About the Center > Needs Assessment > In-Depth Interviews > Determining Individuals to be Interviewed
One person's story cannot represent the many complexities a given population's needs. For this reason, several constituencies with different perspectives must be interviewed in order to collect as broad a base of needs as possible.
Patients, family members of patients, and medical experts can all be interviewed to glean a better understanding of patients' needs. Physicians and other medical experts will often give a different, but needed perspective. Likewise, family members of patients can give insight that the patient may not be able to (for instance, if the patient was heavily sedated or unconscious during a critical incident.)
Ultimately though, patients will be the primary users of CHESS and so their needs must be heard. Because their knowledge of their own situation is generally more accurate and their insights are more creative, we recommend that 90% of those interviewed be patients, and the other 10% be other experts.