Top Challenges in Healthcare and Pharma Market Research

When conducting market research in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors, you need access to the right information, as well as a way to separate relevant insights from extraneous noise. Maintaining a competitive advantage in this space means being the first to know of regulatory activities, new drug approvals, clinical trial pipelines, disease landscapes, BD&L, and commercialization decisions.

Unfortunately, traditional market research is a largely manual, time-consuming process. It involves toggling between different platforms, parsing through pages and pages of data to find relevant information, and simply reacting to market events rather than taking a proactive approach. This inefficient process results in too much time spent on searching and not enough spent on analysis and strategy, eventually leading to knowledge gaps and missed opportunities.

However, market research has been evolving over the last decade, and leading companies and investment firms are moving away from these outdated, manual methods. Instead, they are taking a more centralized approach to research and are using artificial intelligence to help them filter through the noise, inform more confident decision-making, and share market intelligence with their broader organizations.

Below, we dive into some of the top challenges facing knowledge workers when conducting traditional market research in the pharma and healthcare sectors — as well as the solution for each challenge.

Lack of Access to Specialized Knowledge

Relying on public, unvetted sources available on the web or news outlets is not enough in healthcare and pharma market research. You need access to premium, high-quality, differentiated sources that, together, give you a complete picture of the market landscape and help you get the competitive edge.

It’s also critical that the information you are accessing is up to date and reflects current market conditions. Breakthrough treatments, M&A deals, and clinical pipelines can move quickly and have lasting repercussions on the market, which is why you need to always be on top of new developments. Organizations without consistent exposure to definitive, premium sources are forced to rely on outdated information or consumer-grade AI tools, which limits the depth and credibility of their insights. Over time, this leads to poorer analysis and compromised strategic decisions, especially when competing against peers with broader intelligence coverage.

Solution

AlphaSense is a platform that stands out from the rest because it provides access to premium, specialized insights all in one place. In our platform, you will find:

• Healthcare news, industry reports, company reports, and regulatory content from sources such as PubMed, World Health Organization, MedlinePlus, and FDA
• Over 1,700 research providers including Wall Street Insights®, a premier and exclusive equity research collection for corporate teams (healthcare included)
• Expert call transcript library that offers access to over 240,000 investor-led interviews with experts (including with doctors and healthcare industry leaders)
• Standardized financials across thousands of public and private companies, detailed financial models, and M&A and funding data
• Company documents and filings, including earnings transcripts, company presentations, SEC and global filings, ESG reports, and press releases
• Live transcripts that allow users to view past, current, and upcoming event transcripts in a calendar, as well as view transcripts of ongoing events in real time

Fragmented Content and Knowledge Silos

Relying on data from disparate sources can lead to knowledge gaps, duplication of effort, and missing context — all of which impede the quality of your decision-making. Additionally, fragmented content creates knowledge silos that can undermine cross-functional alignment and lengthen research cycles. This can ultimately result in missed opportunities, especially in competitive or fast-moving therapeutic areas.

In order to see the full market landscape, act with confidence, and move at the speed that science and competition demand, healthcare and pharma teams need to have access to all the right knowledge in one centralized place.

Solution

AlphaSense provides unified access to broker reports, 10-Ks, earnings, KOL interviews, analyst forecasts, and clinical data. In addition to these sources, users can integrate and query their own internal content in AlphaSense alongside the premium external sources listed above. This includes:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• CIMs and investment memos
• VDRs
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Emails, newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds

By having access to premium external content alongside your firm’s internal knowledge, you can increase your research efficiency and ensure data integrity. Additionally, AlphaSense’s generative AI features, such as Generative Search and Generative Grid, allow you to quickly and easily pull insights from across all these sources so you can answer key questions, validate assumptions, and ensure you have a 360-degree view of the markets.

Since our AI only pulls from our premium external sources, as well as your own internal company data, you can be confident in the accuracy and verifiability of each insight.

Reactive Approach to Research

In healthcare and pharma, market dynamics shift quickly. New trial results, regulatory decisions, competitor pipeline updates, safety signals, and policy changes can all materially alter strategy. A reactive research approach means teams only investigate after something happens, leaving little time to shape strategy proactively. By the time insights surface, competitors may already be acting on them.

The much more effective approach is proactive research, but this necessitates having access to qualitative and quantitative data that together provide the context needed to make sense of market signals. It also often requires having a way to separate the signal from the noise — dialing into the relevant insights without getting bogged down by extraneous details.

Solution

AlphaSense is the one tool you need to take your research from reactive to proactive. Our AI technology understands your needs and recommends critical healthcare data sets, market trends, and emerging companies that are important to surface before your competitors do. You can also build customized dashboards and watchlists to track key competitors, and our platform will send you real-time alerts any time there is a key update or development.

Additionally, you can use our Generative Grid feature to build living matrices that track PBM mentions, market access, and competitive response across a set of competitors in real time.

Slow Speed to Insight

In fast-moving markets, being able to quickly surface and act on insights is a key competitive advantage. Yet for many healthcare and pharma companies, market research remains a slow, linear process.

Teams often spend valuable time searching for relevant information, validating sources, and synthesizing findings across multiple inputs before meaningful analysis can begin. By the time insights are delivered, market conditions may have already shifted, reducing their impact on decision-making. Modern life sciences teams need faster, more responsive workflows that enable continuous insight generation.

Solution

AlphaSense accelerates speed to insight by eliminating time-intensive manual search, aggregating all relevant life sciences content in one place, applying AI to understand and synthesize information, and automating the workflows that traditionally slow down research teams. Instead of spending days hunting for answers, pharma and biotech teams can uncover strategic insights in minutes — enabling the faster, more confident decisions needed in fast-moving markets.

A simple query in Generative Search can replace time-intensive, manual review of earnings calls, investor conferences, analyst reports, and expert opinions scattered across multiple sources.

For example, you can ask: “How does Merck’s oncology pipeline strategy compare to Pfizer’s, particularly regarding checkpoint inhibitors?”. In minutes, you get a direct comparison of clinical trial strategies and outcomes, positioning of therapeutic areas, and differences in commercialization and pricing approaches.

Long Diligence Timelines

Life sciences diligence can be time-intensive and expensive, often involving external consultants and manual synthesis of multiple earnings calls, clinical conferences, and analyst Q&A sessions. But a too-long diligence timeline can lead to missed opportunities, delays in decision-making, and ultimately, falling behind competitors.

To be on the leading edge, life sciences teams need ways to accelerate their diligence processes without cutting corners or sacrificing quality.

Solution

AlphaSense helps teams accelerate their diligence timelines by centralizing all key sources in one searchable database and by offering advanced AI features that synthesize, summarize, and surface the most relevant insights in seconds.

Let’s say you need to conduct early-stage diligence for potential investments in oncology diagnostics. Simply ask Generative Search to identify market drivers, growth outlook, and competitive intensity within oncology diagnostics. You can also leverage Deep Research to generate a detailed, strategic industry primer in minutes that clearly lays out competitive dynamics, recent M&A activity, and industry-specific macro impacts.

You can also use Generative Grid to rapidly uncover how competitors were addressing strategic opportunities and risks (such as regulatory shifts, payer hurdles, and clinical adoption), instantly identifying competitive differentiation points and investment risks.

Lack of Alignment Across Internal Teams

In the healthcare and pharma space, internal team alignment is crucial to ensure efficiency, mitigate regulatory risk, and drive cohesive decision-making across the organization. In industries that demand speed, precision, and compliance, misalignment can lead to weak strategy execution, blurred research objectives, conflicting interpretations, and unnecessary risk. Ultimately, this erodes decision quality and slows the organization’s ability to compete in fast-moving, high-stakes markets.

Modern life sciences teams need a way to share knowledge efficiently across their organization, as well as tools that make collaboration seamless rather than siloed.

Solution

AlphaSense makes it easy to share knowledge and collaborate across teams. Shared dashboards, saved searches, and alerts provide cross-team visibility into what colleagues are tracking, ensuring stakeholders stay aligned on critical developments. Features like Notebook+ and commenting enable teams to capture key insights and seamlessly share context with one another.

Most importantly, AlphaSense serves as a centralized intelligence hub — bringing together relevant external insights and internal knowledge in a single platform — so teams don’t have to toggle between systems or piece together fragmented information. And with AI-powered search surfacing the most relevant insights in seconds — across earnings calls, expert transcripts, clinical updates, regulatory filings, and internal documents — teams can move from information gathering to confident, coordinated decision-making faster.

Solve Your Market Research Challenges with AlphaSense

Life sciences organizations are facing increasing pressure to align across functions, accelerate diligence timelines, and act on insights before competitors do. AlphaSense helps leading healthcare and pharma organizations eliminate knowledge silos, centralize fragmented content, and access specialized intelligence — all within a single AI-powered platform.

By unifying external market data with internal expertise, AlphaSense empowers teams to move faster, collaborate more effectively, and shift from reactive research to proactive, insight-driven strategy.

See why 92% of the top life sciences organizations use AlphaSense. Start your free trial today.