Bob Gabruk
Managing Director, 81qd
Susan Abedi
Chief Strategy Officer, 81qd - MKG
Blake Walter
SVPr, 81qd
Why Traditional Thought Leader Mapping Is No Longer Enough
In today’s patient-driven healthcare environment, traditional thought leader (TL) mapping methods—focused only on physician credentials, publications, and conference activity—no longer capture the full landscape of influence. As patients play a larger role in their own care decisions, identifying the true drivers of patient behavior has never been more critical.
A patient-centered approach to TL mapping offers a better way: one that aligns with real-world decision-making and improves both engagement strategies and patient outcomes.
Key takeaways include:
- How to identify thought leaders based on patient impact, not just clinical recognition
- Why consumer opinion leaders (COLs) are key to early patient education
- How clinical leaders accelerate adoption of new therapies
- Strategies for overcoming access and adherence barriers through multidisciplinary engagement
Start with the Patient Journey
By adopting a patient journey-centered approach to TL mapping, we identify and engage with TLs who genuinely support patient-focused strategies at each stage of care.
AWARENESS
- Patient experiences symptoms but may not recognize their significance
- Searches for information online or
through social networks - Encounters disease awareness
campaigns or educational content - May delay seeking medical advice
due to lack of knowledge or
perceived severity
ASSESSMENT
- Visits a healthcare professional for evaluation and diagnosis
- Undergoes medical tests, imaging, or lab work
- Receives confirmation of diagnosis and initial treatment options
- Faces emotional responses (eg, relief, fear, confusion, denial)
ADOPTION
- Discusses treatment plan with
a healthcare professional - Considers factors like side effects,
lifestyle impact, and treatment burden - Makes a decision to start therapy
(or not) - Begins integrating treatment into
daily routine
ACCESS
- Navigates insurance, reimbursement, or financial assistance programs
- Faces potential delays due to prior authorizations, formulary restrictions, or cost barriers
- Seeks care from specialists, pharmacies, or support services
- Addresses logistical challenges (eg, transportation, scheduling)
- May delay seeking medical advice due to lack of knowledge or perceived severity
ADHERENCE
- Patient follows (or struggles to follow) prescribed treatment regimen
- May experience side effects, leading to potential discontinuation
- Engages with support systems (eg, caregivers, advocacy groups)
- Influenced by education, reminders, and trust in the treatment
Developing a Patient-Centered Thought Leader Identification Approach
Patient Journey Stages: Awareness and Assessment
Focus: Thought leaders who build content directly tailored to patients.
In a patient-centered approach, one starts by identifying TLs who directly create content or support content development that educates patients, driving awareness and supporting assessment of treatment options.
These TLs are consumer opinion leaders (COLs). They help bridge the gap between HCP clinical practice and patient understanding, providing practical, patient-centered guidance. As biopharma companies continue their shift toward consumer-centric healthcare, these COLs are becoming even more important. Unlike “traditional” key opinion leaders (KOLs), who primarily shape clinical and scientific discourse among healthcare professionals, COLs shape patient engagement by building direct relationships with consumers through digital platforms, social media, and patient networks. These TLs focus on consumer-facing engagement and can include HCPs, patients, and caregivers.
Identification: COLs include advisors for patient advocacy groups, multidisciplinary HCPs who share insights aimed at educating patients on patient-focused social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and blogs, as well as caregivers and patients who provide online resources
focused on symptom identification and diagnosis process.
Impact: The impact of COLs can be tremendous. The early stages of a disease journey can be confusing and lonely. By engaging these TLs, biopharma companies can enhance their patient education efforts, ensuring that information is not only clinically sound but also accessible and actionable for patients early in their disease journey.
Patient Journey Stage: Adoption
Focus: Thought leaders who have the broadest impact on patient treatment through their networks. During the adoption stage, patients decide if they will begin therapy. The HCPs with impact at this step are those who directly impact patient treatment by influencing their networks. HCPs
known as clinical leaders are characterized by the breadth of patients in influence networks. These clinical leaders significantly influence patient care practices and treatment adoption across their networks. Anonymized patient-level data are critical here in understanding impact and trends at the patient level and are the input to mapping clinical leaders. Other approaches may look at influence-based HCP peer surveys or KOL-KOL connections, but the patient datadriven
approach used to identify clinical leaders refocuses the assessment on patients and their journey.
Identification: AI-based algorithms can interrogate every single interaction the patient has during their treatment journey over an established time period, irrespective of the specialty of the HCP they are seeing, to detect those HCPs with the highest impact.
Impact: Adoption of new treatment options can be hindered by HCP inertia, delaying patients’ access to the latest innovations. Clinical leaders can drive the adoption of innovation. Retrospective assessment of treatment behaviors found that clinical leaders were twice as likely to be early adopters of these novel therapeutic options relative to high-volume HCPs.
Patient Journey Stage: Access and Adherence
Focus: Thought leaders who are specifically positioned to support patients in overcoming barriers or challenges associated with treatment.
Adherence continues to be a challenge across most disease areas, and difficulties with side-effect management are a key driver of nonadherence. TLs who have an impact on improving patient experiences with treatments are invaluable in a patient-centered strategy. These experts can help patients overcome the practical, emotional, and clinical challenges they face with treatments—whether those challenges involve managing side effects, navigating complex treatment regimens, or maneuvering market access hurdles. For example, a client was launching a product with ophthalmologic and dermatologic side effects that threatened to impact uptake and adherence. One core challenge was that these side effects would be managed by different specialties vs the treaters. To optimize the impact of an AE-management initiative, TLs who had connections with ophthalmologists and dermatologists were mapped and then engaged to help educate both patients and care team HCPs on how to mitigate and address side effects.
Identification: These TLs may also not be physicians. Traditional KOL ID has primarily focused on the physician; however, a patient-centric approach is multidisciplinary, requiring engagement with all the stakeholders who support patients, including nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, and pharmacists. HCPs could include TLs within primary specialties with broad connections across other specialties, who would be tapped to provide support along the patient journey, as well as advanced practice providers and pharmacists who often manage patient support and adherence.
Impact: By identifying these TLs, biopharma companies can build stronger connections with patients, ensuring they receive holistic support throughout their treatment journey, thereby supporting adherence and improved patient outcomes.
The landscape of biopharma and healthcare is evolving, but one truth remains clear—to optimize patient outcomes, the patient must be at the center of all strategies. Patient-centered thought leader mapping recognizes the breadth of influencers that impact patient care. By adopting these 3 strategies—targeting content creators and advisors for patients, supporting thought leaders who help patients overcome treatment challenges, and engaging clinical leaders who influence patient treatments—biopharma companies can develop more robust, patient-centered approaches to thought leader mapping. This, in turn, will lead to deeper, more meaningful engagement with stakeholders across the healthcare spectrum and ultimately contribute to better patient outcomes.
It Starts and Ends With The Patient
The future of thought leader mapping lies in understanding and amplifying those who influence patients directly—across the awareness, assessment, adoption, access, and adherence stages.
By focusing on real-world patient journeys rather than traditional clinical hierarchies, companies can build more effective engagement strategies, drive faster adoption of innovations, and ultimately improve patient outcomes.