“Where do doctors see the gaps in breast cancer care?”

Qualitative healthcare research makes particular demands. An interviewer has to follow medical reasoning that can be very complex, understand the specialist language and its abbreviations, probe at the right moments and talk to the interviewee as an equal. And specialist doctors, pharmacists and other medical experts are hard to reach and short of time.

So Psyma+Exevia and Zeitgeist Labs are developing a new approach together: specialised, AI-led in-depth interviews for qualitative medical research. The language technology and the systems behind it are tailored to each therapeutic area. They understand medical terminology, abbreviations, treatment concepts and common drug names, and they follow a clearly defined qualitative research design and established methods. Doctors can take part whenever it suits their clinical day, and the conversation loses none of its specialist depth.

The approach was first used in an initial study of everyday breast cancer care, told from the point of view of the doctors who provide it. The AI-led interviews helped to answer central questions: What challenges do doctors see? Which needs go unmet? What works well, and where does care have to change?

The results are structured and analysed in real time, so relevant patterns and changes show up considerably sooner than before.