Reinventing Physician Surveys: From Question-by-Question to Interactive Boards
~3
Interactive boards replace dozens of steps
100%
Pen-test vulnerabilities resolved
0
Missed fieldwork cycles
Primotly built a fully custom, web-based physician survey platform for the healthcare division of a global market research company — a system that simply did not exist off the shelf. The platform replaces the slow, one-question-at-a-time format of traditional survey tools with interactive boards presenting the full questionnaire at once, combined with real-time validation logic that prevents invalid entries as physicians complete surveys. The result is a faster, more intuitive experience for busy healthcare professionals and higher-quality data for researchers. Launched on schedule for the client's first oncology research program, the platform has since evolved into a long-term engagement supporting multiple studies across several European markets. A self-service BackOffice enables the client's operations team to manage recurring research cycles and country-specific configurations without engineering support, while seamless integration with the client's existing analytics pipeline streamlines downstream reporting.
The client is a global market research company whose healthcare division conducts recurring physician research programs to track treatment patterns across multiple therapeutic areas. Physicians are recruited through research panels and complete structured questionnaires about clinical practice and patient cases. The organisation delivers healthcare data and analytics to pharmaceutical and life sciences companies worldwide, with research operations spanning multiple regions.
Healthcare / Market Research
Time & Materials — Extended Engagement
4 people (2 Full-stack Developers, 1 MDD/DDF Specialist, 1 PM/Delivery Lead)
The client's existing surveys used the industry-standard one-question-at-a-time format: each question presented, confirmed, then the next. For the long, complex questionnaires used in medical research, this created real friction — surveys that felt tedious and slow, directly threatening participation rates and the quality of the collected data.
Physicians had no view of the overall task, no way to gauge how demanding the remaining questions were, and no ability to move quickly through familiar ground — so even routine sections felt heavy.
If the platform was not live and collecting valid Patient Record Forms in time for the first monthly wave, an entire data-collection cycle — and the associated physician panel spend — would be lost.
Multi-stage screening with configurable thresholds, dynamic 5-or-7 Patient Record Form allocation, wave-to-wave data continuity, export into the proprietary MDD/DDF (Dimensions / Unicom Intelligence) format, and strict tokenised survey-link integration with panel partners.
No existing platform could meet this combination of requirements. The client needed an engineering partner who could move fast and build exactly what the study demanded.
The central design idea was straightforward but significant: instead of asking dozens of questions one at a time, present the entire questionnaire as a small number of well-structured interactive boards — approximately three — closer in feel to the paper questionnaires already familiar in medical research, but enhanced with modern UX.
Presenting many questions at once lets physicians complete surveys substantially faster and see the whole task at a glance. At the same time, a real-time answer-elimination engine built into the React frontend dynamically disables options based on prior answers and complex inter-question relationships, preventing accidental, inconsistent, or invalid entries that a sequential form cannot catch as cleanly. This combination of paper-like overview and intelligent constraint enforcement is the platform's core differentiator.
Around that innovation, Primotly built a full production platform from scratch, deliberately prioritising a secure, working launch over a complete feature set — deferring non-blocking items such as the MaxDiff component and a planned code refactor to hit the fieldwork window. Daily syncs with the client's product owner kept the highly dynamic scope under control throughout.
Replaces the traditional step-by-step flow with a small set of interactive boards that present the full questionnaire at once, echoing the paper forms familiar in medical research. Real-time answer-elimination logic dynamically disables options based on prior answers and complex inter-question relationships — faster completion, visible scope, and data quality enforced at the point of entry.
Runs each physician through a structured eligibility (ELIG) and perceptual (SCR/PERC) screening flow with hard and soft screenout logic and configurable thresholds. Doctors who do not qualify are redirected to the panel partner with the correct token; qualifying doctors progress to Patient Record Forms — and the client can adjust screening rules per wave without code changes.
Automatically assigns each qualifying doctor 5 or 7 Patient Record Forms based on their reported patient workload tier, with hardcoded safety bounds and a confirmation step to prevent operator errors. Matches data-collection effort to each physician's real-world caseload, maximising usable data per respondent while keeping the study within quota.
Persists stable eligibility answers from one monthly wave to the next so returning doctors skip the eligibility section, while perceptual and patient-form answers are always re-collected fresh. Reduces respondent burden for returning physicians and guarantees that time-sensitive data is never stale — a key driver of longitudinal data quality.
A self-service admin panel lets the client's ops team launch and manage monthly waves, set country-specific quotas, enable features per wave, and manage language availability without depending on Primotly for routine operations. Collected data exports into both Excel and the proprietary Dimensions (Unicom Intelligence) MDD/DDF format, plugging directly into the client's established analytics pipeline.
The Problem: Presenting an entire multi-question questionnaire on a single board meant the platform had to evaluate complex inter-question relationships live, in the browser, as the physician answered. Options had to be enabled, disabled, or eliminated in real time based on prior answers, while keeping the interface responsive and preventing any path to an inconsistent submission.
The Solution: Primotly built a React frontend driving a real-time answer-elimination engine that applies the survey's relational logic as the doctor fills each board, dynamically constraining available options. Validation is pushed to the point of entry rather than after submission, making invalid combinations effectively impossible to reach.
The Result: Physicians complete dozens of questions across roughly three boards far faster than in the client's previous sequential surveys, with accidental and inconsistent entries prevented at source — improving both the completion experience and data quality.
The Problem: The client's analytics pipeline relied on MDD/DDF (Dimensions / Unicom Intelligence) — a specialised proprietary format with its own structural conventions and requirements. Adapting to an entirely unfamiliar data format while ensuring the output would integrate cleanly with the client's existing tooling was a significant technical undertaking.
The Solution: Primotly invested in understanding the MDD/DDF format from the ground up — analysing file structure and conventions using the open-source quantipy3 library, then iterating closely with the client's data analyst to validate each export version. Rather than asking the client to adapt their workflow, Primotly fully conformed to the chosen format.
The Result: MDD/DDF exports were validated and signed off by the client's data analyst, integrating seamlessly into their established analytics pipeline — with zero disruption to the client's existing data-processing workflow.
The Problem: A soft-screenout edge case allowed a small number of doctors who should have been screened out to proceed and complete forms. Blank values in certain perceptual columns were not being treated as zero before the screenout condition was evaluated.
The Solution: Primotly root-caused the issue, defaulted blank values to zero before evaluation, and followed staging-first deployment with client-side testing before production promotion.
The Result: Fix verified and deployed to production within approximately one day of identification; screening integrity restored and affected records flagged for cleanup. A concurrent security pen test surfaced 1 medium and several low-severity vulnerabilities, all remediated and verified resolved on re-test.
The platform launched on schedule, grew into an ongoing multi-market engagement, and gave the client's operational teams a faster, more self-sufficient way to run their longitudinal physician studies.
The platform went live for the UK fieldwork wave on time, enabling the flagship Subcutaneous Oncology Therapy Monitor study to begin collecting physician data without missing a single monthly data-collection cycle.
The initial UK launch grew into an ongoing multi-market relationship. EU5 rollout is in progress — Germany first, then Italy — from a single configurable codebase.
Self-service BackOffice wave management lets the client's ops team run monthly waves and configuration changes without recurring Primotly involvement, reducing operational dependency and ongoing delivery cost.
Wave-to-wave carry-over means returning physicians skip the eligibility section each month; corrected soft-screenout rules recovered high-volume oncology doctors previously excluded — improving valid-respondent capture.
All pen-test vulnerabilities were resolved and verified on re-test, and critical screening defects were deployed to production within approximately one day of identification.
The platform was built for multi-wave, multi-country, multilingual operation from day one, providing a reusable foundation for future Therapy Monitor studies across the EU5 and beyond.
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