What are some successful focus group applications in healthcare?

When your focus is improving ergonomics/UX, it is sometimes helpful to have focus group participants do advance work before the groups. That might be keeping an activity diary, taking photos or a video of how they manage the problem currently, or actually bringing their home-made solutions with them to the sessions. Seeing their solutions is often far better than hearing descriptions of what they say they do. As an example, when conducting research on child-proof closures, seeing pictures of how and where medication is stored documents the reality of child danger (vs. senior ability to open difficult closures) - and bringing hard to open bottles to the group helps design teams see the problems of arthritic and elderly users.

One danger in concept testing is the tendency to test with no benchmark - leading to the question, "how good is good" or "how bad is bad." One solution is to introduce the current solution, evaluate that, then introduce the proposed solution(s) your client envisions. This moves the design from a monadic test to sequential monadic format. If you have several options (i.e., your current product, your main competitor's solution, and your new concept), at the end of the discussion you can reintroduce all and ask participants to place them on a Poor to Great continuum - and that becomes a great springboard for deeper discussion. Also, in many concept tests, clients have not considered criteria for a Go/No Go decision. Decide that in advance!

1. Capturing Voice of the Customer (VOC): Gaining deep insights into patient needs and expectations, crucial for quality improvements. 2. Identifying Critical to Quality (CTQ) Attributes: Understanding patient priorities helps define CTQs in healthcare services. 3. Pinpointing Improvement Areas: Revealing specific process inefficiencies, aligning with waste reduction goals. 4. Enhancing Patient-Centric Process Design: Feedback assists in designing processes that better cater to patient needs. 5. Driving Innovations: Informing innovations that meet patient needs more effectively. 6. Data-Driven Decision Making: Supporting a comprehensive, data-driven approach to healthcare decision-making

Researchers for medical focus groups/IDIs need to know that there may be notable gaps between what you hear in voice-of-patient vs. the voice-of-caregiver interviews - and both are important perspectives. I've seen this in young patients/parents and adult caregivers/elderly as well as in interviews with people of differing disease stages. Offering genuine empathy, maintaining a naive listening posture, and remaining "shockproof" while hearing stories are important moderating skills for this category of work. It is also worth considering the benefits of IDIs with patient vs. family/caregiver vs. conducting joint interviews. Consider also the time and timing of your interviews (brief, at best time of day, and time from most recent care).