Every two weeks, I write the AlphaSense Healthcare Sector Spotlight: a short brief on the key debates driving healthcare markets. AlphaSense has everything I need to build these Spotlights, with content spanning across physician interviews, broker research and company filings, calls, and presentations. For a recent edition, I set out to answer whether muscle-preserving drugs would become routine for GLP-1 obesity patients. For this edition, the hard part wasn't finding opinions. It was pinning down where the consensus sat, who was out of consensus, and which views added something new.
As Director of Healthcare Research at AlphaSense, I'm responsible for the healthcare content in our platform’s expert transcript library. My team and I decide which topics and companies to cover, and which experts to interview. The Spotlight grows out of that work. Each issue frames one or two key debates through three lenses: Wall Street brokers, the companies involved, and the experts in our library. It then shows how users can leverage AlphaSense to understand what’s at stake and who's on which side of the debate. Each Spotlight issue is the basis for a 15-minute briefing I give our sales team, walking them through the debates live in the AlphaSense platform. The written Spotlight then gives the team concrete examples to share with prospects and customers, who also use it to get an edge in the market.
A Personal Assistant for Every Step
I use SuperAnalyst throughout my Sector Spotlight process.
SuperAnalyst helps me keep up with what’s new in the healthcare market daily: trial results, FDA decisions, deals, policy changes, and shifts in broker views. Before a Spotlight issue, SuperAnalyst pulls those developments together, including older ones still being debated, alongside what's coming in the next two to six weeks. I check which topics have seen a jump in broker and expert-call coverage, and if a strong topic needs more, we run additional interviews for the library.
I usually start with the same question for all my sources. SuperAnalyst searches across brokers, companies, and experts, as well as regulatory and clinical-trial data, in one go. I then ask for a shortlist of verbatim quotes from the source documents, and SuperAnalyst builds a first draft around the ones I choose — each quote linked to its exact place in the original, so I can check it in context. I run this project regularly, so once I found the exact steps I want to take for every Spotlight, I saved it as a skill. Now, every issue builds on our format and past findings rather than starting from scratch.
For my muscle-preservation Spotlight, most of my time went into two things: checking that the findings held up, and refining the draft. I questioned each conclusion against the sources and worked through the draft with SuperAnalyst, refining the debate question, tightening the background section, and sharpening each quote. SuperAnalyst automatically checked my changes against the sources as I went, flagging issues and suggesting improvements. The finished Spotlight found physicians and developers agreeing that muscle-preserving therapies would at least initially be limited to older, at-risk patients.
I know things are constantly changing, so the day before the issue went out, I asked what had changed since I drafted it, and SuperAnalyst not only flagged what was new, but automatically applied those changes to my finished draft. And because monitoring isn’t a one-time thing, a few weeks later, I checked back on each debate for a possible follow-up, knowing SuperAnalyst would be able to draft that in my voice and format if one was needed.
12 Hours of Work Down to 4
Before SuperAnalyst, building a Sector Spotlight issue took me about 12 hours, spread over two or three days. With SuperAnalyst, it takes about four hours, short enough to finish in one focused block. Plus, I can now draw on more source documents per issue, which makes the findings even more thorough and gives me more conviction in them.
For the muscle-preservation debate, SuperAnalyst covered all the relevant physician interviews from the past 90 days, along with research from more than a dozen sell-side firms, and earnings calls, conference transcripts, and press releases from six drug developers. Before SuperAnalyst, such a comprehensive review took 3x as long.
Less Time Drafting, More Time Applying Judgement
With SuperAnalyst, I’m now saving about eight hours an issue, or roughly 200 hours a year. That gives me time back for the core of my job: making sure we're asking the best experts the best questions at the right time, and growing our expert transcript library, including expanding internationally.
I would tell anyone producing recurring research to use SuperAnalyst across the whole process, not just for the first draft. In the case of Sector Spotlight, SuperAnalyst helps me pick the right debates, build on what I've learned, and stand behind every finding. The draft comes fast, but the judgment is still mine, and now I have the time to apply it.
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