5 Effective Ways to Plan and Conduct a Medical Survey

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 allows you to make extra money.

However, the information from medical surveys is of an especially sensitive nature as it guides the direction of the subject and influences crucial decisions. So, getting the right information matters. This can only be possible with good planning and effective strategies while conducting the survey. If you don’t know where to start, here are five effective tips.

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 surveying 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 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 questionnaire that engages customers and serves as a lead generator, capturing valuable information for better understanding patients’ cardiovascular health needs. When conducting medical surveys, 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. 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 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 share your survey via email to your mailing list or as a text message.
• You can also post it on your social media or contact 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 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 bigger, you will need people to help you out – especially where the survey is offline.

• Depending on the subject, you might need to hire experts with 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 credible influencers for your target audience and use their pages to promote your survey.

5. Seek expert advice

Planning and conducting a medical survey isn’t easy- especially when 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 access these experts. For instance, you can access freelance medical writers using a freelance platform like Kolabtree. Visit such websites to find individuals that you can work with.

How Can SurveySparrow Help?

Conducting a medical survey requires a lot of dedication. Especially when it comes to data security. Come to think of it, you’re dealing with the confidential information of the patients!

This is where HIPAA compliance comes into the picture. You need forms that comply with the Health Insurance Probability and Accountability Act 1996. And, SurveySparrow is one of the best HIPAA compliant survey tools.

Let’s see why:

• Access Security: Ensure only authorized individuals handle data with varied access levels.
• Encryption Excellence: Utilize 256-bit AES encryption for data in transit and at rest. This helps you safeguard electronic health information.
• Data Transmission and Recovery Assurance: The platform guarantees secure data transmission with unique codes and HMACSHA-256 message authentication. Additionally, have a solid disaster recovery plan to restore critical business data quickly.

Other features that might pique your interest:

• Conversational Surveys: Create chat-like surveys and get 40% more responses!
• Multi-Channel Distribution: Share them via email, social media, or embedding surveys on your website.
• Skip and Display Logic: Give a personalized survey experience based on their responses.
• AI Surveys:  Enter a prompt and let artificial intelligence take over. Plus, if you want to make your questions perfect, rephrase them with the wing feature!
• Templates: You get 1000+ ready-to-use survey templates tailored for different purposes and industries.

Why don’t you give SurveySparrow a try? It’s free!

Conclusion

For informed decisions on the medical subject, you must 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 also to seek advice from experts in the medical field.