By Maxine Bookbinder 

April 28, 2015 | A new cell phone app, intertwining professional qualitative and quantitative analysis with home video narratives of clinical and medical experiences, is helping pharmaceutical companies improve clinical trials by listening—literally—to patients’ own voices.

Storyvine Health, a unit of Storyvine, Inc., a video technology company, created the video-based app, Storyvine, allowing patients to share stories, address key industry challenges and trigger data-driven improvements from their living room sofas. HealthiVibe, a company that works with pharmaceutical clients to capture valuable patient feedback and influence clinical trial design, has partnered with Storyvine for the purpose of creating a video-based survey tool and bringing actionable recommendations to their clients. The collaboration, entitled The Patient Experience, includes the access to the mobile app, content management platform, survey responses, professional video production services, and summary analyses.

The Storyvine platform, patented in 2015, is a structured video concept “designed to bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative in a meaningful way,” says Alex Holderness, executive vice-president and general manager of Storyvine. 

“The goal of the video surveys is to reduce time and costs by making clinical trials more patient-friendly, increasing recruitment and retention. This is a voice for clients at the protocol design level,” says Jeri Burtchell, Director, Patient Initiative, HealthiVibe. “It captures their voice inflection and facial expressions. The typed word never equals emotion and expression. It’s the next best thing to being there and asking questions in person.”

Both say that hand gestures, voice inflections, affect, smiles, grimaces, tears, and other facial expressions give color and emphasis not available in written responses. Holderness describes each survey question as “a discreet piece of content” that, when combined, tells stories that support other disease victims struggling with similar issues, pharma execs looking for trial feedback, or med students vicariously experiencing patient life.

“The human brain responds differently to video than text,” says Holderness. “We are hard-wired to cue into emotions, inflection, and perspective.” Researchers at the University of Chicago agree. In a series of experiments conducted by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder (and reported in the study The Sound of Intellect: Speech Reveals a Thoughtful Mind, Increasing a Job Candidate’s Appeal), readers were rated as more thoughtful, reasonable, intelligent, and competent when speaking text than when observers read the identical transcript, noting that “a person’s voice, it seems, carries the sound of intellect.”

The app, available on iOS, allows people with serious diseases to respond at their own pace, on their own phones or tablets, from the comfort—and privacy—of their own homes. “There is no [film] crew and no focus group leader” that can inhibit honest responses, says Holderness. “The fear factor is taken away.”

Clients, usually pharmaceutical companies, provide specific survey questions and demographic criteria. “The entire experience,” says Burtchell, “from log-in to summary analysis is custom-tailored to each client and the objectives for their project.”   Questions are delivered simultaneously to all survey takers worldwide, who are usually asked to complete them in one week. “This enables storytelling over the mobile app anywhere, anytime, in any language,” says Holderness.

Respondents for a particular survey are selected from a 10 million patient panel worldwide, who previously agreed to answer general survey questionnaires, ranging from shopping and customer service to healthcare. Once the respondents, who can range from healthy people who see their physicians yearly, to clinical trial participants, to patients with chronic and/or serious illnesses, are selected, they are given a project-specific user name and password to access The Patient Experience app. 

Selected respondents are asked to give 20-30 second video answers to each question, which they can review and reshoot if desired; original answers are deleted. The survey tool uses the native camera function of the iPhone, and once the response is uploaded over a secure server via the app, the video clips are instantly erased from the phone. Once a person hits “upload,” he cannot share it with friends, Facebook, or worry that a phone thief will see it.

Using HealthiVibe's research methodologies, the company makes recommendations to clients based on participant responses. The client also views videos, which is, says Burtchell, “what makes this type of interview so much more powerful that online or telephone interviews. While our clients gain insights, they feel connected with the people being interviewed because they can see and hear them.” Videos are stored on Storyvine’s secure server.

In addition to surveys, Storyvine also produces video compilations to provide doctors and trial sponsors with teaching tools that show firsthand what patients experience in various situations. “Clients and other professionals are more informed about living with disease from the patient perspective,” says Burtchell.

This is a win-win for the patient and pharma, says Burtchell. The surveys and recommendations help pharmaceutical clients become more patient-centric and produce more successful and cost-effective trials; clients hear firsthand what patients want and how to keep trial participants happy.  As a result, patients have a better experience and recruitment is quicker with higher retention. “The Patient Experience is a useful tool for infusing the pharmaceutical industry with patient feedback and helping clinical trials become more patient friendly."