Collaborators
Researchers from our client's side, and Stacy Benjamin, Alexis Schiff, Karishma Dotia, Rebecca Lenahan, Kelly Costello and Dana Fell from Panorama Innovation.
Role
Researcher for Panorama Innovation
To comply with our non-disclosure agreement, confidential information has been intentionally omitted or obscured in this case study. The views expressed here are my own, and are not necessarily held by our client or by Panorama Innovation LLC.
We were tasked with finding the habits of pregnant women in the three states of Illinois, Texas, and West Virginia in the United States, and find ways to help our client prevent pre-term labour.
According to March of Dimes, a non-profit organization that works to improve the lives of mothers and babies, premature birth (birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy) and its complications are the #1 cause of death of babies in the United States. Babies who survive premature birth often have long-term health problems, including cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, chronic lung disease, blindness and hearing loss.
The CDC found in a 2018 study that nearly 1 in 10 babies is born prematurely in the US, and that racial and ethnic differences in preterm birth rates remain. For example, in 2018, the rate of preterm birth among African-American women (14%) was about 50 percent higher than the rate of preterm birth among white women (9%).
Our client, a leading health insurance carrier, decided to tackle this problem to see what can be done. Our team at Panorama Innovation worked hand in hand with our client’s research teams and conducted qualitative research remotely and in-person across three states.
I worked with the rest of the team to plan the research, prototype multiple ways to conduct remote research, conduct secondary research, and recruit research participants from non-profit organizations and other stakeholders, interview participants, analyze the information that we collected, and present our findings to our clients.
My core responsibilities were to design the remote research experience, implement it, support the participants during the actual research phase, and provide our team with the data received during it.
Our research took us through lots of interviews with professionals in the healthcare industry, as well as with causes and organizations which are working hard to prevent preterm labor and support newborns to lead healthy lives. Most importantly, we reached out to women who either were pregnant during the time of this study, had a history of preterm delivery, or were predisposed to preterm labor as per their medical background. We also took care to ensure that we were speaking to women from a diverse range of socio-economic status, ethnicities, and had different pre-existing medical conditions which could potentially affect the pregnancy.
I am unable to share this study and it’s findings in detail due to non-disclosure agreements I am required to comply with, and would instead prefer to take this opportunity to tell you about how we conducted remote studies with the participants in West Virginia and Texas. They are particularly interesting because we experimented with various tools which are readily available on the internet and people’s phones in order to conduct research, by creating a combination of card sorts and diary studies which participants could answer as per their own schedules and free time.xn