2. Semi-Structured Interviews: Capturing In-Depth Personal Experiences

For deep, personalized insights, semi-structured interviews provide a flexible yet focused approach. These one-on-one interviews allow for open-ended dialogue while ensuring key topics are covered. They are especially useful when exploring complex or sensitive topics, such as quality of life, treatment burdens, emotional journey, or barriers to healthcare access. The conversational format encourages patients to share their experiences in their own words, offering rich, nuanced data.

Best for: Understanding patient experiences, appraising the patient journey, uncovering unmet needs, exploring sensitive topics in-depth, and including patients’ emotional perspective

3. Ethnographic Studies: Observing Real-World Experiences

Ethnographic studies go beyond what patients say by observing what they do in real-world settings. Researchers immerse themselves in patients’ daily lives—whether at home, in clinics, or within community settings—to understand how they interact with healthcare. This method captures the environmental and behavioral factors influencing patient decisions, which can be difficult to articulate in traditional discussions. Ethnographic studies provide direct, unfiltered insights into lived experiences.

Best for: Understanding real-world patient behaviors, identifying usability issues in healthcare interventions, and designing patient-friendly solutions.

4. Patient Surveys: Scaling Insights Across Populations

When broad patient input is needed, surveys offer a scalable and efficient method for data collection. Surveys can reach thousands, ensuring significant sample representation. They can be designed to collect quantitative data and validate qualitative data, making them versatile tools for assessing patient satisfaction and generalizing patient preferences and unmet needs. They are particularly useful for tracking trends over time and to confirm findings from other research methods.

Best for: Gathering large-scale patient insights, tracking trends over time, and validating qualitative findings with quantitative data.

5. Multistakeholder Workshops: Fostering Collaborative Dialogue

Multistakeholder workshops, as the name suggests, bring together players such as patients and/or caregivers, physicians, payers, and policymakers in a collaborative setting. These workshops facilitate cross-sector discussions, ensuring that patient perspectives are considered alongside other key stakeholders. The interactive nature of these sessions fosters dynamic discussions, co-creation of solutions, and consensus-building. This approach is particularly effective for addressing systemic challenges, appraisal different perspectives and needs on products’ TPPs, developing and influencing policy, and designing patient-centered care models.

Best for: Identifying gaps in care and fostering co-creation between multiple stakeholders.

Choosing the Right Approach for Patient-Centered Research

Armed with a diverse set of methodologies, healthcare organizations can gather precise, relevant, and actionable patient insights. The key is to align the method with the specific type of input required, ensuring that patient voices are not only heard but also effectively integrated into healthcare decision-making.

By embedding patient engagement consistently and systematically, you can foster more meaningful co-creation, improve healthcare outcomes, facilitate patient access to trials, speed-up treatment launch, foster long-term adherence, and ultimately design better patient-centered solutions.