About Thiscovery  

Thiscovery is a research organisation that works with patients, healthcare professionals, and members of the public to improve health and care. Based in the UK, the organisation runs data collection projects for NHS teams, as well as third sector, MedTech, and pharmaceutical organisations across the health and social care landscape.

Its approach emphasizes co-design and “bottom-up” insight, drawing directly on the knowledge and experience of people at the front line of care. Projects are tailored to help clients gather perspectives from patients, carers, and professionals on specific issues, and to use those perspectives to shape solutions and inform policy.

Thiscovery’s aim is to make research both rigorous and practical, ensuring that the voices of those most affected are central to healthcare improvement.

The Challenge: Moving Beyond Academic Timelines and Tools

Thiscovery’s clients often look for rapid, descriptive insights that can directly inform decision-making. Traditional academic approaches, months of thematic analysis designed to produce journal articles, were too slow and too complex for the pace at which their projects needed to move.

The team faced several challenges:

• Academic tools not fit for purpose: Other platforms supported in-depth qualitative analysis but were designed for academic research, not for fast-turnaround client projects.

• Opaque AI solutions: Other commercial platforms felt like a black box—unclear in how results were produced, limited in granularity, and offering little control over the analysis.

• Need for transparency: Clients needed to understand how insights were generated. The team required a system where they could clearly explain every step and maintain oversight.

• Time sensitivity: Projects had to be completed in days or weeks, not months, requiring an approach that could deliver insights at speed without sacrificing quality.

• Sensitive data: With topics like dementia diagnosis and postnatal wound care, participants shared deeply personal stories. Any solution had to be robust, trustworthy, and secure.

“We did use another commercial AI powered free text analysis tool, before we switched to Ascribe. It was a real black box; I didn't have any control over it. I didn't trust what it was doing, and it didn't really have any kind of granularity of really exploring the data.”

- Jenni Burt  

Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer, Thiscovery

The Solution: Turning Patient and Clinician Voices into Evidence for Change, Securely

To meet client demands for speed and transparency, Thiscovery integrated Voxco survey software, Voxco Analytics, and Ascribe’s AI-powered coding tools into its workflow.  

• Voxco Online: Enabled the team to quickly build and edit large, complex surveys with branching and skip logic. Custom styling ensured a branded, consistent participant experience, while linking to Voxco Panels allowed for automated reminders in long-term studies. Participants benefited from a smooth, mobile-friendly interface, and Voxco’s support and training teams were described by Jenni as “brilliantly helpful.”

• Voxco Analytics: Provided daily dashboards to monitor responses and track recruitment trends, with client dashboards offering instant access to progress and initial quantitative data. In one case, Analytics tables helped the team deliver an interim report at speed during the IMP Patients survey, thanks to automatically updating tables prepared in advance.

With Ascribe, the team found two features especially transformative:

• AI-powered coding frameworks: Ascribe quickly generates initial frameworks that categorize open-end responses. Analysts can then refine and adjust these frameworks—merging, splitting, or re-labeling codes as needed. This gave the team both a rapid starting point and the control they required to ensure outputs reflected the nuance of participants’ experiences.

• Ask Ascribe: Once coding frameworks are in place, Ask Ascribe helps build the actual insight reports. By querying open-end data directly, the team can generate summaries, highlight key themes, and pull supporting verbatim extracts. This capability allows them to move from raw data to client-ready reports in days.

“Our insight reports are based on the synthesis of data analysis from Voxco Analytics and Ascribe, with the main text presenting the story of the survey findings with extensive quotations from free text responses, and detailed data tables from both closed and open ended analysis (we include all coding frameworks generated for example) for clients who need real detail to inform next steps and actions.”

- Jenni Burt  

Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer, Thiscovery

Together, these solutions made it possible to handle sensitive healthcare data while delivering insights at pace, taking projects seamlessly from data collection through analysis to narrative-rich reporting that clients can act on with confidence.

Safeguarding Sensitive Stories

Thiscovery often works with participants who share deeply personal and sometimes traumatic experiences. For their team, protecting that data is not just a technical requirement, it is central to building trust. With Ascribe, they feel confident that sensitive information is handled securely and with care, thanks to guardrails designed specifically for survey open-ends.

“I need them to be confident that they are going to tell us those stories and we are going to honor and respect those stories and not put them into a generic open AI model to analyze. I know I can put people’s data into Ascribe. It is safe. It is secure.”

- Jenni Burt  

Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer, Thiscovery

Case in Point: Alzheimer’s Research UK

One example of Thiscovery’s approach in practice was a project with Alzheimer’s Research UK, focused on improving the dementia diagnosis process. Diagnosis in the UK is often delayed and described by patients as confusing and even traumatic. To address this, Thiscovery designed two national listening exercises.

• The first survey, built using Voxco Online, gathered experiences from over 100 people with dementia and more than 400 carers. Respondents shared in detail what the diagnosis process had been like for them and their families.

• The second survey reached 150 healthcare professionals, presenting back the patient and carer perspectives and inviting clinicians to reflect on what might be going wrong in the system.

With Voxco, the team analyzed the open-end responses quickly and transparently, producing narrative-rich reports that combined themes with verbatim extracts. The findings have since fed directly into a national policy campaign aimed at reshaping dementia diagnosis in the UK.

“One thing I really liked about Ascribe was the very rapid generation of coding frameworks. You can see at every level of granularity how the framework interacts with the data and what goes into each bucket. From there, you have as much time as you want to manipulate, change, and adjust, so you really feel like you’ve got under the hood of what it’s doing.”

- Jenni Burt  

Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer, Thiscovery

The Results: Co-Designed Evidence With Impact

By bringing Voxco into its workflow, Thiscovery has been able to transform how quickly it delivers insights. Projects that once would have required weeks of manual analysis can now move from data collection to full reports in a matter of days. This speed has not only improved efficiency but also strengthened client relationships, giving Thiscovery the confidence to commit to ambitious delivery timelines.

Equally important, the team no longer has to compromise on transparency or control. Analysts can show exactly how themes are developed, refine outputs to reflect real-world language, and present results in a way that clients can trust. With sensitive topics at the center of so much of their work, that combination of rigor, clarity, and security has been vital.

For Thiscovery, the impact goes beyond internal efficiency: their insights are already influencing product design, policy direction, and service optimisation, ensuring that patient and clinician voices are not just heard but acted upon.

See how Voxco and Ascribe can help you deliver insights that are faster, more transparent, and truly impactful. Book a demo today.

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