No doubt about it: conducting market research with pharmacists and other medical professionals can be a challenge.
This audience is exhausted and stressed out. Now more than ever healthcare professionals feel like there isn't enough time in the day to properly treat patients and enjoy a life outside the office -- much less take an online survey or participate in a focus group.
However, that doesn't stop the desire to collect feedback from pharmacists and medical personnel. So how can you capture their attention and focus?
Our market research firm has a lot of experience conducting studies with hard-to-reach professionals. Below we share our step-by-step approach from an online survey and research interview study we conducted with pharmacists.
Background & Objectives
Our pharmacy market research company recently partnered with a national health insurance brokerage company to conduct an online survey. The target audience for the market research was pharmacists who operate in the U.S.
Drive Research worked with the client to define specific objectives for the market research. These included:
- A better understanding of how pharmacists provide guidance to current pharmacy customers
- How the pharmacists provide support to their customers
- Reasons pharmacists do and do not offer support to their customers
These core objectives and many other secondary objectives were addressed in the market research project.
Drive Research had several meetings with the client team before the kickoff meeting to fully define the scope and objectives.
A full proposal was created to outline the approach, timeline, fixed cost fees, and describe the deliverables.
Our market research proposals are very thorough and detailed, helping the client trust the process laid out by our health insurance market research company.
Approach to Surveying Pharmacists
Our healthcare market research company recommended two core steps to address the objectives at hand with our health insurance client.
- Qualitative phone pre-tests with pharmacists (n6)
- Quantitative online survey with pharmacists (n200)
Step #1: Research Phone Interviews with Pharmacists
With technical topics such as this, it is valuable first to conduct pre-test interviews with the target audience. Therefore, Drive Research scheduled and conducted 6 telephone interviews with pharmacists across the country.
The first draft of the online survey was fully tested as part of this qualitative research.
After each interview, the pharmacist was asked to provide feedback on the script - doing so helped clarify if anything was confusing or if they had any recommended questions.
As a result of these interviews, several tweaks were made to improve the online survey.
Benefits of Pre-Survey Interviews
These pre-test phone interviews are extremely helpful in market research.
Not only do they help identify confusion points and additional context, the findings and insights can also help fuel other ideas for questions before the quantitative launch.
Research gets you answers but also raises a lot of other questions as you continue to peel back the onion.
As a result, if our market research company jumped right into the online survey, there might have been items we learned about at the end that we had wished we asked in the script.
Completing pre-testing with real pharmacists allowed us to adjust our strategy before reaching the point of no return with the online survey.
Step #2: Online Survey with Pharmacists
Online surveys with our health insurance market research company are cost-effective, offer a quick turn-around, are measurable, and gather quality data.
These benefits create a strong ROI for this methodology over other options.
Other types of market research were considered such as phone surveys and focus groups. However, it was determined the return was far greater for the approach recommended by Drive Research.
Details of the Online Survey
- The pharmacist online survey took an average of 7 minutes to complete and included 26 questions.
- The survey received 200 completes from pharmacists employed in the U.S.
- A mix of community, regional, and national pharmacies were collected for analysis
- Fieldwork began on February 27 and lasted until March 6, 2020.
- The margin of error for these results would be +/-6.9% at the 95% confidence interval with a true probabilistic random sample.
- This means if the survey was conducted with another 200 pharmacists, the survey results would yield within +6.9% or -6.9% of the totals 95 out of 100 times.
Example Survey Questions for Pharmacists
- What brand of Pharmacy Management Platform (PMP) do you use?
- How important is Medicare guidance for customers? Why or why not?
- Does the pharmacy offer guidance for Medicare customers?
- For what reasons does the pharmacy provide guidance?
- How is this guidance offered to customers (proactive or reactive)?
- How do customers come to expect guidance from the pharmacy?
- How often do customers come to the pharmacy for guidance?
- What type of information is provided to Medicare customers?
- How is that guidance provided to customers?
- Does the pharmacist provide guidance on what to look for when selecting a Medicare plan?
- What factor(s) are most important when providing Medicare plan guidance?
- Does the pharmacy partner with an insurance broker, rep, or Medicare enrollment company?
- Does the pharmacy use software that specifically provides Medicare guidance?
- What Medicare guidance software is used?
- How does in-store software support Medicare guidance efforts?
- How satisfied are you with the current pharmacy software in terms of Medicare guidance?
- What do you like most?
- What do you like least?
- Concept testing for the client software offering (1 to 5 scale of value)
Deliverables for the Health Insurance Company
Although the results and insights remain confidential with the client, an overview of the analysis and reporting packages are highlighted below.
After the draft report was delivered to the client, the team of experts at Drive Research debriefed the client on the findings and the next steps.
Here are the deliverables provided as part of our health insurance company market research report:
- Survey analysis
- Question by question breakdown of the results categorized by:
- Type of pharmacy (urban, suburban, rural)
- Code of pharmacy (national, regional, community)
- Partner with insurance, do not partner with insurance
- Region (northeast, south, midwest, west)
- Background and methodology
- Executive summary of theme-based findings which answered the following:
- Recommendations
- Infographic
- Next steps with the market research
- Full appendix of charts and graphs (over 50 pages)
Contact our Healthcare Market Research Firm
Drive Research is a healthcare market research company and health insurance market research firm. Our team of experts works with a variety of healthcare organizations across the country to assist with all types of market research needs.
Here are some of the studies we can help with:
- Online surveys
- Email surveys
- Phone surveys
- Mail surveys
- Focus groups
- Online focus groups
- Qualitative recruiting
- Mobile ethnography
- Video interviews
- Mystery shopping
- Website surveys
- New product research
Questions about a project? Need a proposal? Contact us below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Emily Carroll
A SUNY Cortland graduate, Emily has taken her passion for social and content marketing to Drive Research as the Marketing Manager. She has earned certificates for both Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
Learn more about Emily, here.
