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7 min

7 helpful tips to conduct a medical survey

Learn how to conduct a medical survey through these 7 helpful tips

GrapeData
Nov 15, 2022
Healthcare

Introduction

Conducting a medical survey can be a difficult process, especially if you don't have the right strategy for collecting responses. If you want to conduct a medical survey to get valuable data, there are steps that should be taken before you even begin writing out the survey questions. In this article, we will discuss some of those tips and give examples of how to use them.

7 useful tips if you want to conduct a medical survey

Before we talk about how to conduct a medical survey, let's discuss what a medical survey is. A medical survey is a type of market research that researchers conduct to gain insight into the health and well-being of a population. The goal of a medical survey is to collect information about the prevalence of specific diseases and conditions. In addition, it can also shed light on lifestyle habits that may affect the risk for disease. You can use this type of research to help determine how best to prevent or manage diseases in populations.

Medical surveys are a great way to gather market research for your business, especially if you're in the medical field. They can be conducted for many reasons, including:

-Understanding what patients feel about the quality of their care

-Knowing which medical practices have the highest customer satisfaction ratings

-Seeing how satisfied people are with specific medical practices, or subcategories within those practices (i.e., doctors, dentists, etc.)

-Finding out what kinds of consumers visit a particular medical practice or clinic on average

Now that you know more about these types of surveys, let's dive into 7 helpful tips to conduct a survey.

1. Determine your research question to conduct a medical survey

The first thing to do to conduct a medical survey is to determine your research question. The research question is the starting point for any survey and it should be specific, clear, and concise. It should also be answerable by the data collected through the survey process. In order to ensure that your research question is relevant to your target population, it's important that you understand who you are speaking with before beginning a survey.

The next step in surveying is to determine how you will conduct the survey. This can include using online or traditional methods, such as phone calls or in-person interviews. Part of your decision will depend on what information you need, and how much time you have available. It will also depend on whether the data needs to be collected immediately or at a later date.

2. Ensure that your question is specific enough

After you have determined the method of collecting data, it's important to ensure that your research question is specific enough. For example: "What percentage of adults in Canada have visited an urgent care clinic in the past year?" This type of question would be great for determining if consumers feel their current healthcare system meets their needs or not. 

Next, it's important to determine what types of questions you should ask to conduct a medical survey. This will depend on the purpose of your survey and the type of information needed. For example, let's say that you are looking for feedback on a new product or service. In this case,  it would be helpful to ask respondents if they've used similar products or services in the past and how they compare with yours. If you are trying to understand how consumers feel about their current healthcare system, then it would be helpful to ask them how often they visit a doctor or urgent care clinic. Additionally, you can ask them how much time they spend at each appointment.

3. Determine your survey type to conduct a medical survey

When you plan to conduct a medical survey, it is important that you know the type of survey that will benefit your needs. Online surveys and in-person surveys have their pros and cons. Online surveys are convenient for both the respondents and researchers. However, they may not be as private as in-person interviews. In addition, online surveys are generally less expensive than in-person interviews.

However, if you want to find out more personal information about people's experiences with certain health issues or treatments, then conducting an in-person interview might be better suited for this purpose. This is because one can only obtain such information through face-to-face communication between the interviewer and the respondent. People may not feel comfortable sharing this type of information on an app while filling out a survey.

You can conduct medical surveys using the internet, but also by phone or mail. The goal of these surveys is to collect information in order to make better-informed decisions about marketing and advertising campaigns for products or services that are related to health care.

If you want to learn more about medical issues in your target population, then conducting a survey is a great way to start. There are many types of surveys that you can use depending on the type of research you want to conduct and the purpose behind it.

4. Use clear language in the medical survey

Your survey will be more effective if the language you use is clear, unambiguous, and easy to understand. In other words, avoid jargon!

It's important to keep in mind that different people have different levels of education and experience with the healthcare system. If a survey requires a certain level of technical knowledge to comprehend for some respondents but not for others, this can cause confusion among all respondents and lead to invalid results.

Jargon can also create an unintended barrier between doctors and patients when it's used inappropriately. For example, sometimes technical terminology isn't explained well enough for patients who don't already know what it means or how it applies to their situation.

As part of your planning process, consider how much information you want each participant to provide. For example: Do you need specific dates? Or just general time frames? Will you ask respondents about past medical visits as well as current ones?  Your decisions will help determine which words should appear on your survey (and which shouldn't).

For example, if you're asking about a specific diagnosis or condition, it's best to use the term that describes that illness. That way, participants won't get confused by questions about other conditions that may sound similar but are actually unrelated. It's also important to avoid jargon, in this case, medical terms and abbreviations that might be unfamiliar to the general public.

Learn how to tackle technical jargon in this post.

5. Have a target population to conduct a medical survey

In order to conduct a survey, you need to have a target population. The target population is the group of people you wish to survey.

The target population can be a country, city or state, or region. It can even be a particular group of people like employees in your company. By defining your target population clearly before starting the questionnaire development process, it will be easier for you to reach them later when you conduct a medical survey.

It is also important that the selected target population must be easily accessible. Accessibility allows researchers to collect data from every member within it without any problems.

The target population should be large enough so that there will be enough data to analyse. If you have too small of a target population, it may not yield the results you need for your project. A good benchmark is to start with at least 200 respondents from each of your groups.

6. Set your sample size to conduct the survey

The sample size is the number of people you ask to complete the survey. The larger the sample size, the more accurate your results will be. You can use a sample size calculator to determine how many respondents are needed for a reliable study.

The results of your sample size calculation should be used as a starting point for your survey. You’ll want to include additional questions to get a more complete picture of your audience. For example, if you’re conducting an online survey about fitness, you might ask respondents how often they exercise and what types of activities they prefer.

The sample size calculator can help you determine how many people you need to complete a survey. Let’s look at an example to determine the sample size. In our example, let’s say that the confidence level is 95% and the margin of error is 5%. Let’s also assume that the population proportion is 50%,(i.e. the percentage of the population associated with the survey). The total population under consideration is 10000. In this case the same size would be 370. This means that 370 survey respondents are needed to say with confidence that the real value is within, +/- 5% of the surveyed value. 

7. Ensure that your sample is representative

One way that you can ensure representativeness is through non-probability sampling. The quota sample is a type of non-probability sampling. It is used when you want to make sure that the groups that are included in your sample are representative of the target population. Let's look at some examples of when you can use quota sampling:

  • You need to choose a target population. But, you do not know how to measure it objectively (for example, if there is no way to measure annual sales of a product or service).
  • Researchers use quota sampling to get information from people who are hard to reach. For example, it can be used to reach people who live in remote areas or those who may be reluctant to participate.

For a guide on sampling methods, check out this article.

Conducting a medical survey can be difficult, but with the right strategy, you can get valuable feedback

In order to conduct an effective medical survey, you’ll need to make sure that your approach is well thought out and strategic. Here are some tips for doing this:

  • Identify the purpose of the survey.
  • Why are you conducting it? What do you hope to learn from it? This will help you decide on what questions to ask as well as how they should be worded.
  • Make sure that you have the right people to conduct the survey.
  • If possible, try to get a mix of both doctors and patients for each interview. 
  • Plan out how long each interview will take. This will help ensure that you don’t run out of time or end up asking questions that are irrelevant or repetitive.
  • Make sure that you have a plan for analysing the data once it’s collected. This will help you make sense of what people are saying and better understand how to improve your practice.

Conclusion

Medical surveys are conducted for several different reasons, but all of them involve collecting data about a person's health or medication use.

Professionals or researchers can conduct medical surveys who want to collect information from their clients. They often use these surveys to track disease prevalence, drug effectiveness, and more. Additionally, it's important to note that not all surveys are created equal: some are better than others at helping companies understand their customers' needs.

As you can see, conducting a medical survey is not an easy task. There are many factors that need to be considered, such as the research question, target population, and sample size. However, with the right strategy in place, these factors will all work together to help you get valuable feedback from your audience. Need help conducting a medical survey? Contact us today! Curious to know the pros and cons to conduct medical surveys? We've got just the right post for you. Check out 'Are medical market research surveys worth it'?

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