Uncovered opportunities for earlier diagnosis and intervention
Editor’s note: Day One Strategy and Sanofi are finalists of the 2026 Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Research Project award, a category in the Quirk’s Awards. The winners of the awards will be announced on November 17 during a virtual celebration. To find out more about the awards, visit QuirksAwards.com.
Day One Strategy helped Sanofi develop a research program to identify where adults at risk of an autoimmune condition were slipping through the healthcare system. This research program earned the two organizations a spot as a finalist in the 2026 Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Research Project category, part of the Quirk’s Awards.
The goal of this project was to identify and help adults affected by this condition manage symptoms early. The team learned that because it is often viewed as a children’s condition, warning signs in adults can be attributed to more commonly diagnosed conditions, causing opportunities for earlier intervention to be missed.
Rather than relying on a traditional patient journey study, the research brought together patients, healthcare professionals and the systems around them to uncover where people hesitated, signs were overlooked and the healthcare system made it harder to act.
Coralie Noël, lead of global market research, growth assets at Sanofi, and Emilie Genero, senior research director at Day One Strategy, answered some questions about the project and the challenges involved, including how the team used qualitative research, behavioral science and AI tools to identify opportunities for earlier action.
Describe the healthcare project and how you identified opportunities for earlier action in the patient journey.
We helped Sanofi find the moments where adults at risk of an autoimmune condition were slipping through the healthcare system, instead of being identified and managed.
The condition is often considered to be a children’s condition. So, when an adult shows warning signs, these are often attributed to something more commonly diagnosed. The real condition can be missed and what could have been picked up early becomes a much bigger problem later, and Sanofi wanted to change that.
Normally, you would run a patient journey study, which means speaking to people who have been through the system, mapping what happened to them and finding the points where things could improve. But that only works when there is a clear journey to map.
Most of the people Sanofi needed to understand had no reason to think anything was wrong and that’s why we tackled the challenge differently.
We looked at patients, healthcare professionals and the systems around them – where people were hesitating, where professionals were missing the signs and where the system made it harder than it should be to act.
Those missed moments became a practical activation plan for Sanofi. Showing them where to focus, what to change and how to make acting earlier more likely. It moved this audience from a future ambition to a proper part of Sanofi's global and local planning. The research also established an internal blueprint that can be tailored to markets and other populations of interest and used across Sanofi’s organization to share insights and intervention priorities.
How did you determine which methods were best to use for this project?
The challenge wasn’t just about raising awareness as educational communication could have solved that. The problem was that people didn’t realize what was going on and healthcare professionals were not recognizing the signs. In addition, the healthcare system made it even harder to do anything differently.
The best approach had to connect those dots and show Sanofi what to do next.
Qualitative research showed how people understood changes in their health: what made them stop and think, what they ignored and what would be the reason to consult a doctor.
Behavioral science highlighted that people rarely do something just because they know they should, and healthcare professionals often stick to what’s known and familiar unless they have a clear reason to reconsider. We identified how to make action easier, quicker and worth it.
We also looked outside the therapy area, to borrow learnings on how to spot risk earlier, how to make people do what’s best for them before it becomes an emergency, and importantly, how to make all these steps feel normal.
Purpose-built AI tools organized the evidence, spotted patterns and tested ideas faster, while senior human expertise kept the work focused on what Sanofi could use.
What were some of the best practices used when recruiting research participants for this study?
The people we needed to include in the research did not sit neatly in one patient group. In fact, some were not even patients. Most didn’t describe what was happening to them in clinical terms, meaning that traditional medical language wasn’t going to work. We had to talk the way they talked, rather than how the system labelled them.
We used healthcare panels, community recruitment and digital channel to reach people across markets. A standard approach would have found people already visible in the system, but we wanted to find those who had been missed or were about to be.
The screener also asked about health history, emotional context and the key moments when someone noticed something was not quite right, put off doing something about it, asked for advice or moved through the system.
That meant that recruitment did more than hit sample quotas. We got a range of behaviors, assumptions and barriers that Sanofi needed to understand to build a more effective activation plan.