GCC Pharma Primary Research: Market Access Intelligence for an Oncology Client
Designed and ran a primary research program for a GCC pharma client, sourcing key opinion leaders independently to surface market access insights.
Gaurav Gugnani
Associate 2 at PwC Acceleration Centers
From their time as
Strategy Consultant
Healthark • 2024 - 2025
Overview
Gaurav took on this engagement as one of his first projects at Healthark Insights, supporting a large pharma client from the GCC region on their oncology business unit. The client wanted to understand how a competitor drug with multiple indications was navigating market access in the region, including how it was being prescribed and what was driving healthcare professional preference.
The Story
Gaurav took on this engagement as one of his first projects at Healthark Insights, supporting a large pharma client from the GCC region on their oncology business unit. The client wanted to understand how a competitor drug with multiple indications was navigating market access in the region, including how it was being prescribed and what was driving healthcare professional preference.
He designed the questionnaire from scratch, building separate question sets for different stakeholder groups: healthcare professionals, payer representatives, and industry contacts. Each set was tailored to surface the specific intelligence the client needed, while keeping the survey anonymous to protect respondent identity.
The harder part was finding the right people to interview. Healthark engaged an external interviewing agency to help source candidates, but the profiles they provided did not meet the quality bar. Gaurav independently identified key opinion leaders in pharma across the GCC region, researching profiles, reaching out personally on LinkedIn, explaining the anonymous nature of the exercise, and managing the documentation required to secure their participation.
Interviews ran as video calls of thirty minutes to an hour each. Gaurav prepared all questions and was present on every call alongside his manager and the director. Once the sessions were complete, he compiled all findings into a strategic brief, drawing out the insights that most directly answered the client's market access questions and presenting them alongside secondary research to show where the two aligned or diverged.