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The operator of a local medical information website is branching out into a new startup that is building a web-based, medical market research business. It will include a free companion research tool that will focus on tracking people's experiences during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
David Edelman, who has since 2005 run Diabetes Daily, is creating Thrivable Insights, a platform for what he calls rapid response marketing for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. It will conduct surveys, focus groups and even telephone interviews.
The new business was a response to a question from an advertising client who was looking for market research software and asked Edelman, "Why can't I just text people and get answers? Why is this so hard?"
Edelman looked for an existing product but came up empty.
"We were shocked that the whole process of doing market research was manual, slow, archaic," he said on a Zoom interview. "And we thought, 'Well someone's probably fixed this. Let's go get some software.' We went out and looked: There is no software that automates all this."
It turns out that the hospital and health care industries have been slow to keep pace with changes in market research. A 2018 report by Modern Healthcare, a sister publication of Crain's Cleveland Business, said that, historically, consumer research has not been highly regarded by hospital administrators.
Then came the pandemic, and Edelman and his partner and wife, Carrie Gladstone, started thinking about how what they were working on could help the situation. Alongside Thrivable Insights, which is in beta testing, the...