Mobile Ethnography in Healthcare and Medical Research

Introduction to Mobile Ethnography

Mobile Ethnography is a flexible and agile way of understanding people’s thoughts and experiences. At Indeemo, we see Mobile Ethnography as an umbrella term to refer to remote ethnographic research techniques that encapsulate multiple research methodologies including Patient and Clinician Diary Studies, Quality-Life Studies, Experience Design Research, Bio-Medical Design Research, Concept Testing, Pre-tasking and Path to Purchase – all undertaken via the respondent’s smartphone.

A Mobile Ethnography study with as few as ten respondents can quickly provide you with a real-life contextual data set that will significantly increase your understanding of their everyday lives. In short, it is a methodology that helps you derive real insights from observed behavior through the medium of the respondent’s photos, videos, and responses.

Mobile Ethnography in the Context of Medical and Health

Conducting research in healthcare and pharma has long been a challenge. The sensitive nature of research topics has made it difficult for professionals and patients alike. Gaining access to healthcare facilities and understanding the experiences of those receiving care and treatment is considered a challenge given the personal nature of the topic and regulations around data privacy.

The flexibility of Mobile Ethnography can help to overcome some of these challenges. The ability to capture the intimate moments that matter in a private, yet authentic way provides clinicians and patients with a way to document everything in a real-life way. Access to a consultancy room was traditionally off-limits to researchers but now with the arrival of mobile ethnography, clinicians, physicians, and consultants are finally able to provide valuable insights. Applications like Indeemo enable patients to capture their feelings, thoughts, and experiences authentically whilst ensuring that their personal data is protected.

Mobile Ethnography has provided a convenient and unobtrusive way for medical patients to record their experiences as they go about their everyday lives. Without the intrusion of researchers, they can provide honesty in their responses whether they are attending a hospital for an appointment or they are dealing with an illness as they go about their daily routine.

How Mobile Ethnography is used in Healthcare
Research?

There are a number of contexts in which Mobile Ethnography can be used in the context of health. In this section, we will expand upon some of these contexts and explain how researchers within the industry can utilize Mobile Ethnography applications to good effect.

Healthcare professionals

Clinical Researchers

With traditional methodologies, research tended to be fragmented and provided unhelpful, disconnected data. Without using a human-centric approach, gaining an understanding of patients’ challenges and experiences was difficult. Introducing researchers in these circumstances was intrusive and uncomfortable for patients, eroding authenticity in the data. With applications like Indeemo, clinical researchers can gain insights into the experiences of patients living with various illnesses and conditions. Seeing what they do, feel and experience as they deal with personal issues, researchers can make truly life-changing discoveries.

Expecting patients to travel to remote locations to attend focus groups and in-depth interviews is inefficient and in most cases, extremely expensive and difficult to coordinate. Enabling patients to capture their real-life routines and behaviors from their own home is a more practical and more ethical solution and is likely to generate richer insights. The power of mobile devices, especially Smartphones means that clinical researchers can undertake online qualitative research on multiple patients, across multiple locations at any one time. As we have all experienced, illnesses can seem different in retrospect (for better and worse).

R & D Professionals

For researchers in the pharmaceutical and medical industries, Mobile Ethnography can shed some light on patient’s experiences with medications in an everyday context. By seeing how a certain medicine is administered, consumed and how it affects patients (even perceived effects) helps generate rich insights.

Similarly medical device and equipment manufacturers can task patients with a diary study exercise capturing their daily experiences from being prescribed a hip-replacement, through to the surgical procedure, and an evaluation of its success all in the context of a year-long diary.

UX Researchers

UX researchers within the healthcare industry have also benefited from the emergence of Mobile Ethnography. For healthcare professionals, many of the systems and software they will have used daily over many years have become outdated and are not very user-friendly. Such changes move slowly in the industry because seeing how these are used is often difficult.

For UX researchers, Mobile Ethnography has provided healthcare-focused UX researchers with a compelling methodology to help them understand how professionals use systems in the context of their work. Using video and mobile screen recording, doctors, physicians, and administrative staff can easily record their experiences in their own time and when situations arise.

From a patient-research perspective, the digitalization of many healthcare services has had a transformative effect. There is now a wealth of information online to help in understanding and dealing with health issues. Mobile applications have also played a part in this transformation.

From tracking medication usage to IoT connectivity with bio-medical devices to seeing how they are used in the everyday context of patients’ lives in invaluable to UX researchers.

By seeing the practicalities of how they are used and experienced in real-life, they can be developed and optimized further.

Experience & Service Designers

Providing experiences and services has become a key focus of healthcare providers throughout the world. For those receiving care within any given system, it can be the biggest challenge they will face in their lives. Experience and Service Designers within the Healthcare industry play a pivotal role in making it as accommodating and easy for patients as possible.

As the intersection of the digital and physical experience has become more nuanced, these professionals play an increasingly important role. By using Mobile Ethnography, they can see how a patient might book an appointment online, check-in at the hospital, track their waiting time on their mobile, and evaluate the meeting with a consultant.

Why Mobile Ethnography is used in Healthcare?

The flexibility of Mobile Ethnography makes it suitable for a multitude of research cases as we outlined above. Below we have identified some key reasons as to why it is so powerful:

Context

Even more so than in other industries, context is critical, particularly in a patient’s case. Seeing how patients' behave—the complex interplay between their interior lives and their social, cultural, and physical worlds - brings a greater understanding and helps to generate rich insights.

Mobile Ethnography places you at the finger-tips of patients and allows them to capture the most intimate, crucial and nuanced moments of their recovery.

Access to Patients and Healthcare Professionals

Access to healthcare professionals is limited by data privacy regulations. Sending in a researcher to a hospital can be far too intrusive in most cases. Mobile Ethnography - with its ability to be switched on and off at any moment - can place you within the walls of the hospital and negate the need for a human researcher in-field. This places the control of data back in the hands of the healthcare professional who is is the best position to capture key insights while still being sensitive best-practices when it comes to data.

Driving Engagement

The nature of the profession necessitates that they are 100% invested in their work and have little time to engage with a researcher. In an environment where every second counts, researchers are usually an unwelcome distraction.

Mobile Ethnography applications offer researchers a flexible way to document their work and experiences in a suitable way, thus driving engagement. They are often the most engaged of professionals in their work, but mobile allows them to illustrate this effectively.

Strategies for Anonymizing Data

At Indeemo, we have developed strategies for helping to anonymize data this ensures that Personal Health Information (PHI) requirements are being adhered to. With our Mobile Ethnography apps, respondents can keep their identity private from the researcher. This was previously impossible with more traditional face-to-face and in-field methodologies.

Easier and More Cost-Effective to Conduct Longitudinal Studies

Sending a researcher in-field to observe a day in the life, in most circumstances, is unfeasible. As a result, Patient Diaries and Quality-of-Life Studies are often fragmented and unrepresentative of the true journeys and experiences of patients. With Mobile Ethnography, patients can easily capture and diarize their experiences sporadically over more sustained periods. For example, those living with a life-long illness now can document their experiences over 6 months, 1 year or even 5 years. This, for the first time, provides a periscope into the lives of representative samples of people, over a representative fieldwork duration.

By removing the need for multiple ethnographers, observers and other qualitative researchers on these studies, it also significantly reduces the costs. We in no way see mobile ethnography as a replacement for researchers, but it certainly removes the need for great numbers of them to be in different places at one time. Indeemo’s Researcher Dashboard also collates the data and makes the analysis more effective and efficient.

Summary & Conclusion

Conducting research in the healthcare and medical sector has never been easy. Mobile Ethnography doesn’t offer a quick fix for this, but it does offer a solution that is much more flexible, and thus more effective than historical approaches.

By utilizing the smartphone, a universally owned device, combined with a mobile ethnography application like Indeemo many of the problems with traditional research methods are overcome.

Time-poor healthcare professionals and patients with sensitive health issues have repeatedly reported that the new mobile ethnography methodology was convenient, easy and less intrusive on their lives than other methods of research they’ve engaged with previously.

To provide products and services, there must be empathy for the users’ experience with them. This is especially the case in the healthcare and medical sectors. Mobile Ethnography serves as a great methodology for getting closer to the moments that matter and gaining an authentic periscope into people’s lives. In fact, it might not always be the only methodology you rely upon, but it might act as a supplement to existing methodologies to uncover hidden insights.

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If you’d like to know more about how Indeemo can help you to undertake a study, please get in touch.