PATIENT RESEARCH
One of the most important areas of healthcare market research involves the actual study of patients. Certain information can only be obtained by directly asking questions of, or observing them or their caregivers. For example:
- Is their therapy performing as expected?
- Were there any unanticipated issues or concerns?
- At what stage of treatment did they appear?
- Have they been resolved?
The pharmaceutical industry must have an understanding of patient needs, their lives, and how treatments affect them.
Understanding the patient journey can create a competitive advantage.
How to conduct patient research
Unlike much research that centers on a company or its products or services, patient research requires that people focus much more on themselves. As such, the topics very often will be quite sensitive and difficult to discuss with others, especially with strangers.
To get patients to reveal their beliefs, attitudes, feelings and motivations regarding their medications, pharmaceutical providers, healthcare professionals or caregivers requires a certain skill.
There are a number of experienced and qualified third party market research firms that can be valuable resources, i.e. they can help to clarify your objectives; recruit appropriate candidates, panels, or support groups for a study; employ a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, and analyze their findings.
If your company is global, you may want to hire several research firms in different parts of the world. Alternatively, there are companies with multicountry locations and translation capabilities that allow for greater consistency and control over the methods used to collect and present results.
One can use many approaches, alone or in combination, to identify the insights needed to succeed in the marketplace. Below are some of the more common ones.
What to expect
Patient research should provide insights that can help your company in many ways. Here are just a few examples: