Better for everyone

Editor's note: Amy Pratt is senior MI&A manager – consumer health lead, group marketing and e-commerce at Royal Philips. Laura Hunt is business director, health and wellbeing at research firm InSites Consulting.

The way in which health and health outcomes are experienced and defined is evolving. We are all very much aware of how the global pandemic is accelerating transformation within health care, subsequently impacting the design, accessibility and experience of care systems. To successfully engage with this changing landscape, we need an enhanced, holistic approach to insight development. While changes are happening at a system and regulatory level, the importance of the human or lived experiences of health care remains paramount.

In this article, we will share some of our recent learnings around motivating and inspiring a more holistic approach to exploring and understanding changing experiences within evolving health care systems. We will consider the importance of context, outline our approach to designing a truly human-centric piece of research and highlight how we used this to transform our research into impactful insights across the Philips Healthcare business. Our ultimate goal was to improve the human experience of a specific area of health care, reducing societal, financial and emotional impacts.

Making a positive difference

In the U.S., almost 50% of all the post-acute cardiac patients will be readmitted to the hospital within the first year, costing more than $20 billion to the health care system. This is huge. And in a world which is increasingly focusing on sustainability as a holistic concept – better for people, better for planet, better for me – we have an opportunity to help improve this situation in health care, thereby making a positive difference to people’s lives and helpfully contributing to society by reducing health inequalities.

Our insight agenda was very focused on health care outcomes. This concentration allowed us to create a truly holistic, insight-led approach to consider how to improve the quality of experience within a particular part of the patient pathway in cardiology. Our aim was to understand how newly developed solutions can potentially go some way to alleviate health care costs at an individual and collective level.

We designed a multi-stakeholder, multi-market study to achieve our research and business objectives. Care pathway models have traditionally focused on linear, physical stages of care, with an emphasis on diagnosis and procedures. Our experience has shown that experiences of the patient pathway and health outcomes are multifaceted and that lived experiences are influenced by psychological and emotional factors, as well as the environmental context. Therefore, to fully embrace a truly holistic perspective, we opted for a style that embraced the complexities of subjective experiences, navigated tensions between patients, caregivers and professionals, while importantly leaning into the difficult experiences people can face when engaging with health care. We put the human lens at the heart of the matter.

How we put people at the center of our research program

We are very alive to the importance of exploring consumer realities within lived environments. How can we claim to understand human patterns or behavior and experiences without acknowledging the natural contexts in which these are defined and performed? As a result, we needed to design an approach that disrupted existing thinking about patient pathways and health outcomes. An approach that connected with human experience, focusing on empathy, so that we could curate a consumer-intuitive discourse within the organization. We wanted to put humans at the center of our research program so that human experience could become the focus of the solution to therefore increase relevance.

The research program we designed allowed us to connect with human experiences through a qualitative research methodology. This comprised a blended approach of qualitative tools, allowing us to explore journey-mapping while also evaluating potential solutions from various human perspectives: patient, caregiver and health care professional. It was important to us to design a research program that also extended across geographical boundaries and was reflective of patterns of behavior changes accelerated by the global pandemic. We believe our approach allowed us to grasp a better understanding of the contextual framework in which subjective behavior and identities are formed.

Furthermore, designing a human-centric approach meant we could sensitively explore in-the-moment thoughts. The frequent reliance on post-rationalization was not enough to create the quality of insights needed to create usable and impactful sustainable solutions for this part of the patient pathway. Through considerate moderation, we connected with humans during particularly challenging times in their lives and we are very grateful for them sharing these experiences with us as part of our research program.

This approach was not without challenges. As with any insight-led approach, we needed to talk to the right types of people, delving into experiences while in the moment – a deeply personal moment that was difficult to rationally define, yet alone capture. This required creative thinking to identify ways to connect with the right people at the right time, overcoming time zones and market-specific frameworks. We like a challenge and so extended these tactics to reach out to caregivers and health care professionals. By working collaboratively, we were able to share ideas and successfully overcome such challenges – we were better together. 

How to optimize the impact of primary marketing research insights

Irrespective of the area of health or well-being that you are focusing on, we believe there are some shared guiding principles which can optimize the impact of insights generated through primary research.

• Move beyond the traditional combination of research agency and insights team to cross-cluster collaboration across the business – and at all levels, if possible. The needs and desires of your R&D colleagues are critical, as is input from commercial and gaining buy-in from senior executives to help land the insights within the business. Not only is this critical at the start of a research program but communicating with such colleagues only increases in importance throughout the project lifecycle. Our project demonstrated, and delivered, the potential benefits of sharing collaboratively and showed that it is possible to overcome perceived barriers of working in this way.
• When setting out on insight discovery, start with the context. This means acknowledging how new trends are forming, how this process is shaped by cultural nuance and what opportunities this can create in the future. Creating a collective understanding of this environment across your business can help shape future agendas and create support for the role of holistic research approaches early in the journey.
• Expanding the target audience of a project scope allows space to create a holistic approach, an ecosystem of insights that puts the human experience at the heart of the matter. We would argue that such an approach can inform strategic decision making more reliably than a linear approach could.
• As with all research, carefully select the research tools and the moderators executing those tools. Activating appropriate techniques for the types of research participants is beneficial for any research project but moving beyond this to capture in-the-moment observations at such a crucial point in the patient pathway requires a particularly sensitive mind-set and awareness. 
• Encouraging the right kind of culture across the project team can make or break the success of this kind of research program. Fostering openness and creating an authentic dialogue and collaboration across the research team is pivotal. It improves the working partnership and can drive the quality of insights and enhance the commerciality of the subsequent recommendations.
• Designing and developing solutions that are human-centric is exciting! Taking a holistic approach can broaden the scope for opportunity spaces and engaging with wider stakeholders early in the process allows greater relevance for quality of life and improving health outcomes. 
• Don’t underestimate the wider significance of your research or the potential impact you can have on helping shape experiences and policy moving forward. In an ever-changing world that is increasingly focusing on health, shaping new experiences and responding to evolving human needs, we can all play a role in enhancing quality of care and policy debates.

Disrupted our thinking

This is only a very small selection of the learnings we have been gathering at a global level through this multi-stakeholder and multi-cultural insight program. This piece highlights how the insight-led collaborative relationship between Philips Healthcare and InSites Consulting has successfully disrupted our thinking to move beyond the functional context or surface level to embrace lived experiences against the backdrop of changing societal trends in a pandemic world. These experiences continue to inform our approach to insight development to ensure impactful research projects, while also adding to evolving debates about the design of health care research and wider policy considerations about the role of health care systems. 

As demonstrated here, we believe in a holistic approach: a non-linear style; understanding the issue from various viewpoints; and a practical yet emotional emphasis. The human experience embedded in the moment and familial perspective remain key, as do wider perspectives and opinions of payers, regulators and of course health care professionals. It is our goal to inspire the design of health care research and the impact this can have on portfolio development, the design and accessibility of solutions and, ultimately, human experiences.