Our Mission & History

Our Mission

QHRC’s mission is to improve the quality of health care by bringing the human voice to health research.

Our History

QHRC was founded in 2014 by two PhD Sociologists seeking to bring their expertise in social science methods to applied research in medicine, public health and health policy.

Health care is an essentially human concern. PEOPLE deliver and receive health care services, and are key to improving care, and also can be a big stumbling block to improving the health care quality. We created QHRC to address an urgent need in health care research.

We live in an age of big data. Never before have physicians and policymakers had access to more information about so many health-related behaviors of millions of individuals, and yet most decision-makers remain stymied. Qualitative research is uniquely designed to discover surprising answers to unasked questions, and to find the important “how?” and “why?” answers you need to move from data to solutions.

Yet, clinical and health service researchers are often not trained in the social science methods needed to bring critical insights into human behavior and preferences to their research. Similarly, most sociologists and social scientists are not often trained in the intricacies of health policy, of clinical trials, and of the clinical workflow. QHRC fills this gap.

Dr. Cameron Macdonald, Principal, has over 30 years’ experience teaching qualitative research methods at the graduate level, a decade of undergraduate teaching in health policy, and a Certificate in Clinical and Translational Research from the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at UW-Madison. Dr. Macdonald and her team bring experience and expertise in both health science and social science to your research project.

The QHRC Team represents…

Experience

We are lead by a PhD Medical Sociologist with over 30 years’ experience teaching qualitative methodologies.

An extension of your team

We take a deep dive into your research question, we familiarize ourselves with the literature and the language surrounding the problems you want to answer. We become an extension of your research team, bringing our expertise to complement yours.

Publication-ready research

QHRC’s research is published in top clinical and health policy journals. We can teach you and your team how to convert your insights into successfully published research.

The highest standards of research ethics and data security

We use health data. We know health data. Our data collection and analysis protocols meet the highest standards of HIPAA and Institutional Review Board requirements.

Efficient & effective research results

Our small, skilled and flexible team can bring you the insights you need without the overhead that hurts.

“We have been with QHRC since its inception and have seen the evolution of their model and support…we have always been happy with the quality of services we received.”

Rebecca Sippel, MD, FACS

“What I appreciate about qualitative research, is that we believe that the person who is experience the condition and the treatment has something to offer. And really that their perspective should be central. And the inclusion of qualitative research is novel in the health sciences. But it shouldn’t be.”

Nadine Connor, PhD, CCC-SLP