How Empathy, Ethnography and Design Thinking can Reshape Healthcare
The following is adapted from What's their Story by David McDonald.
I first read about empathy and cultural understanding in an article discussing anthropological fieldwork. It was a rather controversial article by Clifford Geertz, which explored ethnography — the study of humans in their natural and lived environment.
It caught my attention that a focus of study existed where researchers observed individual people to discern each person’s reality. Through careful observation, ethnographers can study the intricacies of human social behavior, but more than that, they can achieve a better understanding of what motivates that behavior.
In the article, the anthropologist discussed how leveraging observation and empathy can lead to a better understanding of the culture and community in which the person was immersed.
I was more than intrigued — I was hooked.
These lessons became the basis for my understanding of the world and the people in it. Not only did I grasp the significance of empathy, but I finally understood how empathy related to the people I came in contact with.
When I left college and worked as an assistant elementary school teacher, I used what I learned about empathy and human behavior to engage with the schoolchildren on their level. As a bartender, I found myself using empathy as I served drinks and carefully listened to stories of hardship and glory.
When I started True North, my first healthcare marketing agency, empathy was at the core of our company culture and business philosophy.
It was at True North that I became keenly aware of two truths central to my identity and personal mindset.
The first was that no matter the industry, we as business leaders must strive to better understand and be more relevant to the needs of others in order to serve them to our fullest capacity. The second was that the people we work with carry as much importance as the clients we serve.
Now I understand that empathy is at the very core of who I am — it’s at the core of everything I do in both my public and private life. Above all, empathy provides the cornerstone for the work I do in building businesses that are intent on developing patient-centered solutions in healthcare.
I care about people with both emotional and cognitive empathy, and I appreciate it when others care about me. Empathy serves a basic human need for validation and is a powerful tool for healthcare professionals interested in empowering successful outcomes — clinically or financially.
True North was a strong, successful company when I sold it. Our success was because of the human connections we shared with one another as co-workers and with the clients, we were fortunate enough to work with on a daily basis.
I took this approach and used it as the foundation for LIFT, a marketing and design firm focused on the healthcare space and the patients within it. I sought to leverage empathic concern in healthcare marketing — to listen to patients rather than speak to them.
Empathy can break down barriers in almost every setting and circumstance, and I wanted LIFT and our clients to use it as our greatest resource.
Without my research and studies in anthropology, none of this would have been possible. Studying anthropology and design showed me how empathy could be used to understand the human condition at an unprecedented level.
As a healthcare marketing strategist, I’ve learned how valuable empathy is in my work. Empathy should be used in business — but it must be used in healthcare.
The Empathy Triad
In order to understand the value of empathy in healthcare, it’s important to first define it. Google and Merriam-Webster will tell you that empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
To better illustrate and expand on this definition, I think empathy is best defined within the context of the empathy triad. The empathy triad is a nice way of framing and evaluating how you view empathy and your relative strength or needs in each of three areas — cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective by putting yourself in their shoes. Emotional empathy is the ability to feel what someone else is feeling.
Empathic concern is the ability to sense what another person needs from you.
This gets to the heart of patient-centeredness and is the very reason we use ethnography for healthcare marketing strategy and solution design.
Providers need to recognize that there’s a reason why their patients do the things they do. It’s not uncommon for healthcare professionals to get frustrated with people when they fall short of expectations.
Some providers may even give up on difficult patients or stakeholders. Because of this, patients and caregivers can often get lost in the system. This is an unnecessary outcome and one that can be avoided when providers engage, educate, and empower their patients and those who care for them through an empathic lens.
Empathy will break down barriers and build better relationships, which will foster better care and result in healthier communities and better outcomes.
The Business of Healthcare
Without empathy in the business of healthcare, our patients are not the only ones getting lost in the system. Oddly enough, as healthcare marketers, providers, and researchers, we’re also lost in the system right alongside the patients we’ve abandoned.
We’ve lost sight of the significance of the patient in our development of effective therapies and meaningful communication strategies. We’ve failed to see that the answers we seek as marketers often come from the patients and related stakeholders themselves.
Genuine patient conversations have been lost due to overregulation, protective protocols, lack of curiosity, and inadequate innovation. Sadly, these conversations have been replaced with technology-centered, disconnected checklists, and automated tech solutions that are borne from the lowest common denominator in terms of relevance and applicability.
We’ve undermined our ability to develop a truly patient-centered healthcare system because we’ve eroded our trusted patient relationships with technological solutions that are cold, impersonal, and potentially ineffective.
As marketers, we’re relationship builders, but we’ve lost our way.
Tech (defined here as a digital interface) is not a silver bullet — but relevancy and human engagement just might be.
We may be on the side of the healthcare industrialists as marketers, but we have a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between the patient and their healthcare with effective communication. Whether we’re the owners or strategists within a marketing agency, a director of marketing for a hospital or health system, marketing professionals at a pharmaceutical, or patient education advocates at a life sciences company, we have the tools to change the efficacy of the entire system.
And in order to illuminate a better path forward within that system, we have to understand and know how to use the protocols and tools found in ethnography, anthropology, and design thinking.
The Rebirth of Healthcare Marketing
After years of wrestling with the usefulness and value of tech as an effective way to engage with, educate, and empower patients, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. We’re finally starting to see the full value of the patient voice in crafting our strategies.
This rebirth in healthcare marketing is a result of years of evolution in how we connect with, understand, and communicate with the very people we’re charged to take care of — marketing is more of a human science than one might imagine.
Human understanding is the starting point, and the path we’re on goes back a half-century or more. We have experience and a foundation of capabilities that’s ready to champion a few fresh tools into the way we work as healthcare marketers.
Ethnography and design thinking are the tools driving this rebirth.
Now more than ever before, this combination of science and innovation is the perfect solution to framing effective marketing strategies within the context of a patient-centered healthcare system.
Together, these two tools will help us create better messaging of products and services tailored to the needs of patients. This will be achieved through the cultivation and championing of better relationships amongst everyone in the healthcare transaction, from providers and patients to hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.
Ethnography is one of several tools in the design thinking toolbox and is, in my opinion, the most important. As a marketing framework, design thinking offers an interdisciplinary approach to truly understanding the experience of a target audience so that problems are solved with innovative plans and effective communication strategies.
It’s a methodology for creative problem-solving that prioritizes the interests of everyone involved.
In our estimation, the best design thinkers in healthcare are those who are thinking and acting like cultural anthropologists. These are the researchers and design thinking practitioners who are determined to meet with patients and families on their own turf to truly observe what’s happening at ground level and from the insider’s perspective.
They are also the ones focused on deeply understanding and systematically mapping the patient’s functional, cognitive, and emotional experiences along the illness (and care delivery) journey; properly documenting and then contextualizing their research findings, and ultimately aligning their solution design with the most critical needs and values of the patient and stakeholder audience.
Patient experiences, marketing, and business outcomes, and — more importantly — healthcare outcomes can significantly improve with the implementation of ethnography and design thinking as the foundation for your marketing and patient engagement strategy.
If we begin our journey by listening to the patient’s story, we can formulate tailored engagement, education, and treatment plans that provide patients the tools they need to become both educated and empowered in the most important business in which they will ever invest.
Ultimately, the messaging and experiences that we enable providers to offer their patients should empower patients toward a higher level of competency and accountability in their own healthcare.
This is the promise of design — this is the reason for the rebirth.
To learn more about Ethnography and design thinking, you can find What’s Their Story on Amazon.
David McDonald is a founding partner and the CEO of LIFT, a healthcare design and marketing firm devoted to the unique cause of patient-centered communication and experience design. LIFT specializes in human-centered insights and strategy for patient advocates and marketers seeking to impact Share of Experience®. LIFT is particularly attuned to the needs of hospitals and health systems as well as mature pharmaceutical company brands.
As a healthcare entrepreneur and anthropologist, David has worked for more than 25 years to advance the cause of patient education and well-being. David is passionate about human engagement and consumer behavior and is a thought leader in the life sciences for his use of ethnography and design thinking as tools to improve patient understanding and education.
David resides in Jupiter, Florida, with his wife Diane and a dog called Oliver.
