Webinar Introduction

Stigmatized conditions are likely to be underdiagnosed and undertreated - a missed opportunity for pharma to make a real difference to the lives of patients. Stigma affects a wide variety of conditions. It is characterized by perceptions of exclusion, rejection, and shame for patients. The impact of stigma can be psychological, physical, social, and emotional.

Stigma may reduce the likelihood of seeking diagnosis and treatment, and consequently worsen health outcomes. For example, a 2023 analysis of Oracle Life Science’s syndicated database, NHWS (National Health and Wellness Survey) showed that stigma was strongly correlated with lower rates of diagnosis, lower levels of treatment uptakes and poorer patient outcomes in diverse indications such as atopic dermatitis, Crohn’s disease, and endometriosis.

This is often attributed to the fact that people avoid or delay seeking treatment due to concerns about being treated differently.

There is a need to understand the unique drivers and barriers affecting patients coming forward for diagnosis and/ or treatment. There is also a need to understand physician response to those conditions to optimize openness to treat.

Because of the very nature of stigmatized conditions, our approaches to understanding them should reflect real world situations as closely as possible. However, stigmatised conditions can be uncomfortable for suffers to think about and discuss. This can make it difficult for research to uncover the full impact of stigma on perceptions, beliefs and behaviour.

Join us in this session where we will discuss how we use behavioral science-based methods to go beyond ‘traditional’ rational Q&A approaches in order to uncover the ‘hidden truths’ of stigmatized conditions, design interventions based on implementation science to increase diagnosis / treatment uptake and evaluate the impact of each.