Patient-generated video: From the mouths of babes
Dan PrinceThe video is endearing and disturbing at the same time. It records the experience of 8-year-old Benjamin Robinson as he undergoes treatment for a brain tumor at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The videographer is Benjamin himself.
Benjamin’s video, also partly recorded by his parents, is being used to educate new patients and their families about pediatric cancer treatment. But it also provides a window into how patient-made videos can be a powerful research tool to improve patient experience.
The beauty of these videos is that they capture experiences and emotion in real time, rather than requiring patients to recall them later when taking a survey or being interviewed. As such, videos can provide qualitative insights that, in combination with quantitative data, can help build extremely valuable overall research findings.
How to make best use of videos
While patient-made videos are a cutting edge tool, some thoughts about their best use are already beginning to emerge:
• Use the videos to help shape larger studies. They can uncover operational issues that don’t surface in other ways and provide direction on what you really need to learn through a survey of your broader target audience.
• Recruit enough patient videographers in key demographic categories to reveal meaningful insight . It may take a panel of 25 to 30 camera-equipped patients to yield sufficient information around key issues.
• Supplement the patient-made videos with professionally-moderated interviews of the patients and families involved to probe for deeper insights about the stories they have shared.
• Strike a balance between giving direction to patient videographers to help focus their efforts while allowing them freedom to video what seems important to them.
• It almost goes without saying: keep HIPAA regulations in mind. HIPAA supports the patient’s right to grant permission as long as a media consent form has been signed and dated, unless there are state laws which prohibit such authorization.
Get even more value by repurposing videos
Healthcare providers should also think about how the videos might be repurposed. As the project at St. Louis Children’s Hospital demonstrates, videos can be valuable for patient education.
Consider them as possible marketing tools as well. Capturing video for research purposes often generates powerful stories that can be leveraged for marketing. If you are trying to help potential customers understand what their experiences might be like at your facility, there can be no better tool than the real-life evidence of the people who have been there.
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March 7th, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Thank you for sharing this patient’s video, as well as some insights about the opportunities and limitations of using videography to support research/patient feedback collection. I agree that there is nothing like real-time to capture the full dimensions of the patient experience. A flip cam and specific instruction about what would be most useful to the provider – in terms of patients’ perceptions, opinions and suggestions – would be valuable. Otherwise, I am concerned that there could be diminished value from the effort (and lots of attention-grabbing cameras getting in the way of communications, relationship-building and privacy).
March 7th, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Very touching video and great blog. Kristi makes an interesting point — as the use of patient videos and testimonials becomes commonplace will consumers become desensitized to the information medium in a way we see print becoming today, only faster?
March 8th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
Certainly, there is the potential for misuse and diminishing returns, as Kristi and Danny suggest. Still, I believe the potential risks outweigh the relative benefits.
From my perspective, there are four strong applications for “user-generated” video. External marketing is one, but perhaps more importantly, video stories from real patients can be a powerful tool for improving the sensitivity and skills of hospital staff and for family/caregiver education. These stories can also be an effective game-changer in the board room, having far greater impact than statistical evidence alone.
Right now, we’re just on the “front edge” of the use of flipcams in healthcare. User-generated video can “touch” people in way that other media do not. Hence, its power and potential. Giving patients (customers) an additional voice to impact and influence change in an industry that consumes so much of their resources (time, money & emotional energy) seems like a very good idea to me.