Ken Anderson, author of Ethnography Research: A Key to Strategy which appeared in the March issue of the Harvard Business Review is an anthropologist working for Intel Corporation. You may already be wondering how will I twist and blog his experience into something useful to health care leaders! Well, in Anderson's own words: "I believe that ethnography [has been] so beneficial [to high tech companies] that it will spread widely, helping firms in every industry truly understand customers and adapt to fast-changing markets."
In this short but provocative article, Mr. Anderson makes the case that studying markets using consumer preference or reaction to products misses an important dimension - the fact that consumers (or patients) may recognize what they like or dislike in a product or service but can't as easily tell you what products to develop before they see them. Learning about how patients and consumers use technology, products, and processes in their own environment (in situ so to speak) supports the anticipatory development of products and services that the consumer can't yet imagine. Anderson uses examples from the high tech industry to illustrate the success of this approach and reports that Intel Corporation has found the approach so valuable that it now employs over 20 full time anthropologists and ethnographers to support its product development activities.
Ethnography and Anthropology to Inform Care Improvement...
Is this approach applicable to health care leaders responsible for development of medical devices, therapies, care programs, adherence strategies, etc? Any clinician can tell you that the history is everything in diagnosis. And we know how inconsistent both physician inquiry techniques and patient memory can be. So, on the delivery side, can understanding how medication is stored and when/where it is taken in the home improve pharmacologic regimen adherence? Can discovering grapefruits in the refrigerator give us a better idea of how many people consume juice that interferes with medication efficacy - despite label warnings? Can observation of the physical hazards in an environment improve safety programs? Can the presence and accessibility of scales tell us something about how well equipped CHF patients are to accurately self monitor weight? By looking at the number and condition of vehicles available to transport patients to health care visits, can we learn something about why groups of patients cancel or are late? And therefore about what programmatic approaches to solving these problems might be most useful?
And for Health Product Development...
On the health product development side can home or office based observations yield uniquely helpful information about how families might adapt to new technologies or devices, which devices are most home-compatible, and what unexpected hazards or limitations need to be considered in product design?
We know a little about the importance of home environment from our experience with home based care programs. Consider whether going beyond the history and physical and delving into the environmental realities of daily life on a population basis can yield results - for patients, health care consumers, and for health care leaders and their organizations.
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