Move Your Marketing Research Efforts into the 21st Century

by Alan Shoebridge

They have been living in the online era for nearly two decades, but many healthcare organizations still rely heavily on research methods from the 1950s – printed comment cards, telephone surveys, and focus groups. If you haven’t updated your research with tactics from this century, now is the time to go digital.

Providence Health & Services, Oregon, launched its first online surveys and focus groups in 2009. The health system’s approach pro­vides useful information that guides marketing and operations decisions.

“As the healthcare world grows in­creasingly complex, we’re seeing more need to better understand our patients,” says Marcia Williams, chief public affairs and marketing officer for Providence Health & Services, Oregon. “Being able to say, ‘This is what our patients want,’ adds value to what a marketing department can do for a healthcare system. With shrinking marketing staffs and budgets, it’s crucial to become more than just ‘the department that does ads.’”

Getting started

The genesis of Providence’s online research revolved around a couple of key gaps. First, it wanted to know more about what a patient’s experi­ence was really like – from request­ing an appointment to getting an exam to receiving follow-up care. Although patient surveys, such as those from Press Ganey, tell part of that story, the number of responses for each physician is small, many physicians don’t trust the results, and there is no chance to explore issues on a deeper level. Second, the health system wanted a reliable, consistent way to engage patients in conversa­tions that go beyond 140-character posts on social media.

Using email to reach out to existing patients was the obvious choice, but thinking about the questions to ask, the number of responses required, and the ways to follow up with participants proved more difficult.

Log in below to access this content: