The ‘Service Refugee’ Companies Chasing Patient Voice Research: What They Should Know

Currently, the Patient Voice is trending and is chased and embraced as a commercial opportunity by many organisations. Quite a number of these are what I describe as ‘service refugee’ companies. These are companies that have seen erosion of their initial commercial proposition due to automation (AI) and see Patient Voice as something to pin their colours on. This is in the hope of finding a new ‘something’ that is viable and can mitigate the loss of commercial standing elsewhere. This is the plight of many LSPs right now: what’s that coming over the hill…?

Many of them have attempted to shift to a ‘Patient Voice’ agenda. While Patient Voice research cannot be done in a vacuum, some companies attach themselves to this concept without any understanding or grounding of what it is. Few seem to know where the term comes from, which research discipline, concepts or assumptions it rests upon. They have little idea about how to proceed with even the most basic of qualitative research projects.

We have partnered with lots of LSPs to help them with services such as Patient Voice research, where it was precisely like this. We noticed a complete absence of knowledge of the subject matter - nothing at all, not even the basic terminology or a concept of the workflow, how long a typical project takes or the typical problems that might arise in the course of a project. This means that the LSP becomes little more than an intermediary, adding to the process not much more than their branding. Do their clients knowingly outsource work to companies like this? Why, when there is so much genuine expertise there? Do they care? The ‘fake it until you make it’ approach is a tremendously unethical disservice to patients. Procurement departments of companies commissioning this work would do well to take this seriously and be more diligent about who they are awarding work to.

Of course, this is not a sweeping statement that applies to all LSPs. We have partnered with around 15 of them over the years and some really do take a sincere approach to Patient Voice research. Some of them I have a great deal of respect for and owe a debt of gratitude to.

LSPs are generally well suited to pivot to new commercial areas, given their international scope, natural confidence to enter into new markets and commercial brilliance. I rarely see better business development people than those who work for LSPs. Competing against them is terrifying. A handful of these companies saw the opportunity to shift to more research-based services two decades ago. This includes the US-based one that everyone pretends to not to like. But, dislike them all you want, you have to give them respect for cornering an opportunity in areas like Linguistic Validation so early on. Now, they are influential in setting the agenda in the sector. At a time when every second person is calling themselves a ‘disruptor’, what that company did was real disruption. They caught the more traditional research companies off-guard and introduced a whole new model for pricing and turn-around times. These soon became standard expectations across the sector. They have set the tone for companies operating in this area ever since. I am not saying that is necessarily for the better, but the achievement ought to be acknowledged. With further erosion of translation services due to AI – the monster by now bounding down that hill – there will be more stories like this.

If an LSP is sincere about transitioning into more research-based services, then they would need to deploy and employ appropriate expertise: deploy in terms of their network of freelancers and strategic partnerships and employ relating to their own hierarchy. Many LSPs we have partnered with in the past tend to believe they can transition to a new stream of business using the same network of consultants and the same in-house expertise. This causes a mismatch of skills versus requirements. Even with translators who have some experience with soft research skills such as cognitive debriefing, a translator is not the same as a professional interviewer. In the same way, an interviewer is not the same as a professional translator and would not be used as such. I am not the same as a professional cardiologist and I would probably not be best suited to carry out a triple bypass operation. I could try, just as a translator could try to do a RWE interview only armed with some experience in cognitive debriefing that maybe they do two or three times a year, but the results might not be favourable. Patient Voice research is at a whole other level. Therefore, the skillset of in-country capabilities needs to be appropriate to meet this demand.

In terms of in-house staffing, if an LSP is experiencing a rise in research opportunities and a drop in translation demand, they would do well to reduce the number of language graduates they employ and increase new hires with life sciences research backgrounds. Better to have research specialists that you can teach project management skills to than project managers with no research skills. Professional researchers would bring instant value to the Patient Voice research proposition and know instinctively what would take a language graduate years to learn on the job. The life sciences researcher or the linguist: which one is more suited to the project management of patient research? They should mirror the kind of staff that their own life-sciences clients have. Universities around the world produce hundreds of thousands of graduates specialising in qualitative and quantitative research in life sciences: go and get them!