How HCPs are talking about type 2 diabetes: a guided tour of HCP Voice

With medical knowledge growing at a faster rate than ever before, social media has become a vital way for many healthcare professionals (HCPs) to keep up with new science. The collective intelligence in their online voice provides a wealth of insight, both for their online peers and for researchers wishing to discover how HCPs are learning and sharing medical information.

Last month, we launched HCP Voice, the dashboard that tracks the distilled online voice of healthcare professionals talking about your therapy area. Thanks to CREATION Pinpoint, our unique HCP listening technology tracking millions of online HCPs and billions of HCP social media posts, we’ve built a platform that breaks down HCP conversations by topics, drugs and trials, and congress events.

Let’s dive in and look at a few highlights in our type 2 diabetes HCP Voice dashboard. The first thing we see is the overall dataset: we tracked more than 300,000 social media posts about type 2 diabetes, by more than 26,000 HCPs over the past year. The dataset is refreshed monthly, so it’s always up-to-date.

The roles breakdown tells us that endocrinologists are the most active specialities in the conversation, followed by cardiologists. Primary care physicians (GPs) are in the conversation, too, as are nephrologists. Social media is an environment where diverse specialties collaborate in a way that might not happen much in the day-to-day in-person lives of HCPs. Hovering over any role shows a quick summary of the key topics that role talks about; we can see that nephrologists are interested in treatments, research and patient experience.

Now let’s take a look at the topics in the HCP conversation. We can break this down by sentiment, country, language or HCP role. Here we can see that Cardiologists are the most interested in treatments, and that nephrologists are interested in treatments and data.

Moving over to explore the HCP conversation about treatments, which we can also view by sentiment, country, language or role, let’s take a look at which specialties are most interested in which products.

We see that bariatric surgeon is in fact the role that talks most about Ozempic – followed by cardiologist and then endocrinologist. The bariatric surgeons, aside from the ‘treatment’ topic, seem to be interested in research related to Ozempic.

When we apply the same breakdown to HCP conversations about clinical trials, we begin to see where the nephrologists fit in to the conversation: conversations about two trials stand out as including a significant number of nephrologists: FLOW (a study of the effects of semaglutide on chronic kidney disease in patients with type 2 diabetes), and CREDENCE (a study into canagliflozin and renal outcomes in type 2 diabetes and nephropathy). 

Scrolling down to explore the HCP conversation volume during congress events, and viewing this by physician country, it is not surprising to see that the country with the greatest volume of HCP engagement during ADA (the American Diabetes Association Annual Conference) is the United States, which features far less during EASD (the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes), where a far greater number of physicians based in the UK took part in the conversation.

But the volume of posts from UK-based HCP participants in the EASD conversation was surpassed by posts from HCPs based in India, who made a significant contribution to the conversation about both ADA and EASD.

Finally for now, let’s take a look at which sites and resources HCPs share most often when posting about type 2 diabetes. The most popular links shared are scientific journals, and over the past twelve months, The Lancet just beat NEJM in HCP shares, with 3,925 HCP posts about type 2 diabetes referencing The Lancet (that’s 1.25% of the total HCP online conversation about type 2 diabetes).

There’s a lot more you can discover with HCP Voice, and we’re adding new features including integration with DOL Finder, our HCP online profile platform. If you’d like to learn more or would like a personal demo of either platform, please get in touch.