Healthcare: digital ethnography can illuminate the too-busy Caregiver

CareStarter's sister company, Feedback, has been conducting deep digital ethnographic listening for over 15 years in the healthcare and DoD spaces. Check out these thoughts from Chief Behavioral Officer Dean Browell:

📸 –Kim Warp

Healthcare, take note: This funny but sad cartoon strikes at the heart of why you won’t always find Caregivers expounding on every facet of their lives in your surveys.

But what can you find? Their erudite and sincere questions to peers along their journeys in providing care. The late night clarification on a sick plan, the advice on a second opinion, the fearful tone in the complication exploration, the empathic response to the newcomer. All of these things you won’t find in the survey or even focus groups - which would be more likely filled with a very specific story they need you to understand and general stakes-setting.

(You might see some of it in interviews but imagine how much deeper you’d get if you knew what and how they spoke to peers so you could probe more for better understanding.)

A reliance on HCAHPS to give a complete look at patient experience comes at the caregiver when they are at their most exasperated: after a hospital stay that was likely the culmination of one of the hardest parts of their month… or year… or life. Never mind that you’re not capturing the actual complete experience - which in America includes the payment part - or that the hospital stay is only one part of a difficult life of the caregiver (and it’s not even their life they’re caring for - which is another problem).

The American caregiver, be they parent or child of a patient, is one of the most important and yet most underserved and misunderstood stakeholders in healthcare. Listening to them through digital ethnography and deep interviews, in their own words as they willingly volunteer their stories and needs to one another, is one of the purest ways to ensure you respect their time and understand them.

Feedback has your back for digital ethnography and our friends  Steve Koch and Jonathan Pathuis at Cast & Hue can’t be beat for those deep interviews.