MedSpan Musings — Tips for better market research

MedSpan Musing

Using Adaptive Recruiting Techniques

 

It is not always clear who the most appropriate respondents are for a study. For example, it might not be clear at the onset of a project which hospital executives are responsible for evaluating and selecting a complex patient care program.

For these situations, use an adaptive recruiting technique. Conduct a short Internet survey or phone interview with a few respondents to identify who is responsible for the decisions you are researching.

If you know one job title of interest, you can incorporate the questions for identifying the complete set of decision makers into the main survey instrument. If the appropriate decision makers are completely unknown, identifying the correct decision makers can be a separate exercise.

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MedSpan Musings — Tips for better payer market research

MedSpan Musings — Tips for better payer market research  

The benefit covering a drug is not always obvious

When discussing benefit coverage of drugs with payers, remember that some health plans at first cover drugs under the medical benefit and then transfer those costs each month to the pharmacy benefit. Be sure to probe for this approach and its implications for drugs administered in physicians’ offices and alternate sites of care.

Payer 101: The respondents you need for your payer market research study

At MedSpan Research, we’re proud of the expertise we’ve gained over the past 17 years in an important but not well understood sector of the healthcare industry: payers. Today, we’ll continue with the Payer 101 series that we started in September by covering the key types of payer respondents to include in your next payer market research study.

To recap, the term ‘payer’ is broadly defined as any entity that reimburses the use of healthcare services or products. The term commonly refers to health insurance companies (otherwise known as health plans) as a whole, or to a key decision-maker at a health plan, such as a medical director. In the first post in our Payer 101 series, we focused on the former definition. In this second part of our series, we’ll go into more detail about the latter.

Payer 101: Three things every healthcare market researcher should know

How much do you know about the U.S. health insurance landscape?

In this post, we’ll discuss three basic aspects of U.S. health plan payers: type, geography, and size. Understanding these aspects will help you design a study sample that is representative of your market.

Managed Care Musings-Tips for better payer research

Managed Care Musings-Tips for better payer research