Evaluating Patient Experiences in Dry Eye Disease Through Social Media Listening Research.

Social media listening (SML) is an approach to assess patient experience in different indications. This is the first study to report the results of using SML to understand patients' experiences of living with dry eye disease (DED). Publicly available, English-language social media content between December 2016 and August 2017 was searched employing pre-defined criteria using Social Studio In all, 2279 possible patient records were identified following NLP, which were filtered for relevance to disease area by analysts, resulting in a total of 1192 posts which formed the basis of this study. Of these, 77% (n = 915) were from the USA. Symptoms, causes, diagnosis and treatments were the most commonly discussed themes. Most common symptoms mentioned were eye dryness (138/901), pain (114/901) and blurry vision (110/901). Pharmaceutical drugs (prescription and over-the-counter; 55%; 764/1393), followed by medical devices (20%; 280/1393), were mentioned as major options for managing symptoms. Of the pharmaceutical drugs, eye drops (33%; 158/476) and artificial tears (10%; 49/476) were the most common over-the-counter options reported, and Restasis Insights revealed using SML strengthen our understanding about patient experiences and their unmet needs in DED. This study illustrates that an SML approach contributed effectively in generating patient insights, which can be utilised to inform early drug development process, market access strategies and stakeholder discussions. Novartis Pharma AG, Basel, Switzerland. Plain language summary available for this article.