Challenges of Concept Testing in Healthcare

Concept testing is fundamental to product development. In healthcare, concept testing is used to validate ideas, define features and priorities, optimize messages, and determine the best way of arranging and delivering information. Of course there are numerous methods for concept testing, depending on what needs to be learned and confirmed.

Needs Assessment and Validation

It may be classified as Product Development 101, but the first step in concept testing is to determine or validate needs and wants. As innovators, we may think we have a spark, a great idea that meets our customer’s needs, but we need to make sure our view is shared with the people who matter most: our users. There is no “right way” to do a needs assessment, although qualitative approaches work well to reveal and explore a patient or healthcare professional’s experience.

Impression Testing

In healthcare, there are few ideas that are truly revolutionary, but many services are evolutions of what is already part of the healthcare delivery environment. So, how do we know if we are on the right track with a new concept? That's what impression testing is all about. Innovators needs to know if healthcare consumers and healthcare providers will readily accept and use a new service. And if an idea really resonates, it may be greeted with curiosity, interest or excitement.

Message Testing

Message testing is a type of concept test often used in marketing communications to arrive at the most effective functional and emotional appeal for a product. However, message testing is not only used to sharpen the way that a service will be conveyed through an advertisement or webpage, it also helps to strengthen the product’s notional core. Message testing can provide innovators with not only an understanding of what patients or end users need to believe or understand about a product, it can also reinforce differences that matter and accentuate how a product or service is superior to a competitor’s offering.

How to Describe a New Concept

Impression Testing and Message Testing necessitate communicating the fundamental features and experience of a product of service. Describing an experience – any experience – is not an easy task. For example, if I had to describe what it felt like to bid on and win an EBay auction to a person living in 1990 who had been flung into 2014, I would have had a hard time (especially considering no one had even seen the Internet back then!)

Innovators and designers often get stuck at choosing the right level of detail and description to effectively communicate a new idea. The problem is that oftentimes a concept can’t be communicated with plain text or a simple visual. Healthcare innovations are typically inserted into workflows and processes that exist and to describe a concept effectively requires conveying where the innovation fits inside the healthcare experience.

An approach that we have taken for conveying new ideas that has been well-received is the “Low-Fi Video.” This is simply a short (2-to 3-minute long) video made using Powerpoint and iMovie. We begin by storyboarding a concept using Powerpoint, with narration in the notes section. The illustrations are simple – using clip art. We choose imagery that conveys the function of the innovation as well as where the innovation fits within the patient journey. Then we export images into gifs and build the images around a voiceover in iMovie.

I’ve used the Low-Fi Video for pitch presentations or in helping to convey the basics of an idea to investors, champions and users. I begin with a caveat, explaining that as the viewer can surmise from the crude presentation, the product concept is still unfinished. What I like about this is that the Low-Fi approach allows for unfiltered user feedback. We use the Low-Fi approach to invite users to become “co-creators” in the process of developing and elevating the concept. In this way, concept testing is lean and effective.

Patient Journey Mapping

Innovation begins with addressing needs in new ways or finding needs that have not received adequate attention. With patient innovations, we are dealing with issues that touch patients, families, and providers. Marketers and innovators often have an incomplete understanding of patients’ needs on both a functional level and emotional level. You can’t understand it, unless you’ve lived it.

Inherent in evolving solutions for patients is a deep understanding of how key decisions are made. Who makes decisions? And when? While we would like to believe that important healthcare decisions are made logically, empirically, or with the advice of learned intermediaries, we know that not to be the case. (Medication adherence – the decision to stick with a drug that has been prescribed – is almost made independent of the healthcare provider who prescribed the drug.) So, unless we have a clear idea of how healthcare and treatments are consumed and the decisions and emotions and factors that surround those choices, we can’t create well-tuned solutions.

That’s where the Patient Journey Map comes in. Patient Journey Maps are tools for innovators, marketers and decision makers. They are rich, visual representations that help innovators and marketers develop a deeper empathetic connection to the patient, and provide a dramatic illustration of the gaps that are being addressed. Patient Journey Maps can support solution investment and concept development.

There are hundreds of ways of creating and representing patient journeys. If you look at the patient journey maps on in a web search, many feature figures walking down pathways reminiscent of The Game of Life. Patients and caregivers need to cross streams and rivers. They encounter dangerous waterfalls, climb steep mountains or travel through rainstorms.

The Patient Experience Map borrows from the Customer Experience map, which has been a mainstay of market research for decades. But there are major differences between a journey for Customers (who, for example, might be buying a new BMW) and for Patients, who are facing a major health challenge. Patients deal with fear, loss, family impact and uncertain outcomes. We all know how to buy a BMW (even if we’ve never tried), but the patient who is dealing with a complex condition is often without guides or milestones. In short, Patient Journey Maps are critical tools to understand the intricacies of what patients go through as they travel through the healthcare environment.

The best Patient Journey Maps not only provide rich visual statements, but they connect to patient narratives pulled from the core patient research. Journeys are generalized, but the generalities need to be rooted in real people with authentic, evocative stories. Good journeys are layered – they provide an understanding of the functional, the decisional, and the emotional.

by HealthEd.

Testing and Creating New Idea: From Spark to Concept

How do we test what we think are “good ideas”? Like many people who have been involved in innovation, ideas sometimes seem to arrive effortlessly and spontaneously. Innovation begins with sparks. Sparks can’t be planned. They can’t be forced. Sparks come from reading widely, from provocative conversations and from simply being open to new experiences. Sparks arrive after hours – in private moments, on long walks, or while driving. We’ve all experienced sparks, but only a few sparks are acted upon.

The first step to innovation is taking a spark and gently shaping it into a testable concept. But we don’t usually take that step, and often for good reason. For innovators working inside healthcare, we see endless number of gaps and opportunities to help patients and caregivers and providers. But our spark, our good idea, just may not fit. If we work inside of institutions that deliver services and products for health and healthcare we understand both the problem and the inherent limitations involved in addressing that problem. We decide that our sparks just won’t cut it within the constraints or the processes or the mission of the institution we work for, and so we dismiss what might be a “really good idea.”

We mull. Mulling over a spark is part of the innovation process. At some point in the hours or days of mulling, driving down the road and thinking, “hey, this might just work” and “well, that might be something useful,” we determine that it’s worth taking the step of moving from spark to testable concept.

How do we do it? I use a simple one-page concept sheet. The one-page format forces an innovator to be concise. The one-pager includes three parts: a “tweet-length” concept statement, a paragraph or two describing the problem, and a paragraph or two describing the solution.

Let’s talk about the problem. The problem is typically shared. It’s the patient’s problem. It’s the payer’s problem, the family and/or caregivers problem. It’s a financial problem. But when we refer to the patient (or healthcare consumer, if you wish), I assert that it is important to term a problem statement in terms of both functional needs (access to services, healthcare professionals, etc) and emotional needs. I would argue that most of the most important innovative ideas that have changed our relationship as consumers to healthcare have been equally about filling a need for better access to information and filling a need to have a deeper, more empowered connection to our experience of managing and dealing with our health. Furthermore, I would suggest that well conceived concept statements are ones that consider the patient journey and recognize where the innovation intercedes in that journey. We create solutions that both fit within people’s lives, and in some small way alter the way that we do what we do.

Yes, there is a lot riding on the one-page concept sheet. Innovators have write something that is both true to the “aha kernel” contained in the spark, but also need to be clear, concise and insightful regarding needs and solutions. Given this, we usually go through a few iterations of writing and rewriting our one-page concept sheet. The rewrites are preceded by meetings and calls and research. The process of validating an initial concept is fraught with danger because it is likely that the spark will get trampled upon as you are writing your concept sheet. You see something that feels like a giant barrier. Or you realize that your great big unique idea isn’t so unique as you thought. Or you realize that there is no way that the idea is going to fly within the constraints of environment that it will need to live –- namely you are going to have an impossible idea of selling it to champions.

So, be gentle with your sparks as you develop them into concepts. Be careful with who you describe your ideas to. Don’t let them get knocked around too badly, but give yourself permission to change your thinking while holding on to the kernel that made the idea worthwhile in the first place. If that spark is linked to a gap in the patient journey – a gap punctuated by an emotional need, then you can more easily hold firm to the spark as you move forward into concept development.

First Blogpost: Patient Engagement and Innovation

Patient engagement, patient centered care and innovation are hot topics in healthcare. Almost every health delivery organization is looking for ways to involve patients in their care decisions and to help patients understand the connection between daily health choices and our overall health and wellness.

This blog will review the exciting and innovative solutions being designed, developed and implemented intended to help patients and caregivers be better informed, better connected, and more motivated to take positive health behaviors.

The world of healthcare is changing rapidly with the use of electronic health records, e-prescribing and other tools that facilitate the capture and sharing of data for physicians, hospitals and other providers. Health IT is touching providers, payers, and to some extent patients. Yes, technology allows for information to be instantly delivered to your phone and computer, but access alone is not sufficient: we know that people don’t change behaviors just because they have access to data. For healthcare companies to create disruptive technologies that will help patients take and maintain action, companies need to offer tools that transform data into motivational and decisional tools that patients and caregivers can really use. That means that we need to give people things that they find interesting, fun and motivational. We need to design tools geared to varying levels of health literacy, different languages, and differing levels of technology comfort. Innovators…good innovators working in the world of healthcare need to consider what patients really want and help people understand the connection between behaviors and the consumption of healthcare resources.

This is going to be a fun ride. Hope you enjoy.