The Importance of Market Research in the Healthcare Industry
Seemingly every day there’s headline news about a scientific breakthrough in the healthcare industry, from new vaccines and medications to cutting-edge treatments that promise to change the lives of millions. And while it doesn’t grab headlines quite as often, the healthcare industry is also rapidly evolving when it comes to how it interfaces with consumers. Whether it’s a health insurer and its members, a healthcare provider and their patients, or a health technology company and its customers, shifts in consumer behavior and rising expectations have spurred operational and marketing changes that touch nearly every American.
What is Healthcare Market Research and Why is it Important?
Market research, at its core, is about understanding the needs, attitudes, perceptions, and expectations that drive consumer behavior so you can leverage these insights to make business decisions. In the healthcare industry, market research informs decision-making around things like:
Branding + Marketing - Who are the various segments of consumers we should be marketing to? How should we position our brand to resonate with them? What messages will motivate patients/ members/ users to act in a way that creates value for the organization?
Product Development - What solutions will benefit patients/ members/ users and improve their health outcomes? How do they experience this solution? How can/should it be optimized to encourage adoption and use?
Patient/ Member/ User Experience - What is the current state of the experience? Where are their pain points? How can we improve the experience to increase satisfaction and loyalty?
The methodologies deployed in healthcare market research vary depending on what you’re trying to learn and ultimately do with the research. Primary research methods include things like focus groups, ethnography, and surveys, while secondary research methods involve analyzing existing data. At Campos, before we decide what the right research methodology is, we focus on clearly defining the objectives of the research. That ensures we design a project that will ultimately produce the research insights our clients need to make informed decisions.
And that’s really what market research is about, whether it’s patient market research or market research with other healthcare populations. In the absence of research, decision-makers are left to their own devices, creating brands, products, and experiences that they think will resonate with and work well for consumers. But basing major decisions on intuition and assumptions is risky, with potentially very costly implications. Forgoing market research poses the risk of targeting the right people with the wrong message, targeting the wrong people altogether, bringing products to market full of pain points, rolling out brands that feel inauthentic, and so on. Talk about a waste of time and money!
Primary Healthcare Market Research
As mentioned above, we always start any market research project by clearly defining the objective of the research. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve or the goal you want to achieve? Once you’ve determined the objective of the research, the next steps are to identify the target audience for the research and then determine the right research methodology.
Often that first part, identifying the target audience for the research, is the easier part. In the healthcare industry, for example, we’ve conducted patient market research focused on groups like pregnant women, people with certain chronic healthcare conditions, and people over 65. The second part, identifying the right research methodology, can be trickier.
First, you need to determine if you can use existing research and data to answer your key research questions (“secondary research”), or if you’ll need to conduct a new study to produce data and insights (“primary research”).
Primary research can take many forms, and we advise on the right approach depending on our client’s objectives, target audience, timeline, and budget:
Qualitative research is often done to understand how respondents view the world and your organization (and its products or services) through interviews, focus groups, ethnography, shop-alongs, user testing, and more. Qualitative research—or research that comes from conversation and observation—is about going beyond the surface level to understand the “why” behind consumer behavior.
Quantitative research is used when statistical validation is critical. Quantitative research refers to collecting and analyzing numerical or statistical data—think surveys and large datasets—and allows you to form a validated understanding of consumer behavior and opinions. Segmentation surveys, which allow you to identify and understand the distinct segments of consumers in a given market, are one example of quantitative research.
Product trials are a mixed-method approach that allows you to gain deeper insights into your offering or product from a group of research respondents.
Secondary Healthcare Market Research
However, as noted, sometimes you don’t need to conduct primary research. Sometimes there’s existing data that can be mined and synthesized to answer our key research questions. Sources of secondary data and research include:
Existing patient/ member/ user data
Publicly-available data, such as government data (e.g., the Census, studies from the US Department of Health and Human Services) or published data from reputable sources (e.g., KFF, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)
Syndicated consumer and industry research reports (e.g., Mintel, IBISWorld)
Often secondary research will answer some but not all your research questions, necessitating further primary research.
The Benefits of Market Research in Healthcare
When healthcare organizations make market research-informed decisions, it greatly benefits both the organization and the end consumer.
On the organization side, market research helps prevent costly missteps (e.g., rolling out an ad campaign that doesn’t resonate with people) and ultimately creates value for the organization. Sometimes that value is increased revenue (e.g., attracting more new customers), sometimes it’s more efficient spending (i.e, better marketing targeting leads to less waste), and sometimes it’s outcomes that are strategically important to the organization and its mission (e.g., better healthcare outcomes for members/ patients/ users).
For the end user, market research produces brands, products, and experiences that better meet their wants and needs. Research allows organizations to create and optimize products and experiences that can make people healthier, happier, and more satisfied.
Below are a few more use cases for healthcare market research and how they can benefit organizations and members/ patients/ users.
Refreshing a Brand Strategy
A strong brand has the power to forge a connection between a consumer and an organization, ultimately driving them to want to choose your brand over another. Marketers in the healthcare industry understand better than anyone that insurers and providers need to differentiate from one another and speak to their ability to uniquely meet the needs of consumers. This begs the question—which consumers? And what are their needs? What are my organization's strengths that we can play to? And what sets me apart from my competition? That’s where market research comes in.
Testing Messaging
Whether it’s a hospital’s new ad campaign, a health insurer's new member brochure, or a health tech company’s latest user guide, healthcare organizations produce an immense amount of content designed to resonate with and be easily understood by consumers. But not all content produced lands with consumers the way it’s intended to, which is why it’s important to test this messaging before putting it out in the market.
Identifying Barriers to Accessing Healthcare
Many healthcare organizations are focused on improving health outcomes, and key to that is understanding barriers to accessing care. Healthcare market research can help organizations identify what those barriers are for various populations, illuminating frictions related to geography, economics, chronic conditions, and more. Our research projects are often designed not just to surface barriers, but to identify and test possible solutions.
Improving Operations and Services
Market research focused on the member/ patient/ user experience can map the current state of a customer journey and identify parts of the journey in which customers experience pain points, like delays or confusion, that ultimately lower satisfaction and hurt a customers’ relationship with an organization. For example, healthcare providers can conduct market research focused on the patient journey for people experiencing particular conditions, from diagnosis to treatment to recovery. Where are there wait times that could be lessened or avoided? When is there fear or anxiety that should be addressed head-on? What takes more time than it should (e.g., scheduling appointments, getting test results)? Ultimately experience insights allow decision-makers to improve operations and services to better serve consumers.
Using feedback to increase satisfaction
Measuring and tracking customer satisfaction is just as important to healthcare organizations as it is to other consumer-facing brands. Often these organizations partner with research vendors like Campos to field customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis, assessing satisfaction with various touchpoints they might have had with the organization. With that quantitative data in hand, healthcare organizations can then dive deeper into the satisfaction findings using qualitative research to understand the “why” behind the numbers. This quantitative and qualitative feedback is critical for informing improvements to products, services, and experiences that will ultimately help increase satisfaction levels.
Evaluating Interest in New Products and Programs
Healthcare organizations focused on improving health outcomes often develop new products and programs to help achieve that. Healthcare market research can help identify opportunities for new products and programs by identifying unmet needs or barriers that need to be overcome. Once a solution concept has been developed, market research can also be used to evaluate interest in it. For example, a health insurer may develop a wellness program or app aimed at helping people with a particular condition but before they spend any time or money developing the program or app, they need to assess if the intended audience wants this solution and if they’re likely to use it.
Tips for Conducting Healthcare Market Research
To recap, there are a couple keys to a successful market research project:
Identify the problem or goal you’re trying to solve or reach. Start by asking yourself what you’re looking to do. For example:
Develop a new brand or marketing strategy?
Refine a new or existing product?
Improve or innovate a customer experience?
Just as important, why are you looking to do these things? Maybe it’s about breathing new life into a stagnant legacy brand or ensuring a product is intuitive to avoid losing users once acquired. You must know what you ultimately want to do with the research and why that’s a priority for the organization.
Identify the Target Audience: Who will be the subject of your research? The study should be designed to gather insights from people representative of that group. (Not sure who you should/could be targeting with your product? We can help with that!)
Design your research approach around your objective. Choose one methodology or a combo from the ones outlined above based on different purposes and outcomes.
If you have no idea which methodology is right for you—don’t panic! A good market research partner will advise you on the best approach based on your goals, budget, and timeline.
Build a strong foundation for the research based on what you already know. Make sure everyone involved in the project deeply understands the background and context for this research, what we know going into it, and what hypotheses we may want to test.
Ask the right questions of the right people. Designing surveys and discussion guides that will actually get you the insights you need is not easy. Ensure the research tools you employ will produce the insights you need to make research-driven decisions in pursuit of your goal.
Choose the Right Partner for Your Healthcare Market Research Needs
A good market research partner is just that—a partner. They will work hand-in-hand with you to develop the right project approach and then conduct the research in a way that feels truly collaborative. At Campos, we function as an extension of your team, essentially giving you a bench of research experts to work with.
And research is only useful if you know what to do with it. That’s why Campos cuts through the noise to deliver answers, not more questions. Our strategists are dedicated to teasing out the most important findings and telling a clear, actionable story with our research. That way, you can circulate these findings internally and then get to work on making big decisions.
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