Best Practices for Better Insights When Evaluating Digital Tools

Intellus Regional Event, Boston

June 13, 2024 | 1:45 PM EST

Defining Digital Tools in Healthcare

Digital tools refer to software, applications, platforms, or tech that facilitate various tasks, processes, or activities in digital environments. In the context of the healthcare industry, these tools can include healthcare providers (HCP) and patient websites, apps, digital therapeutics, wearables, and diagnostic tools, just to name a few. Each type of tool has unique intricacies and plays a crucial role in our evolving healthcare ecosystem.

Digital Tools in the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare industry is not traditionally seen as a digital pioneer. However, it is striving to evolve. We frequently evaluate various digital tools used in pharmaceutical and biotech industries, from HCP and patient-specific apps to digital visual aids and physician decision-making tools. It is crucial to consider the value of these tools through the lens of the various end-users, namely healthcare providers (HCPs), patients, and payors/health insurance companies.

Different Audiences’ Perspectives on Digital Tools

Understanding what digital tools mean to different audiences is essential, as each group, whether patients, HCPs, and payors, interacts with these tools differently.

• Patients: For patients, digital tools often include apps for medication support, health management, and patient registries. These tools aim to enhance patient engagement and support their healthcare journey.
• Healthcare Providers (HCPs): HCPs benefit from tools that provide the latest therapeutic information, decision-making aids, and treatment support platforms. The challenge is to ensure these tools meet their practical needs and enhance their clinical workflows.
• Payors & Health Insurance Companies: For these stakeholders, digital tools are frequently functional or transactional, including e-commerce sites, claims management platforms, digital health management systems, and myriad data analytics tools.

Leveraging Non-Healthcare Digital Trends

Recognizing that healthcare often lags behind many other industries in digital adoption, we find significant value from our experience in the consumer tech, financial services, and hospitality and travel industries. For instance, the evolution of social media or banking apps or the transformation in meal delivery services offers valuable lessons for developing healthcare delivery solutions. These insights help us envision a future where digital tools in healthcare are as seamless and user-friendly as other common digital services.

5 Best Research Practices in Digital Tool Evaluation

1. Internal Stakeholder Engagement: It’s important to engage not just traditional internal research stakeholders but also those directly involved in digital tool development, such as software developers, UX specialists, and IT vendors. This collaboration ensures a holistic view of the digital product lifecycle and maximizes the relevance and impact of our insights.
2. Research Design: Prioritizing realism in research design is crucial. We advocate for methodologies like mobile ethnographies, online communities, and agile testing to mimic real-world usage closely. Incorporating physician-patient dialogues and conducting iterative testing through agile sprints help refine tools effectively.
3. Respondent Selection: Ensuring a diverse range of respondents, including varying levels of digital savviness and different device types, is essential. This approach helps us capture comprehensive user experiences and identify potential usability issues.
4. Platform & Stimuli Options: Time does not have to be a constraint, but instead can be a valuable asset. Allowing respondents to have time to reflect on innovative stimuli using asynchronous platforms like Online Bulletin Boards, can better align with real-world experiences where users become familiar with new technologies gradually over time
5. Value Add to Insights: Beyond UX, we emphasize integrating digital insights with broader brand and customer experience (CX) considerations. This involves mapping the micro-journeys often uncovered in digital tool assessments to the broader patient or HCP journey and continuing to track how they impact more general brand and CX perceptions.

By following these best practices, we can drive meaningful insights and optimize the development and implementation of digital tools for the healthcare industry.

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