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 hospital, 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.
Patient 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
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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.