Objectives

To develop a tool which allows the comprehensive mapping of the European Key Opinion Leader (KOL) over a range of topics pertaining to diagnostic testing, including antimicrobial resistance, sepsis and bloodstream infection.

Our approach

The first step to mapping European Key Opinion Leaders was to identify several appropriate sources for data mining. Once identified, this knowledge was then used to develop a data visualisation tool, with KOL identification and segmentation to enable the user at Becton Dickinson to understand, profile and segment KOLs.

Built by our Insight team, the tool included several viewing options:

  • How KOLs rank relative to one another in terms of their influence and their ‘connectedness’ within a community
  • How KOLs within a community rank relative to one another in terms of their experience in certain activities, including conference speaking and contributing to guidelines
  • ‘Fingerprints’ for the most important KOLs identified (one-page professional biographies combining publication history and other data, designed to provide indicators of subject matter expertise, to support the development of specific action plans by BD) insightful data visualisations (spider maps).

Outcome

We built a data visualisation-tool based on over 8,680 publications, 105 conferences, 125 societies, 800 guidelines and 20 journals. The mapping tool provided the global device manufacturer with information on over 87,450 KOLs, helping to save the client time and resources in their recruitment of any future KOL activities.