By Amy Santopietro, Director of Consumer Insights and Market Research at Mass General Brigham.
Amy and her colleague, Avion Ray Moore, will provide additional details on this work at Ignite: Healthcare Research, June 5 in Philadelphia.
In today's healthcare environment, providing the right services for diverse patient populations is essential. At Mass General Brigham, we recognize that gaining feedback from all audiences is vital to improving patient care and achieving equitable outcomes. By implementing innovative engagement strategies, our consumer insights team has successfully gathered data from many hard-to-reach groups to inform communications, marketing, and other services. To achieve this, we needed to both diversify the populations from which we receive feedback and explore recruitment tactics beyond traditional online panels.
Broadening the Primary Care Audience
Before diving into some of the more experimental tactics that we tried in our efforts to reach niche patient populations, we do want to highlight our most leveraged resource: our online patient panel. Historically, this panel (like many online panels) has skewed older, Caucasian, and female. In re-recruiting, we identified the need to diversify this community to better reflect our patient demographics. One key strategy was expanding our definition of the primary care audience.
We recognized that some historically underserved patients—those with lower incomes, non-White patients, non-English speakers, or those lacking reliable transportation—often do not have a primary care provider and access care through alternate means. This includes urgent care facilities or specialists that offer “primary-care-like” services, such as OBGYNs. In doing some analysis on these patients, we realized that while they do not have a PCP in our system, many of these patients were accessing our care 4+ times a year and likely could have valuable insight to offer. In revising our criteria to include these patients, we identified over 50,000 additional individuals of whom we could target for recruitment into our online community.
This approach enabled us to connect with younger, working patients and caregivers who may have been overlooked in our traditional patient panels. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of the healthcare ecosystem ensures that our insights reflect the diverse experiences of our patient population.
Reaching Home Hospital Patients
While broadening our online panel was critical, receiving feedback from the right audiences sometimes requires different methods altogether. When our Home Hospital leadership team came to us with questions concerning how they could optimize the consent process, we had to think creatively about how to reach a very small, specific population of patients who had received Home Hospital services. Knowing that the average age of a Home Hospital patient is 78, we knew we weren’t going to find these patients – an already small group – in existing panels. As an alternate approach, we mailed paper surveys directly to their homes.
By providing paper surveys, we allowed patients—many facing mobility or technology barriers—to share their feedback comfortably. This approach was successful; we received feedback from nearly fifty Home Hospital patients through mailed surveys, and some patients were so pleased to be asked that they agreed to participate in telephone interviews to share additional thoughts. This research directly informed changes to our in-hospital outreach tactics.
Meeting Patients Where They Are: Cancer Patients and Non-English-Speaking Hispanic Women
Our initiatives to engage specific patient populations have led to further innovation in our methods. We successfully used asynchronous boards to connect with current cancer patients, recognizing that the fatigue and stress that comes with cancer treatment can hinder participation in traditional focus group formats which require a commitment to a day/date/time. Offering flexible engagement allowed patients to share their experiences on their terms, yielding valuable insight that ultimately drove the creative campaign for the Mass General Cancer Center in 2022.
In another instance, we sought input from non-English-speaking Hispanic women regarding their pregnancy care needs. Partnering with a local Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) chapter helped us build trust and reach this population effectively. WIC's established community connections allowed us to gather insights into their preferences and challenges in accessing care. Ultimately, we decided not to pursue this population at that time, as we realized we needed to reassess our program to better meet their needs. Nevertheless, the research was valuable in guiding our approach and avoiding potential cultural missteps.
The Path Forward
Capturing hard-to-reach audiences in healthcare presents both challenges and opportunities. While some outreach strategies may not yield immediate results, each experience provides valuable lessons that enhance our awareness of how different populations want to engage. In remaining committed to understanding our audience—their needs, preferences, and ability to participate—we will continue to innovate our tactics and hopefully drive towards more equitable feedback that results in a deeper understanding of our patients and better healthcare results.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amy Santopietro is the Director of Consumer Insights and Market Research at Mass General Brigham, where she is passionate about the organization's mission of ensuring equitable care for all. In this role, she oversees patient and consumer research across marketing, patient experience, and digital, among other areas. Prior to working at Mass General Brigham, Amy spent six years at TJX where she supported consumer insights for HomeGoods, worked on the launch of Homesense in the US, and later led both store and digital customer experience across all five US brands. Amy is the current President-Elect for the Insights Association North Atlantic chapter. She also sits on the IDEA Council Executive Committee, which is a subset of the national Insights Association and has a mission of promoting ongoing inclusion, equity, and access in market research for both respondents and researchers.