Physician-Patient Dialogue Research for Pharmaceutical Companies
Our physician-patient dialogue research methodological approach has several advantages over those of ZoomRx and Verilogue.
We believe that it allows greater control in recruiting patients in who are in a clinical situation that is relevant to the client’s product.
For most our physician-patient dialogue studies, patients are recruited on the cusp of a potential treatment change.
When compared to more routine physician-patient visits in which the patient is stable on and satisfied with their current treatment, these more change-oriented physician-patient conversations substantially increase the chances that the observed and recorded physician-patient dialogue segments will capture how doctors and patients discuss and make treatment decisions.
These types of physician-patient interactions are also more likely to reveal the key barriers and drivers to treatment change.
Our ethnographers spend a day in a particular physician office. We record and observe these in-office physician-patient conversations as they occur in real-time.
The ethnographers then interview the patient right after the patients’ visits with the doctor, which provides fresh and meaningful context in analyzing the observed visit.
In these patient interviews immediately after the physician-patient interaction, patients reveal what they recalled and understood about the conversation, how certain HCP comments made them feel, perceptions of how specific products were presented, why they omitted certain symptoms and mentioned others, what triggered or motivate them to make particular treatment decisions, and what they envision as their likely next steps.
The ethnographer also interviews doctors and relevant office staff (HCPs) on the same day as the patient visit.
In these interviews, HCPs provide their interpretations of the patient cases and explain their own approach to the patient visits, including how and why the observed cases exemplify or deviate from their typical patient visits.
The freshness of these immediate post-visit interviews with both patients and HCPs is of critical importance to capture the underlying reasons behind particular behaviors, comments, and decisions. As time passes, people’s memories and accounts of their interactions become much less accurate and meaningful sources of data.
Ethnographic Solutions’ social scientists (PhD) later carefully transcribe, code, and analyze the recorded physician-patient dialogue segments, drawing on their expertise in conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, and social interaction.
AI has also proven to be a useful tool that our conversation analysts now engage to accelerate and enhance our analysis.
Typical physician-patient dialogue studies involve 12-18 physicians, 8-12 office staff members, and 24-36 patients (24-36 captured in-office physician-patient interactions).
