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How a healthcare research consultant used pre-tasking for contactless research with at risk patients suffering from a long-term illness
Researching the everyday lives of patients is critical when it comes to developing treatments and services that minimize suffering and save lives.
Traditionally, healthcare research relied on in-person methodologies such as focus-groups, in-depth interviews or in person observations.
However, the risk associated with in-person research has forced healthcare researchers to adopt safer, contactless ways of researching the needs and experiences of caregivers and patients with rare diseases.
Using Mobile Ethnography either as a standalone research methodology or as a qualitative pre-task for virtual focus groups and in-depth interviews.
The research challenge: engaging patients and caregivers
When our client approached us, they were trying to understand the lives of patients with a particular long-term illness.
In order to truly empathize with these patients, they had planned to conduct in-home interviews with each patient and use focus-groups at a central location to engage with their caregivers.
However, given the health risks associated with conducting research in-person with rare disease patients, the client mandated that all research should be conducted in a contactless manner.
Synchronous or asynchronous (or both)
Concerned that virtual in-depth interviews and online focus groups alone would not surface the richness they needed to truly understand the everyday realities of their target respondents, the client contacted us looking for advice on how best to address the research brief.
Given the long term nature of the illness and the need to truly understand the context of these patients and caregivers, our client felt that a more longitudinal approach was needed in order to “stretch the timeline” of the research and give them more time to surface the unknown unknowns that are extremely hard to uncover in synchronous qualitative research approaches such as IDIs or Focus Groups.
The research goals
The objectives of the research brief were to:
Get to know the rare disease patients more intimately so that the client could better empathise with their symptoms and needs
Get a richer more contextual insight into the daily lives of patients suffering from this particular long-term illness
Understand how supporting a patient with a long-term illness impacted the lives of family and caregivers
The Solution: qualitative research pre-tasking
When our client approached us, we were confident that adopting an asynchronous online qualitative research methodology (in this instance pre-tasking) and augmenting this with IDIs and Focus Groups for a subset of the respondents was the best approach for this particular project.
Because the rare disease patients would have access to their mobile phones throughout the entire study, they would be able to give in-the-moment feedback on what they were feeling and experiencing and the impact living with this long term illness had on their lives.
Furthermore, the consistent feedback we receive from our clients is that healthcare research respondents are more likely to be honest and open about their illness when they were recording their responses in private versus chatting face to face with a researcher.
20 Respondents
12 Tasks
2 Weeks
Tasking Strategy: Scheduled Tasking
Working with Indeemo, our client created 2 task lists (one for Patients and one for Caregivers) assigning 12 scheduled tasks to the respondents over the course of 2 weeks.
Much of the first week was exploratory and focussed on understanding the daily routines and rituals of respondents when it came to living with the disease. Tasks focused on getting to know the participants, their home / care environment, their support network etc.
The second weeks tasks was much more specific in terms of tasks and zoomed in on specific activities such as symptoms, diet and medication.
By splitting the respondents into 2 groups, our client was able to get the perspective of both the patient and the caregiver and was able to cross reference the insights surfaced from specific tasks / activities such as meal time, the taking of medication and arranging visits to physicians.
“With private, asynchronous research methodologies such as Mobile Ethnography, there is literally no one else in the room when the research happens. As a result, participants tend to share much more intimate feedback than they might do face to face with a researcher.” ”
Over the course of the 2 weeks, respondents uploaded almost 1,000 videos, photos and notes giving media rich, in-the-moment insight into how they lived with their condition.
This gave our client a far more in-depth and authentic insight into the lives of their respondents.
As respondents uploaded their responses, our client was also able to build up trust and rapport with respondents using Indeemo’s in-the-moment comment / probing feature which allowed them to correspond in real-time.
By pre-tasking the respondents and engaging with them in this manner, they built a better relationship with respondents by the time they conducted focus-groups and IDIs with them.
The pre-task can also be the screener
Furthermore, because our client had the time and ability to really get to know the research participants over the 2 weeks of qualitative pre-tasking, they were able to identify which research participants best fit their target segmentations.
This allowed them to conduct a second round of screening and, via their qualitative research recruiter, were able to identify which subset of respondents they wanted to carry forward to the online focus groups and IDIs.
This significantly increased the quality of the synchronous research phase that followed and ensured that every respondent that they brought into the online groups and IDIs (in which the client had backroom access) were both authentic, actively engaged and a strong fit for the research brief.
This strategy of using Indeemo to act as a second level, longitudinal screener is something we are encouraging actively now as it maximises the ROI of any synchronous research approaches that proceed after pre-tasking is completed.
Keeping sensitive data safe
At Indeemo, we are fully aware of the stringent confidentiality and security requirements in the healthcare industry. We take these regulations very seriously and have taken the necessary measures to ensure that we comply with them. Indeemo is in compliance with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and is ISO 27001 certified. To further protect respondent and patient privacy, Indeemo offers anonymous email options and push notifications, eliminating the need to store names or email addresses within our platform.
GDPR Compliant
Information Security
Enterprise Ready
HIPAA & ISO 27001 Accredited
Contact Us
Indeemo has been used successfully for pre-tasking and post-tasking across a wide range of healthcare and pharmaceutical scenarios in both B2C and B2B contexts.
Pre-task assignments can last as little as 10-20 minutes or can go on for 1-2 weeks.
Clients consistently tell us how much more productive their face-to-face sessions are as a result of getting to know respondents through Indeemo before they meet in person.
If you’d like to discuss how we can evolve your current research offering, please get in touch now.
