Treato, the source of "patient voice" intelligence, has announced the new version of its Treato Pharma platform for pharmaceutical companies and agencies.

Treato's proprietary big data technology platform extracts real-time patient insights about drugs, conditions and treatments from over 1.5 billion health-related discussions posted on thousands of blogs, forums and communities online. Customers have access to aggregated data about patient experiences, perceptions and attitudes. Treato Pharma's analytics capability then turns this information into insights for understanding patient decision making, switching behaviors and competitive opportunities.

Features include:

• Executive access: driving patient-centric decision-support. A set of new capabilities helps bring the patient voice into the executive suite, including an intuitive dashboard interface that provides centralized access to the most important patient insights and trends, and automatic email updates about brand-related topics.
• New domains of deep patient analytics: delivering unprecedented brand insight. New data mining algorithms automatically identify competitive gaps within a drug category and offer granular-level insights about drug switches to and from competitive brands. Advanced search capabilities enable additional research around specific sought-after parameters.
• Pharma savvy: streamlining key work processes. Enhanced user interface and new integrated features provide easy access to information across teams and client-agency partnerships, including data export to Excel, general drug information, extensive help tools, and email sharing of key patient insights from within the Treato Pharma system.

According to a 2012 social media report by PwC's Health Research Institute, 42% of consumers have used social media to access health-related information, including consumer reviews of treatments, with another 25% posting about their own health experience. The study suggests that companies can benefit from integrating the insights available about their products and services through social media into their business strategies. The PwC study was based on a survey of 1060 U.S. adults.

Treato Pharma leverages Treato's experience in Natural Language Processing, medical ontologies and big data analytics infrastructure to translate massive amounts of unstructured user-generated content (UGC) by patients and caregivers into meaningful brand insights. These are delivered via data visualization tools like drillable infographics, charts and graphs.