Patient market research gathers direct feedback from individuals with specific health conditions about their treatment experiences, healthcare access, and unmet needs. Pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare organizations use these insights to develop better products, refine services, and improve patient outcomes.
Why Patient Market Research Matters
Patient perspectives shape how drugs are developed, how devices are designed, and how care is delivered. The data from patient research directly influences medical decision-making and affects real lives, which means quality cannot be compromised.
Patient insights drive:
- Treatment outcome improvements: Solutions designed around actual patient lifestyles and challenges perform better than those based on assumptions
- Effective healthcare communication: Understanding how patients talk about side effects, dosing concerns, and support needs improves everything from packaging to patient education materials
- Competitive differentiation: Companies that understand what patients actually experience gain advantages over those relying on clinical data alone
- Reimbursement and market access: Patient-reported outcomes increasingly influence value-based care decisions and payor approval
Patient research also reveals:
- Where the diagnosis-to-treatment process breaks down
- What patients prioritize versus what clinicians assume matters most
- Which pain points cause treatment discontinuation
- How patients compare competing products or services in real-world use
These insights support product development, regulatory submissions, pricing strategies, and marketing messaging. For pharmaceutical companies, patient data helps demonstrate value beyond efficacy numbers, showing how treatments fit into actual lives.
Patient Insights
When conducting patient research, you are often conducting research on patients with specific ailments to learn more about their patient journey, experience, satisfaction, and demands. Understanding patient experience is critical for healthcare companies who want to provide the best products and services for their consumers. Patients offer a unique perspective on the healthcare industry for quantitative market research because they experience ailments and treatment in a way that differs from healthcare providers and professionals.
Patient insight is valuable and has never been more important than it is right now. By tailoring treatments to the exact needs of patients, companies are better able to develop the right products for them and find the right drug, device, or treatment faster. When conducting your patient research, it’s crucial to get the best quality data for your insights because these insights are used in medical decision-making every day and directly impact the quality of patients’ lives.
Recruiting patients for both quantitative and qualitative market research has presented a challenge over the past few years, especially through clinical trials. Healthcare sample can be very difficult for many reasons, including low incidence rates, small sample pools and challenging targets whose top priorities are not often survey participation. We have over 20 years of experience identifying, vetting, and managing a strong network of healthcare sources and have fine-tuned a method that can help you reach these challenging audiences.
Patient market research can fall into 2 categories: healthcare manufacturers or hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry.
Patient Research - Healthcare Manufacturers / Hospitals
For healthcare providers, hospitals, healthcare manufacturers and others in the healthcare industry, patient research can be key to gathering insights on a variety of topics that can help their organization.
These insights can be key to understanding:
- Pricing strategy
- Product or brand performance
- Customer loyalty / satisfaction
- How product / service / brand compares to competition
- Marketing and advertising strategy / messaging
Patient Research - Pharmaceutical Industry
The goal of patient market research is different for pharmaceutical companies than it is in the healthcare industry. The pharmaceutical industry is striving to understand not only the needs of patients, but also the lives of patients, and how their treatments or potential treatments impact them.
Pharmaceutical companies are looking for insights from patients regarding:
- Ease of obtaining medications
- Dosage instructions
- Side effects of medications
- Positive outcomes
- Promotions / advertising
- Taking medications as intended
- Opinions of the company that manufactures pharmaceuticals
- Customer loyalty to medicine / pharmaceutical / organization
These insights become especially valuable during product development, when incorporating real-world feedback early can prevent expensive redesigns later. For more on how patient research integrates with development timelines, see our guide to market research for new product development.
The Challenge of Recruiting Patient Respondents
Healthcare sample presents distinct difficulties compared to consumer or B2B market research. Patients dealing with serious conditions don’t prioritize survey participation. Recruitment challenges include:
- Low incidence rates: Many conditions affect small populations, making qualified respondents hard to find
- Limited sample pools: Rare diseases or specific treatment histories further constrain available respondents
- Sensitive topics: Patients may be reluctant to discuss conditions or treatments they find embarrassing or emotionally difficult
- Survey fatigue: Patients managing chronic conditions already face heavy administrative burdens
These obstacles require specialized recruitment strategies and access to deeply profiled patient panels.
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How To Conduct Patient Market Research
Patient market research requires people to put a larger focus on themselves – unlike normal consumer or business-to-business research. This is due to the sensitive nature and/or difficultly of the topic of this research.
It requires a certain skill to coax patients into providing insights into their attitudes, behaviors, motivations, feelings, and opinions about their ailment, medications, healthcare service, provider, etc.
There are multiple approaches that can be used, but all fall into two categories: Quantitative Research and Qualitative Research.
Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is a good option to gather feedback from a larger audience. Some examples of quantitative patient research include:
- Online Surveys
- Diaries
- Ethnographic studies
- Wearable technology
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is a good option to gather deep, richer insights from a smaller group. Some examples of qualitative patient research include:
- Personal Interviews
- Focus Groups
EMI’s Network
Our global network of sample partners gives you access to one of the highest-quality pools of healthcare respondents– including patients. Finding a needle in a haystack is much easier when you know exactly where the needle is. When conducting patient research, we use the most highly targeted consumer panels in the industry to ensure we can deliver the correct ailment groups from the very start.
Example of Target Ailments
- Acid Reflux
- Allergies
- Arthritis
- Asthma
- ADD/ADHD
- Back Problems
- Chronic Pain
- Crohn’s Disease
- Diabetes Type 1 & 2
- Eating Disorders
- Eczema
- Fibromyalgia
- Headaches/Migraines
- Heart Problems
- High Blood Pressure
- High Cholesterol
- Menopause
- Mental Disabilities
- Obesity
- Osteoarthritis
- Osteoporosis
- Pregnancy (By Week)
- Psoriasis
- Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Seizures
- Sight/Hearing Disabilities
- Sinus Problems
- Sleep Disorders
Our Approach to Data Quality
EMI’s commitment to quality comes from our extensive industry knowledge and our drive to deliver unbiased, actionable quantitative data tailored to the needs of our clients. To do that, we have built a multi-faceted suite of quality measures, including both technology and human elements, to provide the highest quality patient data possible.
Our overall data quality process plays a role in every stage of our sample plan construction. We begin our quality process early on when vetting and assessing potential panel sources for potential inclusion in the EMI network. Each sample provider added to our network goes through a rigorous assessment process where only 33% are approved and admitted.
We manage each study through our proprietary sample management platform, SWIFT. It combines industry-leading digital fingerprinting, along with Geo-IP blocking, as well as the best fraud and bot detection technology hard coded into our platform. (i.e., SampleChain, MaxMind, DB-IP, FraudLabs, etc.) Our internal algorithm sets a threshold level for fraud and if a respondent has been flagged for too many fraudulent behaviors, they are blocked.
You can learn more about our overall approach to quality here.
Quantitative & Qualitative Patient Research Methods
Quantitative Methods
Quantitative methods allow you to gather broad feedback from large numbers of patients. Typical tools:
- Surveys (online, mobile) of specific patient populations
- Patient diaries or frequent check-ins to track symptoms or adherence over time
- Wearable or digital devices to collect objective data on activity, biometrics, or treatment adherence
- Large-scale patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs)
Pros:
Scalable, statistically robust
Easier to compare across segments or over time
Enables quantification (e.g. % of patients with X challenge)
Cons:
Less depth; may miss nuanced patient experience
Responses may be superficial or influenced by recall bias
Scaling can increase cost and time, especially for rare diseases
Qualitative Methods
Qualitative methods dig deeper into feelings, motivations, and real-world behaviors. Useful tools include:
- In-depth interviews (in person or virtual)
- Focus groups with patients or caregivers
- Ethnographic observation or patient shadowing (where possible)
- Diary studies or patient stories to uncover lived experience
Pros:
Rich, nuanced understanding of patient feelings & motivations
Ability to explore unexpected themes or insights
Useful for ideation, designing patient materials, messaging
Cons:
Smaller sample sizes; less generalizability
More time-intensive and potentially costlier per insight
Analyzing qualitative data requires specialist skills
Ready to elevate your patient insights?
FAQs
What is patient market research?
Patient market research collects information directly from individuals with specific health conditions. It focuses on their actual experiences, including symptoms, treatment effects, access to care, side effects, adherence challenges, and what matters most in their healthcare decisions. Unlike clinical data, patient research captures the real-world context that influences treatment success.
Why is patient market research important for pharmaceutical companies?
Patient research helps pharmaceutical companies understand how medications perform outside controlled trial settings. It reveals side effects that matter most to patients, identifies adherence barriers, informs patient support program development, and validates messaging relevance. These insights influence regulatory submissions, reimbursement negotiations, and commercial positioning.
How do you recruit patients for research, especially for rare conditions?
We use several approaches for patient recruitment:
- Strategic sample blending across multiple vetted healthcare panels increases reach
- Deep profiling on ailments and treatment history targets respondents precisely
- Global partner network of 150+ sources provides access to diverse patient populations
- Flexible methodologies, including remote participation
- Collaboration with patient advocacy groups (where appropriate) improves recruitment for rare conditions
With 20+ years of managing healthcare sample, we’ve refined our ability to reach low-incidence populations while maintaining data quality standards.