Combining qualitative, quantitative and trend research to discover how to actively involve patients in their care process

The mission of ZorgDomein is to facilitate people in finding and providing the best possible care and support them along the care process. Currently, ZorgDomein mainly focuses on connecting healthcare providers so it is easier to do patient referrals and exchange patient information in a fast and secure manner. For this project, we collaborated with ZorgDomein to explore how this platform can support healthcare consumers in their healthcare process. In this blog, you can learn how we used radical empathy, hard data and healthcare trends to unfold this challenge.

Client

Zorgdomein

Impact

Helped ZorgDomein better understand the needs healthcare consumers have in their care process and how they can be addressed in the future as well.

Research focus

To be able to facilitate healthcare consumers to find the best possible care, ZorgDomein believes consumers should be actively involved in their own healthcare process. But what does that mean, being actively involved? Do they actually want this? And what are additional needs when going through a healthcare process? During this research we focussed on the experience from the moment someone experienced a complaint, received treatment, was able to pick up their normal life again and all moments in between.

Getting a better grip on qualitative research findings

We interviewed 16 healthcare consumers with a wide range of health issues. By using Contextmapping prior and cardsorting exercises during the in-depth interviews, latent needs were brought to light. These insights were used to create three opportunity domains and a Morphological Tension Model to structure needs that exist when going through a healthcare process. From there, we created 5 Need Based Profiles that can be used to better understand how ZorgDomein can support a wide range of healthcare consumers.

Working with quantitative validation

To get a better grip on qualitative research findings a quantitative validation was done. We used the insights gained from the qualitative research to build a survey which was sent to +300 healthcare consumers. The research focussed on getting a better understanding of the following topics:

  • What is the frequency of needs that were found;
  • What need based profiles are dominant;
  • What do healthcare consumers think about using digital solutions in their healthcare process;
  • What do healthcare consumers think about managing their medical data;
  • What variables have an impact on consumer needs? For example, does the perceived complexity of a health complaint have an impact on needs someone has?

Exploratory data analysis allowed us to create several insights that can be used for strategic decision making in this project.

Instead of leaning on our own thoughts and ideas, insights of consumer needs are now the building blocks to better support healthcare consumers in their care process.

— Zorgdomein

Staying relevant in the future

To radically change how healthcare consumers are involved in their own care process it is necessary to leap into the future. We believe user needs do not drastically change over time. In the context of healthcare, for example, the need for receiving personal attention during your care process was present 5 years ago, and will still be relevant in 5 years. However, the way needs are fulfilled change over time. New trends and technologies allow us to create solutions that fulfil user needs more efficiently.

A good example is online consultation, where you consult your doctor via video. This new development allows doctors to offer healthcare services faster and more cost efficient. But looking from a user perspective, how does video consulting influence the need for personal attention? Does it help, or does it create more barrieres for the users?

For an organisation to still be relevant in the future, it is not enough to solely ‘lean’ on user research. We collected relevant healthcare trends and combined them with the qualitative and quantitative research findings during a creative session. This allowed ZorgDomein to explore how they can support healthcare consumers further into the future as well.

What is next?

This project helped ZorgDomein to better understand the needs healthcare consumers have in their care process and how they can be addressed in the future as well. By using the qualitative and quantitative research findings, ZorgDomein is dedicated to facilitate people in finding and providing the best possible care even better.

The brainpower behind this project

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Joris Hens

Our service designer combines the user's qualitative perception with quantitative data like no one else.
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