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How a Medical Device Manufacturer used a Mobile Diary Study to Understand how their Product met the Needs of Audiologists and Patients?
Context
Technological innovation of medical devices continues to have positive impacts on the healthcare industry, healthcare professionals, and patients. Technological advancements within healthcare aim to provide technical solutions for most, if not all common ailments.
The power of hearing is something many of us take for granted, but for those that suffer from an impairment, it can have a massive impact on their lives. Audiologists play a key role in finding solutions and the rapid advances in technology have made hugely positive improvements to real lives.
The Challenge
We were approached by a client that specialises in medical devices for the treatment of hearing loss. Whilst technological advancements of audiological medical devices has benefited the treatment of hearing loss, there are a number of challenges. Previous research was conducted to understand the end user experience. Patients experienced the positive impacts of this technological innovation, but the added challenge involved a different stakeholder. This product life cycle required audiology consultants to use the product and understand how the medical device can be fitted. Additionally, audilogists needed to know how to use the accompanying software. This challenge highlights the importance of knowing your various personas and users of a product.
Consultants will typically use several different brands and versions of hearing aid. Others will develop brand loyalty to certain brands and stick with their tried-and-trusted preference.
Understanding the consultants’ user experience of our clients’ specific software, how they prescribed their device and how the patient reacted to it in the context of a consultancy room was still a mystery and that was the nature of the challenge they came to us to help resolve.
The Goals
The following represent some of the primary goals of their diary study research:
Develop a rich understanding of a day in the life of Audiology consultants, and how they use and interact with medical devices.
Capture the experiences and behaviors of consultants as the prescirbe, fit, and program the new hearing device.
Gather insights about the variety of hardware and software audiologists use across their working day.
The Solution
Engaging with healthcare professionals like medical consultants can always be difficult. From a research perspective, consultants may not be able to commit to face-to-face interview, or focus groups. In addition, they work with patients throughout the day and patient confidentiality is imperative. By adopting an unobtrusive qualitaitve research approach, our client wanted to work with Indeemo and design a diary study that would enable them to capture the day to day experiences of audiologists in the workplace without adding burden to them as research participants.
Indeemo also allowed for the researchers to recruit audiologists from other parts of the world at a cosst-effective manner. Ultimately, research participants were not required to attend interviews. Instead they used Indeemo to report on their day-to-day experiences and behaviours as they occured in real time
How Indeemo Helped?
Having consulted with our resident Medical Strategist, it was decided that the following represented the optimum route to proceed with.
Create a scheduled task list using the Indeemo app on their smartphones. This was used to gather photos and videos facilitating instant feedback on their devices, their software, patient interactions and consultancy wrap-ups.
One of our clients’ key reasons for adopting Mobile Ethnography was the ability to undertake multi-market research in an agile manner, from remote locations. On this basis, they went all-in with respondents in 6 markets, across 4 different continents. Indeemos’ ability to task in any language was critical to this.
As a time-poor demographic, our strategist also suggested keeping tasks short and concise and allowing them to complete the tasks throughout the fieldwork as the context arose. Time-poor, medical professionals are often the most invested and passionate respondents we see, so allowing this simple flexibility reaped rewards when it came to engagement.
The Outcome
The extensive market coverage meant that our client gained over 1300 insights from the everyday lives of 100 audiologists over 3 months of fieldwork. This access to consultancy rooms was unparalleled to anything our client had attained through traditional methodologies used previously. Whilst they had seen how consultants used their products in a controlled test environment, it was the first time they had seen a real-life practical application.
They also built a much deeper understanding of the routines, challenges and daily activities which impacted on audiologists and even their patients. Building empathy with users is crucial to the ongoing development of MedTech products and the bulk of raw provided would provide truly actionable insights.
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Summary & Conclusion
Qualtiative data can be difficult to analys. However, our client was able to leverage the Indeemo dashboard for effective qualitative data analysis. Trends and behavior patterns quickly emerged across the cohort of participants. The researchers uncovered a number of issues resulting from the adoption of the new medical device. Similar design issues that impacted the patient experience were also identified by the consultants.
Contact us
If you’d like to know more about how Indeemo can help you understand patient experiences, please get in touch to learn more.
