Case Study: GfK Healthcare and 20|20 Partner on Online Diary to Gauge Patients’ Feelings About Medication
The team and client: Carla Penel, director of research and consulting, and Will Leskin, senior vice president for Blue Bell, Pa.-based GfK Healthcare, a leading provider of fully integrated health care marketing research, were looking for a way to investigate reasons why some patients with chronic medical conditions take their medications as prescribed and others do not.
GfK’s client was looking for qualitative insights to help develop an adherence program that would encourage patients to comply with therapies.
The challenge: Penel knew such research into medication adherence could prove tricky. “You can’t ask someone outright why they don’t take their medications as prescribed,” Penel says. “Particularly for chronic illnesses, where people often want to think they are taking their medications as they are supposed to. They don’t always want to admit to themselves that they are not as compliant as they should be and sometimes they don’t even realize it.”
“We wanted to do something a little bit different from traditional qualitative research where you get people in a room and ask them how they feel today,” Penel says. “The reactions could be very different over a period of time where factors beyond point-in-time emotions drive their behavior. [We wanted to record] things in daily life that affect them physically and emotionally.”
The recommendation: To gather the meaningful input required, Penel looked to 20|20’s bulletin board focus group product QualBoard™ to conduct a longer-than-usual five-day study with unique elements. Instead of an interactive board, GfK wanted participants to share the moments of their daily lives with a moderator. Each participant was sent a Flip video camera to express him or herself in that medium. The group was split across two boards.
“A traditional bulletin board wouldn’t get at the really deep and intrinsic thought processes. We needed to get people to ask themselves, ‘Why don’t I take my medications? What would motivate me to do so?’” Penel says. “We approached 20|20 with the idea of doing a closed bulletin board and online diary where we integrated both writing and video to create a multimedia expression. Respondents wrote and uploaded video every day to describe their life with their medical condition and what taking medication means to them.”
The results: 20|20’s multimedia diary approach proved a success, unlocking responses the team wouldn’t have been able to elicit with more traditional approaches. Penel and others on her team checked in and monitored the daily feedback, including what was required of each participant, which was at least one video per day. The videos provided some respondents with the ability to express a depth of emotion they might not have been able to convey in writing.
“20|20 was truly our partner in setting up the technical details of it,” Penel says. “We had never done this exact methodology on the bulletin board platform, so we relied on 20|20 to give us guidance and training not only on how to use their platform, but also to help us manage the respondents on technical and project management-type issues.”
The project’s success helped 20|20’s clients develop their compliance plans.
“This is something we will definitely want to do again,” Penel says. “We came out with some very actionable results. We’ve already proposed two additional studies with other clients.”
Find out more about QualBoard 3.0, our bulletin board focus group platform.
