Doctor, doctor, I think I’m a market researcher

Doctor, doctor, I think I’m a market researcher

Well, just ask yourself this question.

How easy is healthcare market research? Surely it’s very easy, because the hospital has already done the hard work for you. Find a ward for the medical condition you want to know about, sit down with a patient and make a start on your questions. Simple.

In case we didn’t make it obvious, this isn’t how to do market research. Try this method and you’ll end up in court faster than you can say ‘completely unethical practice’ or ‘call the police – we have a strange person with a clipboard’.

In fact, healthcare market research is the best way there is of promoting our services, since there’s lots of things here that other companies just can’t do.

And just why is that?

We have a roster of about 150,000 people who we can ask to take part in our research activities. Their backgrounds have all been checked really thoroughly. We’re sure that they’d be super reliable people for whatever project they’re asked to work on.

Since our database is huge, it means that we can select people for each task. Want to talk to fleet managers? We’ve got loads of them. Need to ask about whether ASDA is better than Sainsbury’s? No problem. Intstagram versus TikTok? So, so easy.

And that also includes healthcare professionals, from nursing assistants to hugely experienced surgeons. If you want a paediatric nurse to tell you how many children use their inhalers properly, we can find them. And if you need a hepatologist to talk about Hepatatis C, we know loads.

It gets more complicated when it comes to patients. We don’t come with handy labels that tell people what’s wrong with us. Nobody is called Beth Godfrey: Mild Asthma or Will Hancock: Broken Leg. But we can find loads of them with the conditions that your research wants to target.

And when it comes to more serious, life-limiting conditions, our researchers are all experienced people with high professional standards who are sensitive to the job they’re doing. They can get the information you need without ever losing sight of the fact they’re talking to real, live humans.

That’s great. But why would I want to spend money on this?

Simple. You wouldn’t design a product or a service without talking to the end user first, or at least finding out what they think. Unless, of course, you wanted to launch the medical equivalent of New Coke or Cheeto-flavoured lip balm.

By involving human factors – that’s people, to you and me – early in the process, you make sure that medical devices can be used by the people that they’re designed for. Even the most useful knee support or arthritis-friendly can opener will fail if nobody apart from your designers know how to use it.

And it’s the same with what the industry calls ‘healthcare experiences’. A really useful app designed to remind people when their clinic is taking place, and where, won’t be any use to seniors who don’t have smartphones or people who are visually impaired and navigate around the different functions – or even open it.

It’s only when you get in-person feedback that problems like this become obvious. We know that you’ve been told a million times how people live on their phones and your mum might have told you that nobody talks to each other anymore, but we do live in a very, very digital world. Don’t tell your mum, but sometimes having in-person feedback or listening to first-hand experiences can be useful.

When you’ve built that prototype knee support or can opener, there’s no substitute for having people in a room, using them. Somewhere between the noise of Velcro ripping off or cans of baked beans falling on the floor, there will be useful, usable information that makes your product or service better.

Is that all I get – some people in a room?

No. We work with healthcare professionals and healthcare users from every area. That helps us give you insights into every disease area and the impact of treatments or those healthcare experiences we talked about. And that means much deeper insights.

Focus groups and interviews are part of it. But we also do participant diaries, so you can see, in real-time, what impact you’re having. We do fieldwork as well, taking to experts, users, patients and carers to see what they think. And we do more involved research into the economics of particular solutions or outcomes to see whether they’re working.

This is all led by you. We aren’t healthcare professionals. As great as we are at doing what we do, we know that we’re not doctors. So we start by discussing what you need and look at ways to deliver it.

Then we draw up a screening questionnaire and using our database – as well as contacts across the industry – to find the people you want. And then we draw up a plan of how we’re going to get the information and share the participant profiles, so you know what’s going on.

Give me some examples, then

We can do that. There are two in particular. In the first one, we worked alongside a pharmaceutical company who were looking at people who were recovering from Hepatitis C – and who also inject drugs.

We set up a specialist panel with GPs and prison GPs, hepatologists and nurses, as well as pharmacists and outreach workers. Alongside participants on our own database, they gradually found new ones. We also spoke to various companies and experts, as well as using community forums, to find them.

It’s a sensitive subject, so we’re proud that we were able to put the company in touch with the people they needed to speak to – even though it was in a relatively confined geographic area and in a particular window of time.

The second one saw us working with a pharmaceutical company that was developing a new app for people with respiratory problems. It had a function that monitored how people were using their inhalers.

We had to find people with asthma and other breathing problems that used a wide range of different inhalers. And we also had to find respiratory consultants, GPs and respiratory nurses.

Yet again, we called on the in-house database to help, as well as using our reach on social media to find people who met the criteria. In the end, social media turned out to be a really useful tool, since it spoke pretty directly to people who had smartphones and who were comfortable using technology.

And in conclusion…

Those are two examples among loads. The most important thing is that you’re getting the expertise of a company you can trust. This means that alongside our experience, we always do the right thing.

For a start, we’re members of BHBIA, the British Healthcare Business Intelligence Association who have a set of strict ethical standards that govern what we do and how we approach it. And we do regular training – and by that, we mean regular, not just once a year when we’re quiet. It keeps us up-to-date with best practice.

So, if you want to research a healthcare device, a healthcare product or a healthcare service, Acumen are ready when you are. And we can solemnly promise that we won’t tell any more dad jokes.

✔️ We don’t just rely on the internet. We blend digital, personal, and on the ground strategies for high-quality recruitment.

✔️ We won’t just accept anyone. We ensure every participant is engaged, qualified and ready, willing and able to provide valuable insights.

✔️ We don’t forget that we’re dealing with people. Behind every data point, is a real person sharing their story.

✔️ Our database of healthcare users and professionals, as well as our contacts and social media presence, makes it easy to reach the people you need.

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