Rx4good Wants You! Help Us Understand the Caregiver Role in Clinical Decision-Making

• by: Heidi Adams
|
• February 5, 2018


• Categories:
  • General
  • Good4Patients
  • Patient Engagement
  • Research

At Rx4good, we are fortunate to partner every day with clients to reveal and support the patient experience through our research, strategy development and project implementation. Through this work, we have recently become interested in an important area where we see a lack of evidence and insight: what is the role of the caregiver in clinical decision-making, including clinical trial participation? And after the overwhelming response to our invitation to help us explore this area, we can only conclude that many of you wonder, too!

To help answer that question, we’ve launched a research project to look into the influence and impact of caregivers, and will be presenting preliminary findings at DIA in June, at a session we are leading called, “Beyond Adult Patients, Untapped Advisors in Clinical Development – Adolescents, Parents, Siblings and Spouses.” 

We have already invited several hundred nonprofit patient organizations and companies to collaborate with us on this research, and are thrilled that many have agreed to serve in one or more of the following roles:

• Advisor:  Provides guidance on the research questionnaires once they are developed in early February
• Connector:  Helps disseminate the research questionnaires to your network of patients or caregivers when we launch the research in March
• Reviewer:  Reviews the research report and provide comments before publication and presentation (estimate April and May)

Since our initial invitation, enlightening conversations with many groups have helped us evolve our research approach as follows:

• Conduct a literature review on the role of caregiver in medical decision-making and package into a bibliography to share with research partners
• Develop and field two research questionnaires – one for patients and one for caregivers – to assess the caregiver role in medical decision-making and clinical trial decisions.

We are in the process of developing the surveys, and the literature review is underway, but it’s not too late to sign on to help! If you are interested in collaborating on this important research – as an advisor, connector or reviewer – please let us know. If a phone call would be helpful to further discuss this project with you, we’d be happy to chat.

We will, of course, appropriately credit your contributions to the research, and will also publish the results in a white paper that will be shared back with participants.

Thank you so much in advance for your potential willingness to collaborate with us to support greater understanding of the caregiver role on clinical decision-making.

For more information or to set up a call, please contact us at info@rx4good.com. We hope to hear from you!