Enhancing Healthcare Survey Response Rates

Over the past 10-15 years, research project response rates among health care providers (HCPs), which includes physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, and ancillary personnel, have been steadily declining. When asked, some of the major reasons why HCPs stopped participating or participate less often in marketing research studies, are: redundant screening questions, long screeners capturing information only to be disqualified, too long surveys, and overall less time to allocate to providing feedback despite increasing honoraria rates.

While we can’t solve for the HCP’s time available to participate in studies, the others are things our industry can address. Led by healthcare panel icons Jerry Arbitier and Jason Freeman a group of healthcare research industry colleagues including panel companies, marketing research agencies (MRAs) and end clients, met to discuss the problem and generate possible solutions.

The reasons why something should be done such as raising response rates, reducing respondent frustration, increasing maximum feasible sample sizes, better sampling, and holding the line on costs, etc. are obvious. Going further, we have an obligation to make the survey experience as easy and pleasant as possible because a better survey experience helps resolve the response rate problem and addresses the reasons why it should be done.

While diving deeper into why an improved customer experience matters, a stark reality became clear; respondents are our primary assets without which our industry goes away. So, by doing the right thing – respecting our respondents and treating them with greater care and consideration – we maintain our profession. Indeed, it is a symbiotic relationship.

The small working group then developed the idea of a Centralized Screener Database. It was an innovative design aimed at shortening online screeners up to 5 minutes by eliminating the need for respondents to answer the same screening questions repeatedly across surveys. The hypotheses that HCPs, specifically physicians, would prefer the streamlined screener to the current screener format, and would complete more surveys if it were used was tested in a survey among 110 doctors across a range of specialties. Both hypotheses were validated;

• 65% preferred the newer, streamlined screener compared to the current approach, 27% were neutral.
• 79% replied “yes” they would do more surveys if they used the new streamlined approach, 23% said “no”. However, the 23% could also be no in the sense they’ll do the same amount of surveys they currently do.

The idea was then shared among a larger group of panel companies, MRAs, and end clients while at a recent healthcare marketing research industry meeting. The concept was overwhelmingly positively received but, there were practical, financial, and technological concerns about a centralized database. As a result of these discussions, a more feasible method is being developed, the “Optimized Healthcare Screener.” This new approach achieves the same objective of reducing the time it takes to complete repetitive screening questions by developing a standardized set of screening questions to be used by all panel companies and MRAs.

Here’s how the Optimized Healthcare Screener would work in a survey.

Step 1: The panel company sends an invite to panelists with a survey link.
Step 2: Once the panelist clicks the link, they are considered a respondent and are directed to the market research company’s survey.
Step 3: Upon entering the survey, an API call is made to the respondent's panel company, with the pre-assigned question codes relevant to the survey.
Step 4: The panel company sends the corresponding answers for those question codes back to the market research survey.
Step 5: The survey then displays the questions and selected answers to the respondent on a single screen:

1. If the answers are correct, the respondent confirms this and proceeds.
2. If any answers are incorrect, the respondent can make corrections before proceeding.
3. Any updated answers will be sent from the market research company to the panel company to update its database.

The next steps in developing the Optimized Healthcare Screener are:

1. Develop a working prototype that can be reviewed by the group of companies working on this issue.
     a. Test a. sample survey among a sample of physicians.
     b. Test a sample survey among a range of non-physician HCPs
2. Create a standardized set of screener questions. Use straightforward wording to facilitate faster adoption. Once a functional system is in place, additional questions can be standardized.
3. Assign a discrete code to each screener question. This is the essence of the design.
4. Participating panel companies assign the corresponding code to a respondent’s answers.
   Test the process with the participating panel companies, i.e., the API calls and information exchanges work as intended.

Stay tuned for an update on this exciting and industry changing approach to creating a better survey experience for HCPs.