In healthcare, the most valuable competitive signals live in public.
What patients say, what competitors do, and now what AI assistants tell your stakeholders: all of it is public, and all of it can be read. Starling reads it and answers the questions your team actually has.
Public intelligence for life sciences. Since 2011.What is public intelligence?
Public intelligence is what patients, consumers, healthcare professionals, and competitors say and do in the open: on social media, in forums, in patient communities, in press releases, in regulatory filings, and now in the answers AI assistants give. It is the fastest-growing source of competitive insight in healthcare, and it has three surfaces.
What patients say
Treatment experiences, questions, fears and the words patients actually use, in communities, forums and social media. The fastest-moving signal in healthcare, and the one most programmes miss.
What competitors do
Launches, partnerships, congress activity, hiring, advocacy moves. Every one of them leaves a public trace before it shows up in a sales number.
What AI tells your stakeholders
Which brands and products ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers name when a patient, a clinician or a payer asks, and which sources they cite. Measurable, monthly, and moving.
Starling captures these signals, classifies them with AI, checks them with people, and answers the questions your team actually has.
Selected Work
Five kinds of project we take on. Every case is anonymised; every one was contracted and delivered by Starling.
Competitive monitoring in reproductive medicine
Challenge
A consultancy needed a digital intelligence layer for an ongoing competitive monitoring programme spanning six companies across three continents, including Japan, where market moves appeared in Japanese-language sources weeks before English coverage.
Delivered
Continuous social media monitoring with AI-assisted classification across ten intelligence themes. Monthly briefings, share of voice analysis, alerts, and annual brand factbook contributions. Japanese-language monitoring that surfaced Asia-Pacific signals invisible to English-only programmes.
Result
The consultancy offers fully integrated digital intelligence without hiring social media analysts or licensing monitoring platforms. Signals that took weeks to surface now show up in the monthly read or an event brief.
A yearly benchmark of pharma on social media
Challenge
Pharmaceutical companies wanted to know how their corporate social media presence compared with their peers, on evidence rather than impressions.
Delivered
An annual benchmark series covering 28 companies and 31 accounts, 700,000 followers segmented into 55 audience groups, and a million posts classified by theme. A ranked report with the moves each company made year on year.
Result
Successive editions were bought by two of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies, and the segmentation method became the base of the classifier Starling still runs.
Building a pharma social analytics platform
Challenge
No off-the-shelf tool could classify healthcare social media conversations with the precision required: distinguishing physicians from patients, categorising by therapeutic area, and mapping influence networks across languages.
Delivered
A proprietary analytics platform ingesting millions of healthcare conversations, classifying users by role, and mapping influence networks. Served pharma clients across oncology, neuroscience, and rare disease with influencer mapping, campaign tracking, and competitive benchmarking.
Result
Five years of continuous operation. The methodologies and taxonomies developed became the foundation for Starling's current AI-augmented intelligence infrastructure.
Patient perspectives across the US, Europe and Japan
Challenge
A global pharmaceutical company needed to understand patient perspectives on a chronic skin condition and its complications: how patients in different markets discover information, manage risk, and make treatment decisions.
Delivered
A multi-market intelligence programme combining patient panel consulting with social media community analysis across US, European and Japanese patient communities. A persona-based method surfaced patterns beyond individual stories.
Result
The programme revealed gaps in patient information pathways that shaped the company's engagement strategy. Findings were structured for potential regulatory submission use.
What AI assistants tell patients about a therapy area
Challenge
A brand team asked a question their tracker could not answer: when a patient asks an AI assistant about their condition, which products does it name, and which sources does it trust?
Delivered
A monthly panel of unbranded patient questions put to three AI engines, each asked several times to average out chance, scored for which companies and products are named and which websites are cited. Added as a page to the monthly report next to social share of voice.
Result
A baseline the brand can move, and a list of the sources the engines actually cite, which is where visibility is earned.
Two founders. No hand-offs.
Starling GmbH is a Swiss-based public intelligence firm, founded in 2011. We started by building our own healthcare social analytics platform and have evolved through every generation of digital intelligence technology — from keyword monitoring to natural language processing to AI-augmented classification. Our work spans life sciences and consumer health, with particular depth in categories where patients and consumers talk openly online.
Nina leads Starling's Japan and Asia-Pacific intelligence practice and capability building programs. With Japanese fluency, active business relationships in Tokyo, and regular engagement with Japanese healthcare stakeholders, she provides the in-language coverage and cultural context that most Western intelligence firms cannot. Nina holds a U.S. CMA credential, an ICF coaching accreditation, and serves on the global board of the Institute of Management Accountants.
Kevin leads Starling's social media analytics and intelligence infrastructure practice. With 15 years of experience building healthcare social listening platforms and AI-augmented monitoring systems, he brings deep expertise in competitive intelligence for pharma, from Share of Voice analysis to real-time congress monitoring. Kevin operates Starling's social listening and AI classification pipelines across European, US, and Asian markets.
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Starling GmbH
Zurich, Switzerland
The person who reads this is the person who runs the work. Expect a reply from one of us, not a form letter.