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Trilogy Tidings December 2008
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Season's Greetings to you and yours at this time of renewal. Let's be grateful for this year-end opportunity to look ahead!
Project work is all consuming this month, so I have only one topic to share: Gaining clinical insight through physician interviews. This topic comes easily to mind since I do a lot of market research, and much of that involves having dialogs with clinicians for purposes of assessing opportunities on behalf of suppliers to the medical products and life science communities. In fact, I'm in the midst of such an exercise right now. Although some of my thoughts could be classified as "inside baseball" advice, I hope you can derive some benefit from these ruminations.
Best wishes,
Joe
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| Planning, Conducting and Interpreting Physician Interviews
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Whenever you are contemplating something new in the medical arena, it's inevitable that you will want to know what clinicians think about it or the environment it will occupy. The obvious way to hear those views is to speak with them. Sure, you can read what they publish or what "industry experts" write, but at the end of the day you will want to have real conversations with a cross section of potential users: physicians, nurses and technologists. I have some thoughts to share with you about dialogs with physicians. (Nurses and technologists are equally important sources but the techniques in those cases are significantly different and deserve separate treatment.)
I'm not talking about quantitative surveys conducted online, through the mail, or at medical meetings. These methods all have their place among primary research techniques. Rather, I'm referring to in-depth, qualitative, open-ended conversations with doctors in areas of their expertise and interests. Make no mistake, these are not easy or inexpensive to accomplish but the results are often invaluable.
I see the process as having four parts:
- Understanding what you're attempting to accomplish, that is setting your objectives and defining the class of physicians you will need to talk to
- Identifying specific physicians and recruiting them to participate
- Conducting the interview
- Interpreting what you hear and converting those responses into relevant findings and (hopefully) insight
You'll find my suggestions along these lines here. Let me know what you think, especially if you have some additional tips to offer.
Thoughts to share? |
