Case Study:
Hope in the Healthcare Environment
The case:
In some cases, a single complex emotion can serve as a highly diagnostic indicator and provide insights to drive patient care at important junctures. This is readily apparent in healthcare where Hope can be the determinant of critical patient actions.
The challenge:
Patients in clinical drug trials, as well as patients admitted to hospital stays, respond very differently to treatments. Depending on patient experiences, their Hope can remain high or falter as a result. Understanding this level of Hope can be key to understanding if a patient is likely to remain in treatment or drop out of (very expensive) drug trials.
But can you measure this important emotion? Until the development of our methods at TRH, gauging Hope was truly a daunting task. But now, researchers can measure complex emotions such as Hope at any given point in the healthcare journey, triggering interventions in patient care that may alter
their outcomes.
The emotional insights:
Working with our healthcare research partners, TRH has demonstrated the efficacy of measuring the Hope emotion in helping understand patient behavior. In this case, patients who were starting a new drug trial expressed high levels of Hope that the new drug will address their needs. However, over the course of the drug treatment, patients who do not perceive benefits from their treatment see a critical drop in Hope that was found to predict their likelihood of remaining in the trial.
The resulting strategic actions:
Trial administrators were able act on this information and invoke strategies to keep these patients engaged. By understanding a patient’s level of Hope through their treatment process, intervention was able to be focused on at-risk patients, resulting in more patients completing the full trial, improving the accuracy, timing and costs of the trial.
Hope is a strong indicator in the healthcare industry. And healthcare researchers can use Hope, as measured by our TRH method, to improve outcomes for patients in different stages of care. This, in turn improves outcomes for the agency researchers and the clients of these agencies.
Case Studies
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Research Partnerships
We partner with a number of established market research firms to provide opportunities by adding emotional measurement data and insights to the research programs already in place with key clientele, and attracting new clients by promoting the joint capabilities of emotional and cognitive research offered by the partnership.
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Segmentation Research Enhancement
A boutique research agency pitched a prospective client that was looking for a new perspective on segmentation research. The Rational Heart partnered with the research firm to help them show how segments differed in their emotional response to the client’s product offerings.
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Integrating Emotional Research
A pharmaceutical subsidiary ties TRH emotional performance information to their ongoing brand tracker, identifying the emotional points of relative influence, which directed their marketing strategies.