Fieldnote Research Library

Research should accumulate

Meridian Health’s teams had hundreds of interview notes from patient and clinician studies, but every new project began with another round of discovery. Documents were easy to store and difficult to retrieve, and product decisions rarely carried the evidence that shaped them.

Fieldnote treats observations, themes, participants, and decisions as related objects. A researcher can move from a claim to its source context, while a product manager can see where the evidence is strong, old, or contradictory.

Designed for nuance

Search combines exact filters with forgiving language matching. Results show the surrounding passage rather than an isolated keyword, preserving the context that makes qualitative material useful — especially when that material concerns patients’ experiences of care.

The interface deliberately avoids scores and certainty theatre. Teams can mark tension between findings, record dissent, and show when an insight has been superseded.

Governance from day one

Because the library holds sensitive research, privacy was a design constraint rather than an add-on. Role-based access, audit logging, and a clear distinction between published and draft evidence were built into the information architecture from the first week.

Outcome

The library became part of weekly planning rather than a destination used only by researchers. Repeated discovery work declined, and roadmap proposals at Meridian Health now link directly to supporting evidence — which has made the decisions easier to defend and much faster to make.