In healthcare, the most valuable competitive signals live in public.

Patients share treatment experiences in online communities. Competitors announce partnerships on social media. Clinicians discuss therapies in forums. Most intelligence programs miss these signals. We capture them, classify them, and deliver them as structured intelligence.

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. It is the fastest-growing source of competitive insight in healthcare.

In consumer-health-adjacent categories — fertility, women's health, dermatology, mental health, wellness, digital therapeutics — public conversations carry signals that proprietary databases and expert panels cannot capture. Treatment experiences shared in a Reddit community. A competitor's hiring patterns on LinkedIn. Patient advocacy groups mobilising around a policy change. Conference reactions in real time.

Starling captures these signals, classifies them using AI, and delivers structured intelligence your team can act on.

We work directly with life sciences and consumer health teams to build and run public intelligence programs. We also partner with CI and market research agencies as a specialist digital intelligence layer — providing the monitoring infrastructure, AI classification, and multi-market coverage they need without building it themselves.

15
Years of continuous healthcare intelligence
6+
Therapeutic areas monitored
3
Continents covered — Europe, Americas, Asia
4
Languages — English, German, French, Japanese

Capabilities

Monitor

Public Intelligence Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of competitor activity across social media, patient communities, and digital channels — curated by analysts with deep healthcare domain knowledge. We track what your competitors are doing in the public conversation and what patients, HCPs, and the market are saying about them.

Our healthcare-specific keyword taxonomies and therapeutic area classifiers took years to build. A raw social listening feed without this layer is data, not intelligence.

Ideal for: Life sciences teams needing ongoing competitive visibility, or CI agencies adding a digital monitoring layer to existing advisory engagements.

Build

Intelligence Infrastructure

We design and operate technology-enabled intelligence pipelines that automate collection and classification — so your analysts spend time on interpretation, not data wrangling. AI does the first pass on thousands of mentions. Human analysts do the second pass on the fifty that matter.

Starling built its first healthcare social analytics platform in 2012. We have been through every generation of this technology — from keyword matching to NLP to large language models — and we know what works in practice.

Ideal for: Pharma teams modernising their intelligence operations, or agencies looking to scale monitoring capacity without hiring data engineers.

Extend

Japan Public Intelligence

Most Western intelligence firms treat Japan as a black box. We open it. Our Japan coverage is led by a principal with native Japanese fluency, deep business relationships in Tokyo, and direct access to Japanese patient advocacy organisations, pharma news, and social media.

When a competitor launches a Japanese awareness initiative or shifts its APAC strategy, the first signals appear in Japanese-language sources — often weeks before English coverage.

Ideal for: Any intelligence program with a Japan blind spot, or companies competing in markets where Japan is a strategic priority.

Enable

Intelligence Capability Building

Training and workshops to build or strengthen your team's public intelligence capabilities. Social listening tool training, competitive taxonomy design, AI integration for CI workflows. Available as half-day, full-day, or multi-session formats.

Ideal for: Agencies and pharma teams building internal digital intelligence skills.

Selected Work

Public Intelligence Monitoring

Competitive monitoring in reproductive medicine

Challenge

A CI agency needed a digital intelligence layer for an ongoing competitive monitoring program 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, real-time alerts, and annual brand factbook contributions. Native Japanese-language monitoring that surfaced Asia-Pacific signals invisible to English-only programs.

Result

The agency could offer fully integrated digital intelligence without hiring social media analysts or licensing monitoring platforms. Signals that previously took weeks to surface were captured in near real-time.

Intelligence Infrastructure

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 & Community Intelligence

Patient perspectives across US, Europe, and Japan

Challenge

A global pharmaceutical company needed to understand patient perspectives on a chronic skin condition and its associated complications — specifically how patients across different markets discover information, manage risk, and make treatment decisions.

Delivered

A multi-market intelligence program combining patient panel consulting with social media community analysis across US, European, and Japanese patient communities. Persona-based methodology surfaced insights beyond individual patient stories.

Result

The program revealed significant gaps in patient information pathways, informing the company's engagement strategy. Insights were structured for potential regulatory submission use.

About Starling

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.

Kevin Michels-Kim
Kevin Michels-Kim
Co-Founder & Managing Partner

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.

Nina Michels-Kim
Nina Michels-Kim
Co-Founder & Managing Partner

Nina leads Starling's Japan and Asia-Pacific intelligence practice and capability building programs. With native 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.

Get in Touch

Thank you. Your message has been sent. We will be in touch shortly.

Starling GmbH
Zurich, Switzerland

For enquiries about public intelligence programs, capability building, or partnership opportunities.

Kevin on LinkedIn Nina on LinkedIn