Medical surveys are an important tool in healthcare. As a medical practitioner, your observations on different medical areas are crucial for gaining invaluable insights – insights that can help improve the healthcare system for patients, drug manufacturers and the public. Besides, conducting paid medical surveys gives you an opportunity to make extra money.
However, the information from medical surveys is of an especially sensitive nature as it guides the direction for the subject, and it influences crucial decisions. So getting the right information matters. This can only be possible with good planning and the use of effective strategies while conducting the survey. If you don’t know where to start, here are five effective tips for you.
1. Have clear objectives
While planning for your survey, start by defining the primary objective. Have a clear mental picture of the expected outcome.
To achieve this, ask yourself a few questions:
- What kind of feedback do you need? For instance, are you doing the survey for a particular drug or a certain medical service?
- Are you looking for specific answers or general answers?
- Is there a specific target group?
The answers to these questions will tell you how to formulate your survey. In addition, while a single survey can be used to measure different things, you need to check if the extra subjects threaten the primary objective. If they do, avoid them and stick to the primary objective.
For example, Cardi Health (a platform for monitoring heart health) offers a personalized questionnaire that not only engages customers but also serves as a lead generator, capturing valuable information for better understanding patients’ cardiovascular health needs. When conducting medical surveys, utilizing such engaging tools can ensure accurate data collection and help guide important decisions in healthcare.
2. Be creative with the questionnaire
The ultimate goal of the survey is to gather answers on a particular subject. If you are to have the target people participate and give honest answers, you have to be creative with the questionnaire.
- First, clearly state the importance of your survey and how your audience can benefit from it.
- Keep it like a conversation where you start by engaging the people. Then move gradually to personal questions if there is a need for them.
- Don’t make the survey too long as many people don’t have the patience for a long questionnaire.
- You will also get more honest and thoughtful answers if there are only a few questions
In addition, focus more on closed-ended questions such as checkbox questions or multiple-choice questions. Such questions take less time to answer.
3. Leverage an online platform
The internet has made things easier for most tasks – including conducting a medical survey. You can take advantage of this valuable resource to invite participants and gather responses.
- You can put respondents at ease and guard confidential data with anonymous surveys.
- You can choose to share your survey via email to your mailing list or as a text message.
- You can also post it on your social media or contract other websites to display a banner to their visitors.
With online platforms like SurveySparrow, you have multiple ways to cast your net wider. You can create your own account and explore these features.
4. Hire help
If you are conducting a small medical survey, it is possible to do it on your own. However, if the survey is of a bigger magnitude, you will need people to help you out – especially where the survey is offline.
- Depending on the subject, you might need to hire experts in the field who have the right skills.
- However, for subjects that don’t require specific skills, you can train a few intelligent people to help you do the work.
If the survey is online, you can also hire influencers that are credible for your target audience and use their pages to promote your survey.
5. Seek expert advice
Planning and conducting a medical survey isn’t an easy task – especially when you are doing it for the first time. That’s why it is important to seek the advice of medical experts who are knowledgeable in the subject.
Thankfully, the internet is full of different websites where you can get access to these experts. For instance, you can have access to freelance medical writers by using a freelance platform like Kolabtree. Visit such websites to find individuals that you can work with.
Conclusion
For informed decisions on the medical subject in question, it is important that you plan carefully and adopt the best strategies to conduct your survey. Start by defining the precise goal that you want to achieve. Then sit down and write your questions creatively. It is good to make use of the internet and hire people to help you with the work. Finally, remember to also seek advice from experts in the medical field.
