Understanding Healthcare Patients Experiences Leveraging A Mobile Diary Study

The Challenge

The Goals

Our clients’ goals were to:

• Get to know patients on a personal level before engaging them in focus groups and in-depth interviews

• Gain a real-life, in-context periscope into the daily lives of patients living with a long-term illness

• Understand how a long-term illness affected the lives of sufferers and see what actions they took to cope with their condition

• Understand the lived experience and the impact of medications on day-today routines

The Solution

When our client approached us, we were confident that a Mobile Qualitative Research project could serve as the perfect pre-tasking method for their wider project.

Because respondents would have access to their mobile throughout the full duration of fieldwork, they would be able to capture in-the-moment insights into their feelings, thoughts, and experiences. Furthermore, respondents were more likely to be honest, and open about their illness when they were recording their responses in private.

Because we have become so accustomed to interacting through our smartphones, we have found that respondents find recording their responses on their mobile, in their own homes more natural and unintrusive. With the sensitive nature of this project, this would prove to be of utmost importance.

How Indeemo Helped?

Working with Indeemo, our client created a task list, assigning 26 scheduled tasks to respondents over 2 weeks of fieldwork. Much of the first week focussed on understanding the daily routines and rituals of respondents when it came to taking their medication, what coping strategies they put in place and how they generally felt. The second weeks’ tasks then focussed on their feelings and memories surrounding the initial diagnosis and having them diarise how they felt on each given day over the course of the week.

With vast experience in supporting healthcare and medical projects, Indeemos strategy team was able to assist our client in creating a task list that would not overburden the patients, but would still garner critical insights throughout the fieldwork.

We were also able to guide our client on moderating personal posts and provide advice on the amount of engagement expected of the patients during fieldwork., bringing real authenticity to the data.

The Outcome

Over the course of the 2 weeks, respondents uploaded almost 2,000 videos, photos and text notes giving a media-rich, inthe-moment insight into how they lived with their condition.

This gave our client a far more in-depth and authentic insight into the lives of their respondents than traditional research methods had delivered.

The challenges faced by people suffering from illnesses can often be hidden from the naked eye of a researcher. Medicine cabinets, routine struggles, coping mechanisms, and high/low points in a day can be difficult for a patient to verbalize, or too personal to discuss with a real person.

Using Indeemo took our client within the confines of the home without being intrusive and provided an unparalleled insight into a topic that they had previously struggled to understand in any real depth

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Summary and Conclusion

When our client undertook further research, they reported that respondents were more open, honest and authentic in their responses than those involved in similar projects they supported in the past.

They accredited this to two factors;

Patients had already opened up about their illness privately, using just their mobile. Although patients were fully aware that they were partaking in research, the absence of a researcher biasing or unintentionally intimidating them was largely nullified.

Secondly, because they already had primary, raw data on each patient and their experiences, they were able to probe them further in their face-to-face interviews.

The message from our client was clear: Pre-tasking respondents in a natural way meant that the data collected was richer, more authentic and valuable in further research phases.

From their perspective this was down to Indeemo and our Mobile Ethnography application, as well as the support we offered to help design an approach optimized for success.