this information manually, instead the technology does the heavy lifting for you - everything you need is just a touch of a button away.
But that’s not the only benefit, there is a whole range of benefits for using technology such as:
It can standardise the data sets and ensure there is less human error in the outputs of the data.
You can invest more time in understanding and interpreting the data, rather than wasting time and resources on the traditional, manual process.
It allows you to pull together all the relevant information into one place, giving you the power to access the information easily, and conveniently whenever you need.
It provides continuous updates - instead of giving you a snapshot at that moment, you can track changes over time to follow trends, who your competitors are working with, and rising stars in the market.
How KOL mapping can help with categorising KOLs
Identifying the different types of influence held by KOLs/DOLs means you can segment them into tiers and analyse how their influence is received by patients and their peers. Just because a KOL has a bigger following, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll have a bigger influence or be best suited for your goals. Those with smaller followers may have more of a personal connection with their local communities so it’s likely their engagement will be higher with the end user.
KOLs/DOLs can be found on both a national and international level - all of which are easily identifiable through automating your KOL mapping process.
How we extract KOL data using technology
In order to automate this method and gather relevant information, API feeds are used to draw information from external data sources, such as: Twitter, and MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) to quickly and efficiently pull them into one main source.
Once gathered, it is then automatically placed into a network graph, which highlights the relationships between the different entities - in this case, the KOLs, DOLs and organisations connected with each other. The network graph provides a visual snapshot of the inter-relationships, which can then be refined using filters for laser focused results.
If you’d like to speak to a member of our team about the Medical Aesthetics Tracker, contact us at hello@rare.consulting
