Health Care & Medical

Limelight Insights by Shugoll has extensive experience in health care market research. With our full suite of consulting services, we help health care clients evaluate consumer needs and preferences, satisfaction with facilities and quality of care, reasons for receiving/not receiving treatment at a location, and more.

Our team offers specialized knowledge and experience in helping health care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and medical device companies make critical business decisions in a highly competitive industry. We’ve provided critical analyses on trends and issues that significantly affect profitability and the quality of customer care.

Our consultants have an outstanding reputation for conducting market research for health care and insurance providers, and we have a large health care research division. We conduct a wide variety of research for our health care clients including:

  • Service/Facility Evaluation
  • Health Care Leadership Evaluations
  • Health Plan Assessment
  • Assessing Patient Journeys/Navigation of the Health Care System
  • Position Expansion in the Medical Field
  • Patients’ Health Care Decision-Making Process
  • Health Care Website and App Usability Research
  • Awareness and Perceptions of Health Care Facilities

Health Care professional segments targeted for past health care research studies include:

  • Physicians (Primary Care and All Types of Specialists)
  • Nurses (including APNs, Nurse Managers, and Nurse Directors)
  • Hospital C-Suite Executives (e.g., COOs, CFOs, CEOs, CNOs)
  • Hospital/Long-Term Care Facility Administrators and Decision Makers
  • Allied Health Professionals (e.g., Lab Directors, Paramedics, Medical Researchers, Nutritionists)
  • Pharmacists
  • Medical Industry Leaders/Healthcare Industry Influencers and Policy Makers

Consumer/patient audiences for past health care research studies include:

  • Residents served by a community hospital or healthcare system
  • Hospital inpatients, outpatients, and emergency department patients
  • Patients of free-standing emergency and urgent care centers
  • Patients with specific diseases or conditions
  • Spanish speaking patients
  • Home care patients and caregivers
  • Long-term patients, caregivers, and guarantors
  • Health plan members and lapsed members
  • Community opinion leaders
  • Seniors and Medicare recipients
  • Medicare Advantage consumers
  • Donors, supporters, and members
  • Dyads of patients and their caregivers

We also have experience in medical equipment/devices, medical products/supplies, and with pharmaceutical products. Our experience with drug and pharmaceutical device audiences includes:

  • Healthcare consultants
  • Pharmaceutical/Biotechnology companies
  • Government agencies
  • Healthcare providers
  • Other healthcare professionals
  • Healthcare influencers
  • Consumer/Patient segments
  • Long-term care specialists
  • Health insurance and managed care providers

Limelight Insights Knows
Health Care Market Research

While we help many of our clients address the balance between short-term profitability and quality patient care, we also have a great deal of experience in forecasting for future planning. Applying our proprietary methodology — the Product Opportunity Forecaster — the results and conclusions have provided timely insights on projected demand for new products and services and related pricing, thus indicating appropriate areas for capital investment.

Case Study: Health Service Line Assessment

A health system contracted with the Limelight Insights consulting team to conduct an exploratory research study for their cancer institute and treatment facility among referring physicians and prospective patients.

A multi-phase research study was conducted: an online survey with current patients, in-depth interviews with patients at competitive facilities, and in-depth interviews with physicians who refer some of their cancer patients to the client’s cancer institute and treatment facility. 

The research explored drivers of physician referral patterns and perceptions of the client’s institute and competitive facilities. Research with patients explored factors that heavily influence selection of treatment centers, resources used when identifying treatment facilities, reasons for not choosing to receive treatment at the client’s facility, and satisfaction with the treatment experience at competing area facilities.

The findings of the research provided insights on perceptions surrounding the facility, ways to encourage physician referral and patient self-referral, and to create messaging to ‘court’ physicians and patients to choose the client’s facility.

A large part of our business is answering critical questions
and providing actionable insights that can inform a business’ or organization’s direction.

Here are some of the questions Limelight Insights has helped health and medical clients answer:

Can direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising increase demand for my drug or device?

Research with target consumers and physicians has been used to track awareness of conditions, disease incidence, presentation of symptoms or indicators, use of screening tests and treatment protocols, patient requests for medications, and the pros and cons of different therapies. We’ve identified four key steps to accomplishing these goals.

  1. We qualify demand, interest, awareness of, and knowledge about the drug or device among target consumer segments and physicians.
  2. We ask target consumers about how often their physicians review their condition or how regularly they receive screening tests to identify the need for the drug or device.
  3. We use virtual/online and telephone in-depth interviews to identify physician attitudes and current practices to determine what would motivate or prevent them from recommending or using the drug or device. We also test how to best position the drug or device for optimal receptivity by the medical community.
  4. We test different messages with both physicians and target consumers. It can be a challenge to know which strategy or position will resonate with the target audience. With that in mind, we employ a wide range of qualitative and quantitative tools to identify the overall strengths and limitations of various campaign strategies.

How can we confidently project future demand for new products and services and the impact demands may have on new facilities?

Limelight Insights has evaluated potential patient and physician reactions to new concepts ranging from comprehensive women’s health care and information centers to full-service cardiac centers. First, we use qualitative research to define patient and physician expectations prioritizing essential features, products and services. Then quantitative studies are employed to estimate demand and revenues. We also test advertising messages that have been developed to promote these healthcare programs and facilities.

How can we evaluate patient satisfaction with the quality of our services and care compared with those offered by other hospitals and centers?

We recommend and have used a systematic feedback program that offers recently discharged patients the opportunity to evaluate and provide feedback on staff, services, facilities, and other important issues. We design custom evaluation forms, using qualitative input to ensure coverage of all key issues, and timely, easy-to-complete evaluation vehicles that include opportunities for open-ended comments.

Using computer-administered evaluations completed at discharge or online surveys completed at home after discharge, we can track patient satisfaction on a large scale. Over time, the computerized data will provide a picture of patient satisfaction and patient priorities. The data are a key component in evaluating and measuring the effectiveness of changes and improvements made.

What are my health-care organization’s strengths and weaknesses and how is the organization perceived in the community?

Limelight Insights by Shugoll regularly conducts positioning and branding studies for hospitals and health-care systems. These involve conducting qualitative and quantitative research with patients, community residents, community leaders, and hospital staff including nurses and physicians to determine awareness, perceptions, and use of area services in order to understand how your institution compares with the competition.

When using qualitative research to explore deeply held feelings about your institution or brand so that you can select an optimal market positioning, we often use metaphorical tools including analogies, personification, situational drawings, and picture decks. Other projective techniques used include sentence completing, adjective sorts, and storytelling. These techniques allow us to identify key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of/to your organization that will enable you to develop a strategic plan to play to your strengths and opportunities, and acknowledge and avoid weaknesses and threats.

The quantitative positioning and branding studies we conduct often use perceptual mapping and gap analysis to provide more substantive and insightful analysis of a hospital’s or health care system’s relative strengths and weaknesses. Forced choice preferences for selected services also provide insights into departments that are strongest. Repeated implementation of these studies provides trend data to measure changes in an institution’s position over time.

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