What does the Zika virus travel dilemma have to do with marketing research?

Editor’s note: Liz George is a senior qualitative researcher at Market Strategies, Kansas City, Mo. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here under the title, “What Zika virus is teaching us about credible health care information.”

As a first-time mom to an 11-week-old girl, the growing concern about the Zika virus has captured my attention. Daily, I count my blessings that both she and I are healthy, having come through pregnancy and labor safely. As a researcher focusing primarily on pharmaceuticals and health care, I spend a significant amount of time learning about devastating diseases but this one has really hit home.

It was almost exactly a year ago, while traveling for in-situ research with health care providers, that I called my husband from a hotel room early in the morning to tell him that we were finally pregnant. That same week, I flew to four different states as my research continued, and the next week three more. Within a month, I was onto another project and literally circling the globe to conduct interviews with oncologists in Asia and Europe.

Travel has always been – and will continue to be – an integral part of my life and work. I was fortunate that morning sickness was the only ailment that I had to worry about while traveling so broadly. What would I have done if the Zika virus had been spreading then? How would I react if research was going to take me to South America? I can only imagine I would have immediately begun doing the thing I’m probably best at – asking questions.

I’ve put thought into what I would need to know to weigh my decision – risks, incidence, speed of transmission in affected areas, prevention, available treatments and potential outcomes. I also know where I would probably turn to start gathering information: Google. There, I’d see the most recent media coverage and come across links to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or World Health Organization (WHO) early in the results.

The problem is that with the wealth of information available today – and the speed of sharing that information – there are mixed messages and conflicting facts abound. At present, the head of the CDC recommends against pregnant women traveling to regions where Zika is spreading but the director of WHO has suggested that pregnant women can travel if they take appropriate precautions to avoid mosquito bites. As more information emerges, it is likely that recommendations will change. The abundance of conflicting recommendations has historic precedent in other recent disease outbreaks, including Ebola, West Nile and H1N1 (also known as swine flu, which I actually did contract while traveling).

It is not only infectious disease that is afflicted with the rise of contradictory information, making health care decisions increasingly complex for patients. With almost every disease I research, I hear patients describe inconsistent recommendations between different specialists, between their physician and their pharmacist, between what their nurse said and what the Internet said, between what their clinic recommended and what their insurer has deemed appropriate. While the Information Age offers a degree of empowerment to patients, it can also leave them bewildered and confused about what is truly best for them.

As organizations and companies work to educate patients about diseases and treatment options, it becomes increasingly important to guide patients through that confusion.  Having conducted message and advertising testing among many different therapeutic areas, I’d like to share several takeaways:

• Patients frequently mention that relevance, simplicity and credibility are critical to capturing their attention and motivating them to seek more information.
• Usability testing with patient education and patient-oriented Web sites tells us that ease of navigation and personalization are successful strategies to implement to increase time spent browsing and recall of information.
• Content creators need to be mindful of the range of health literacy that exists among patients. Many factors can influence how much a patient may or may not know about their disease or health care in general.

I’m grateful that I did not have to face the travel dilemma that the Zika virus presents during my pregnancy and am increasingly empathetic toward patients who face similar difficult decisions with even higher stakes. As marketers and researchers, I hope we can work to advocate for not only making information accessible to patients but also simplifying the information-seeking process so they can feel confident in their health care decisions.