Boston Children’s Hospital is a world-renowned pediatric healthcare and research institution dedicated to advancing child health through exceptional clinical care, innovation, and scientific discovery. As the organization continues to invest in new digital experiences for patients, caregivers, clinicians, and staff, understanding the needs of these diverse audiences has become a critical part of its product and service development process. To support this effort, Boston Children’s Hospital partnered with Hubble to streamline participant recruitment, conduct user research more efficiently, and capture meaningful feedback directly from the people who rely on its services every day. By combining Hubble’s comprehensive participant recruitment capabilities with powerful qualitative research tools, Boston Children’s can rapidly recruit highly targeted participants, validate new ideas, uncover usability issues, and make informed decisions backed by real user insights. This enables the hospital to deliver more intuitive digital experiences while ensuring every innovation remains centered on the needs of patients and families.
As one of the most respected pediatric hospitals globally, Boston Children’s recognizes that data alone cannot fully explain patient and caregiver experiences. By combining quantitative insights with direct feedback from patients, families, and healthcare professionals, the organization ensures that decisions are grounded in real-world needs, helping deliver better outcomes and more compassionate care.
Key Results or Research Impact at a Glance
- 6+ integrated research methods available in a single platform, including usability testing, prototype testing, surveys, card sorting, tree testing, and AI-moderated interviews.
- Improved access to millions of research participants worldwide, including healthcare providers, parents, caregivers, and patients, with advanced demographic and custom screening capabilities.
- One unified workflow spanning participant recruitment, scheduling, moderated and unmoderated studies, recording, transcription, AI analysis, and reporting—eliminating the need to switch between multiple research tools.
- Research completed in days instead of weeks, enabling teams to deliver customer insights faster while reducing manual coordination and administrative overhead.
Recruiting the Right Patients, Caregivers and Healthcare Professionals
Boston Children's Hospital serves a highly specialized audience, making participant quality just as important as the research itself. Recruiting caregivers, pediatric patients, and healthcare professionals through legacy research platforms often resulted in limited targeting options, slower recruitment, and additional coordination to find the right participants. With Hubble, Boston Children's Hospital could access a broader network of vetted participants while leveraging advanced demographic, clinical, and behavioral screening to recruit highly qualified audiences faster. This enables their research team to spend less time managing recruitment logistics and more time gathering meaningful feedback from the people who matter most, ensuring every study is powered by representative participants and delivers insights that can confidently inform patient-centered product decisions.
Scaling User Research Without Slowing Product Teams
As Boston Children's Hospital continued to expand its digital experiences for patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals, the need to validate new concepts and user journeys quickly became increasingly important. Traditional research methods often required significant coordination and scheduling, making it difficult to gather feedback at the pace product teams needed. With Hubble's unmoderated studies, Boston Children's Hospital could rapidly launch usability tests, collect feedback asynchronously from participants across a variety of healthcare audiences, and identify usability issues early in the design process. This allowed the research team to scale user testing, accelerate product validation, and ensure every digital experience was informed by real-world feedback without slowing down innovation.
Deeper Insights Through Moderated Research
While unmoderated research enabled rapid validation at scale, Boston Children's Hospital also relied on moderated studies to gain deeper insight into the experiences, motivations, and challenges of patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Conducting live interviews through Hubble allowed the research team to ask follow-up questions, explore complex healthcare workflows, and uncover nuanced feedback that would be difficult to capture through surveys or unmoderated testing alone. By streamlining participant management, scheduling, recording, transcription, and analysis within a single platform, Hubble made it easier for researchers to conduct high-quality moderated sessions efficiently, enabling Boston Children's Hospital to make more informed, patient-centered decisions throughout the product development process.
Continuing to Scale Patient-Centered Research
By adopting Hubble's unified user research platform, Boston Children's Hospital has significantly accelerated the way its research team gathers and acts on user feedback. Through a combination of unmoderated usability testing, AI-moderated interviews, and information architecture tools such as card sorting and tree testing, researchers can validate concepts, uncover usability issues, and evaluate navigation structures from a single platform.
What previously required weeks of coordination across multiple tools and stakeholders can now be accomplished in just days. Hubble's AI-powered workflows streamline study creation, automate insight generation, and reduce the manual effort required to analyze qualitative feedback, enabling researchers to spend more time driving strategic decisions rather than managing research operations. The result is a faster, more scalable research process that empowers Boston Children's Hospital to make confident, evidence-based product decisions while maintaining the depth and rigor required for healthcare innovation.
