Aya Healthcare Recruits Long-Term, Niche Participants with Dscout

When Aya Healthcare went to market for a new research partner, they faced a particular set of challenges—both in recruiting niche participants and in running long-term diary studies.

Not only did the team need to recruit bona fide nurses and doctors, but they also had to be traveling nurses and doctors.

Dscout enabled Aya Healthcare to not only recruit the best participants, but also expand into a wider variety of research methodologies all on one platform.

In this conversation, Dscout Customer and Community Marketing Manager, Colleen Pate, sat down with Dr. Christine Maldonado to learn why Aya Healthcare made the switch.

Christine Maldonado, PhD, is a Lead UX Researcher at Aya Healthcare.

Watch the full interview here

Jump to…

• Challenges before making the switch

• Improvements since transitioning to Dscout

  • Recruiting niche participants

  • Running long-term diary studies

  • Evangelizing research’s value internally

• Advice for teams considering Dscout

• Switching vendors and breaking up with a previous vendor

• Wrapping it up

Challenges before making the switch

Christine: Aya is a platform that supports travel healthcare providers and clinics and hospitals that need that extra support. As you can imagine, COVID was a crazy time for the business. It was also simultaneously a time when the organization pivoted to be a product-first company.

We were trying to reach our end users, who are nurses and healthcare providers. As they were building up their product team and putting on a design-first mentality, they also started investing in UX research.

Now, fast forward, it's 2023 (because we started with Dscout early last year), and we’re noticing the changes of the pandemic. From a research team perspective, we're looking for new business opportunities.

There were questions like—what is the travel nurse experience now in this post-pandemic time? Given the longitudinal nature of job hunting, onboarding, and the short-term nature of this industry, a diary or longitudinal study was needed to understand what the new journey for a travel nurse is.

The tool that we had previously wasn't going to be able to support us in that endeavor, and having worked with Dscout in the past, I brought it to my manager's attention that Dscout is a great platform to run this particular methodology.

I have used Dscout in previous organizations and was pleased with a lot of the functionality, specifically the diary functionality. We joined Dscout for the diary capabilities, but we ended up staying for usability. I didn't even realize that there was an expansion into usability. We test-drove usability, and we ended up completely sunsetting our old tool.

We are all in on Dscout currently. We have a lot of flexibility now, with different methodologies depending on research questions or goals that our team has, and we feel like we can support them in whatever asks they have.

Improvements since transitioning to Dscout

✔ Recruiting niche participants

Christine: We work with our end users or travel healthcare providers, so travel nurses, travel doctors, etc. As you can imagine, just getting nurses and doctors is difficult, but then narrowing that down to people who travel is a very niche population.

To our surprise, there are some travel healthcare providers on Dscout. It's certainly not, in full transparency, enough to rely on just our scout panel, so Dscout's been great at helping us bring our own participants.

We usually intercept them from our homepages via Appendo Guide and then direct them right over to a Dscout study. There were concerns with that transition like, are people going to like it? Are we going to lose them in the funnel of clicking over, or are they going to remember when they get emails to remind them to join live sessions from Dscout as opposed to from Aya?

We've had some hiccups along the way, but our partners have been great in helping us work through that. We're finding ways to get around it. We’ve also learned that Dscout is investing in and coming up with a third-party recruiting ability to help customers like us who have participants that are difficult to find.

The other thing that’s related to what I was just saying, but is not necessarily about impact is that during the demo, our account manager was great. We would give feedback all the time, and you know you're always told like, “Oh, thanks. We'll consider this. We'll pass this on to the product team.” But you don't know if that's actually happening.

Something that I am continuously surprised and delighted by Dscout is that it feels like the whole company is researchers. They ask insightful questions and they act on the things that you are providing feedback on.

It feels like it's a true partnership and they're invested in being responsive to you as a client, and what your needs are to get your research done right.

✔ Running long-term diary studies

Christine: We've just done the one study so far, the diary study. The challenge is something that I've already alluded to. It was around finding the right participants.

That's something we're continuously working on in terms of expanding our available pool of nurses. The pleasant surprise was that our stakeholders were incredibly impressed with the fact that the participants stuck around. There was no attrition.

There was this misperception that people wouldn't stick around for a diary study of this length, and the depth of the artifacts that we received. We asked people to whiteboard out their job journey from their perspective. The richness and quality of participants is unmatched.

We were having difficulties ensuring that people who were saying that they were nurses or healthcare professionals actually were.

One of our research advisors suggested that we ask them to cover up their identifying information and show us their hospital badge. It will weed out some people, but you can feel certain that the folks that you're getting are, in fact, nurses, and that helps to alleviate concerns with our stakeholders.

✔ Evangelizing research’s value internally

Christine: People Nerds has been fantastic. One of the goals that we've had for our research team is to build out a team site again to spread awareness about our discipline within our organization. So coming up with a content strategy of, what should we be putting on here? What kind of blog posts should we be posting?

When you think about the support that you get with Dscout from your research advisors during the studies, we've also started leaning on People Nerds’ research resources to develop our content strategy for our internal workforce.

Dscout checks all the boxes, not only in helping you tactically execute your research and your research strategy, but also in helping you to evangelize your discipline even within your company. I also really appreciate the Slack community. It’s super helpful to be able to bounce off ideas with other colleagues.

Advice for teams considering Dscout

Christine: Even after you sign on the dotted line, I'm continuously impressed. We have monthly meetings with our research partners. You feel like someone is supporting you in making sure that you're getting the most that you can out of this tool.

I'm very much impressed with the turnaround I get on my questions or concerns. You do feel supported. So be a squeaky wheel, because I think in some ways they truly do appreciate it, especially as they're better building the usability line of business out.

It's a really exciting time as a researcher to be a Dscout customer at this phase because there are aspects of it that you feel that you are creating the research world that you want to play in.

Switching vendors and breaking up with a previous vendor

Christine: A lesson learned is that in our fine print with our previous vendor, we were told that we would have six months of access to our data following the official breakup, and we quickly found out that wasn't true.

They allowed us to have, for example, our videos, but they didn't allow us to have the summary data afterward. We had to go back and forth with our legal departments because they were not willing for a while.

When you're confirming that breakup, make sure that you understand the terms of what you're going to have access to, and no matter if you know what the terms are, start that download or backing up. If you know you're going to be transitioning out some data, get started early or maybe even build it into your process as an ongoing part of your workflow.

Wrapping it up

Partnering with Dscout enabled Aya Healthcare to…

• Recruit vetted, high-quality research participants that were otherwise difficult to source

• Retain said participants for complex, long-term diary studies

• Receive feedback and insightful questions on studies to enhance the research process and findings

• Seamlessly expand into other mixed methods research, such as usability testing

• Spread awareness about the value of research throughout the organization

It's important to read the fine print with your previous vendor before making the switch. You may need to backup or save certain information before terminating the contract.

Overall, Aya Healthcare enjoys the collaborative relationship with Dscout that allows them to give feedback on the product and enhance their research operations across the board.

Do it all with Dscout

Recruit, field, manage, analyze, and share your insights with Dscout. Whether you're running unmoderated diary studies, moderated interviews, or conducting usability tests—Dscout can support you every step of the way. See our platform in action and take both your research practice and overall org, to the next level.