G2X recently spoke with Katie Joyce, Senior
Vice President, Government and Healthcare Research Lead and Bob Torongo, Senior Vice President, Government Research at Ipsos Public Affairs about what they see ahead for 2019 and 2020 and the role Ipsos can play in supporting Federal Healthcare.
What Opportunities are Ahead in 2019/2020?
The past few years we’ve seen the industry increasingly driving towards empirically-based decision making in an environment that is more data rich than ever. This is a positive trend to see policymakers and practitioners alike successfully filtering insights from an abundance of data. At the higher strategic level this drives more effective policies, and helps to prioritize where (and how much) money is allocated. On the other hand, we still have more data than we know what to do with. There is an opportunity for those who understand how to curate data to capture what will drive the most meaningful insights. In Healthcare for example, beyond administrative data like EHRs, stakeholders need partners who can collect surveillance-based data, which tells you what people are doing and where they are doing it, as well as partners who can collect first person experiential data to understand perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and insights into how people think they behave. Taken together, administrative, operational, and cost data combined with behavioral and experiential data forms a picture of how a healthcare facility operates, and how best practices could be scaled to effect system-wide change. Again, the ability to curate and integrate all of these data sources and then translate the insights into meaningful, positive change for Healthcare delivery and patient experience, for example, is the ultimate goal for a firm like Ipsos in working with our clients.
What Changes do you Expect are Coming?
In terms of improving patient experience, there is increased focus on using apps to incentivize healthy behaviors and encourage patients to be the drivers of their own Healthcare. Our clients are interested in empowering patients, capturing the opinion of caregivers and families, in service of curating an patient-centric experience that starts well beyond the walls of a Healthcare facility. Most Healthcare systems have not been built with the patient (and by extension, the broader community) in mind first and foremost. Unfortunately, policies, budget restraints, leadership mandates, and other drivers often determine ultimately everything from the “brick and mortar” design considerations of a facility, to inefficient policies and technologies, and poor hiring practices. Whether we’re talking about the VA or private health systems, there must be a holistic view of all stakeholders (patients, clinicians, front line and back office staff members, leadership, policymakers) to keep a Healthcare ecosystem in balance.
What is the Challenge in Achieving Success?
We’re seeing a lot of integration efforts and the challenge is bringing all of this together and understanding what it shows. You can only input so much information at once and drawing conclusions and making recommendations out of all of that data often frankly overloads the capacity of our human brains! We need to use machine learning and other increasingly powerful analytical tools in order to support data integration, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. There needs to be an understanding of how change may be implemented but staggered in a way that results will be seen but that will not be too disruptive for the stakeholders. This is the balance between implementation and change management, where data is turned into actionable steps that can be moved forward and assessed.
There is also the challenge of sifting through the data for use cases, for generalizable stories that will drive home the message, that will translate the data to something relatable. Where a client may not be data savvy, without this, you risk losing the message and in turn, forward action.
What is the Role Ipsos plays?
On a personal side, we both come from large management consultancy backgrounds and are passionate about public health and social programs, and how we can support all individuals and communities through these programs. Our teams at Ipsos work side by side with our clients to identify the problem, design a solution and then assess the impact. Unlike other firms, we lead with a strong research DNA, and are grounded in gold standard social science research methods as well as newer methods in surveillance-based research (GIS, sensors, cell phone data). Ten years ago, you needed an army of data collectors and experts to interpret findings and a lot of those traditional research methods were slow and expensive. Ipsos has progressed in a dynamic way, delivering an ability to drive data quickly and less expensively but still maintaining the rigor of the past.
Our research scientists work seamlessly in one team with our training, technical assistance, and change management experts to engage with clients and their stakeholders on utilizing the insights we deliver so that our work does not end up as “shelf-ware.”
Also, in 2019 Ipsos acquired an asset called the KnowledgePanel®, a large, rigorous online research panel. Through this research panel, we have access to 55,000 US households that have been probabilistically recruited and profiled. We have at our fingertips a unique research platform to help health decision makers connect with a representative sample and in doing so, offer a transformative approach to research that supports tight timelines, limited budgets and rapid decisions. Whether it is acute situations in health or rapid decisions needed to move part of a larger health transformation forward, we have the ability to get robust information into the hands of decision makers in a timely and cost-effective manner.
About Ipsos
Since 1975, Ipsos has been a leader in market and social research across numerous sectors, delivering rigorous data and actionable insights based on consumer and citizen knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. At Ipsos we are passionately curious about people, markets, brands and society. We deliver information and analysis that makes our complex world easier and faster to navigate and inspires our clients to make smarter decisions. This includes providing strategic survey research, data analytics, and advisory services on healthcare quality improvement for government, hospitals, integrated health systems, national and regional health insurers, and other health provider organizations. For over 20 years, we have managed and implemented large-scale patient experience surveys and other healthcare research programs for the DHA, the Army Medical Command, the Veterans Health Administration, and a number of major civilian health insurers.
Ipsos delivers information and analysis that makes the complex world easier and faster to navigate and inspires clients to make smarter decisions. Security, Simplicity, Speed and Substance applies to everything the company does.
