nanoform

Our guest on this episode is Jamie Unwin, Commercial Insight Officer at Nanoform. Jamie joins us on the Room 101 podcast to share what things in the industry he’d like to see banished to Room 101 forever. The main pet peeves Jamie describes are: one-way glass in central facilities, insights professionals who push back on assigning an ROI, and “intent to prescribe” as a metric. Jamie provides meaningful criticism during our conversation, and we hope you enjoy it.

Key Quotes:

• “I guess I went from researching at the bench in petri dishes to actually researching by calling people within the industry and people in the environment to understand how they react to the medicine.” (4:30)
• “The entire concept of having a uni-directional piece of glass to separate a sponsoring industry professional from a respondent is bonkers because it’s the ultimate elephant in the room. And I fundamentally think it constrains the quality of the insights we can get from in depths.” (8:16)
• “All of the reasons why we do central facilities is around the destressing and enabling people to focus. I’m a massive fan of observational research because you get that stress, you get the bias, you get the things you’re actually desiring out of the experiment when you bring people into a central facility. And that’s the good stuff.” (11:20)
• “Increasingly, all of us have to assign an ROI; otherwise, I don’t think that we’ll exist in 10 years. We have to show the value that we’re adding in line with the organization’s KPIs. “ (16:15)
• “That’s when you can go in and say, ‘You’ve been at this level for the last five years. You’re not planning any additional investment. We can come in and re-energize this by identifying three or four insight-driven flexion points in the prescriber journey. Let’s share the upside.’” (24:54)
• “That prescription decision is probably the most complex one that he has to make based on environmental considerations within the hospital, affordability, or access considerations, which might even be at the national level, the payer mentality, patient objections, compliance charges that might be perceived, the local constraints, system delivery – the ability to get the medicine to the patient and into the patient.” (25:50)
• “The people who reap the benefits of a system to do so are looking at investing in AI systems and machine-learning based systems internally are really reaping the benefits because they’re spending less money on IDIs. They’re having greater forecasting accuracy, which means they have better inventory management levels. They’re able to serve their market demand more quickly. They’re able to right-size their organizations because their forecast model is more accurate based on the demand that they’re expecting, and the ROI on that thing is an easy one to assign.” (29:25)

Key Topics: 

• Jamie describes what he is most proud of in his career (1:48)
• Jamie remembers how he got involved with market research (3:10)
• Jamie recollects a funny story from his time in the industry (5:33)
• The first item for Room 101 is one-way glass in central facilities (7:60)
• Jamie agrees with me that some forget about the glass after a while, but he says more often than not they actually speak to the glass (10:16)
• Jamie expands on the use of virtual interviews (11:12)
• Thinks virtual type of research is close to dead (12:47)
• Jamie shares another funny story about insights research (13:59)
• The second item for Room 101 is insights professionals who push back on assigning a return on investment (15:22)
• Describes how to measure the ROI (17:47)
• Jamie explains the effect measuring ROI would have on current insights practices (22:20)
• Jamie expands on how many insights organizations offer to do free work in exchange for an agreed-upon price if successful (24:13)
• The third item for Room 101 is ‘intent to prescribe’ as a metric (25:15)
• Jamie thinks the ‘intent to prescribe’ metric is simply habit and easy (27:32)
• Recommender-based systems are finding their way into the field (30:29)
• Jamie describes nano-targeting (31:55)
• Jamie discusses the role of UX along with data security, as well as ethics and compliance (33:33)
• Hannah and Jamie agree to put the ‘intent to prescribe’ metric into Room 101 (35:43)

About – Jamie Unwin:

Dr Jamie Unwin is the Commercial Insight Officer at Nanoform, an innovative nanoparticle medicine-enabling company where he helps clients understand the value that his services and solutions bring to their individual drug candidates, as well as to portfolios as a whole.  When he is not serving as a passionate advocate for patient centricity in new drug development, he is a visiting lecturer at Imperial College Business School in London where he teaches classes on advanced analytics in healthcare.

Relevant Links:

• Jamie’s LinkedIn.
• Nanoform - Website
• Day One - https://www.dayonestrategy.com/
• Hannah Mann - LinkedIn

The Day One podcast is published by the Day One Strategy and produced by Zorbiant.

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