The era of “build it and they will come” in healthcare is over. With the rising cost of medical services and influx of convenient care options, patients now treat their health decisions like any other serious investment. In the face of increasing competition and consumer expectations, hospitals and health systems need to restructure their strategy in order to engage patients and consumers effectively.
Creating a truly outstanding patient engagement strategy requires control over many components across the health system. While your hospital has well-oiled operations and physicians with care expertise, a huge piece of the patient engagement puzzle is well-timed personalized communication. This is where marketing's role is often overlooked and underestimated – as excellent communicators, they are uniquely poised to support patient engagement efforts with a data-driven strategy.
The benefits of improved engagement are numerous – empowered patients, fewer hospital visits, and improved health outcomes, to name a few. A recent study by Deloitte revealed the measurable impact of patient engagement on hospital revenue: Higher engagement leads to higher patient satisfaction, and hospitals with excellent HCAHPS scores have a net margin of 4.7 percent, versus just 1.8 percent for their lower-rated counterparts.
Clearly, patient engagement offers powerful benefits to hospitals that can harness it correctly. However, many marketing teams have yet to create a patient engagement and retention strategy with considerable depth, leaving them mystified over the initial steps. Before digging into how to improve patient engagement, let’s take a moment to understand how data-driven insights drive strategy. Beginning with the right insights pinpoints those consumers most likely in need of your care.
The era of “build it and they will come” in healthcare is over. With the rising cost of medical services and influx of convenient care options, patients now treat their health decisions like any other serious investment. In the face of increasing competition and consumer expectations, hospitals and health systems need to restructure their strategy in order to engage patients and consumers effectively.
Creating a truly outstanding patient engagement strategy requires control over many components across the health system. While your hospital has well-oiled operations and physicians with care expertise, a huge piece of the patient engagement puzzle is well-timed personalized communication. This is where marketing's role is often overlooked and underestimated – as excellent communicators, they are uniquely poised to support patient engagement efforts with a data-driven strategy.
The benefits of improved engagement are numerous – empowered patients, fewer hospital visits, and improved health outcomes, to name a few. A recent study by Deloitte revealed the measurable impact of patient engagement on hospital revenue: Higher engagement leads to higher patient satisfaction, and hospitals with excellent HCAHPS scores have a net margin of 4.7 percent, versus just 1.8 percent for their lower-rated counterparts.
Clearly, patient engagement offers powerful benefits to hospitals that can harness it correctly. However, many marketing teams have yet to create a patient engagement and retention strategy with considerable depth, leaving them mystified over the initial steps. Before digging into how to improve patient engagement, let’s take a moment to understand how data-driven insights drive strategy. Beginning with the right insights pinpoints those consumers most likely in need of your care.
Identifying Patient Needs With Business Insights
The first step in any go-to-market strategy should be identifying top growth opportunities and top audience targets – and a patient engagement strategy is no exception. With an understanding of organizational goals (For example: “Grow market share by 3 percent”), identify geographic areas in need of a strategic service offered by your health system. Dive deeper after uncovering these general needs of the market to understand your best next actions for executing in the opportunity, as well as differences in key attributes and response preferences of the consumers and physicians.
This is where a healthcare business insights solution is critical. It combines external market dynamics with business intelligence to identify top opportunities for engagement campaigns. With these insights driving campaign strategy, the marketing department transforms into a revenue-driver, not just a cost center.
The question is – how can you harness the vast amounts of available consumer, household, patient, physician, and claims data to create and deploy highly personalized campaigns that reach consumers at the right time with exactly the right messaging? Let’s go over four strategies that can help you reach your engagement (and ROI) goals.
Provide Personalized Resolutions To Patient Needs
Consider this: 72 percent of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations on a personal level. The typical healthcare marketing strategy (casting a wide net and hoping for responses) is no longer sustainable. Instead, focus your strategy on campaigns with highly-segmented, hyper-targeted audiences and messaging.
Take advantage of the data sources at your disposal (consumer, patient, behavioral, financial and more) to create a centralized patient persona. These insights provide the confidence and knowledge to put the right messages in front of precisely targeted populations, at just the right time.
Imagine that a hospital is seeking to expand their orthopedic service line: The hospital’s two primary target markets are athletes with sports injuries and aging individuals with knee pain. Attracting these populations requires different approaches, even if they will receive similar treatments.
For the best campaign performance and ROI, your marketing team needs to create unique, content-based campaigns for each of these markets and deploy tactics on channels that each audience is most likely to respond to. An email, for example – perhaps highlighting the common symptoms of muscle strain, strategies for alleviating pain, and a list of sports medicine specialists – is more engaging to the younger target market and more likely to result in a conversion.
With a business insight tool, this information provides clarity of focus and opportunity for your organization - on any service line.
Utilize Multi-Channel Campaigns
Many health systems have become complacent with single-channel, traditional marketing campaigns. But consumers don't limit themselves to one channel and often have nonlinear journeys. Their initial touchpoint might happen via social media, but from there they could visit your website, research potential treatments, and even call to request more information.
With this in mind, you can’t focus all marketing efforts on one channel to reach and engage consumers effectively. A healthy mix of tactics – such as social media, website optimization, email campaigns, outbound calling, and even direct mail – is critical to ongoing success.
Complete 360° views of the target consumers, households, or patients sets your team up for success. This requires sophisticated audience segmentation and predictive analytics, along with the centralized technology. By harnessing these insights, your organization can anticipate consumer and patient needs and deploy highly-targeted campaigns seamlessly across channels to the right audience, at the right time.
Focus On Population Health
The same data and insights approach defines strategy and best next action at a chronic disease management level as well as high-value service lines, like in the example we explored above for orthopedics. Take, for example, diabetes and pre-diabetes screening pophealth initiatives. Track community-wide wellness trends such as incidences of obesity and a lack of physical activity, use market data and predictive analytics to determine which groups of people are at the greatest risk, and deploy appropriate communication to these groups. Not only does this strategy help you reach new and existing patient populations, but it also improves health outcomes and reduces care costs.
A population health strategy requires in-depth data analysis. A comprehensive data set allows your organization to not only identify trends and determine the best way to reach segmented populations, but also finds new and nurtures existing patients that are already in your health system’s care funnel. Data-driven nurture campaigns improve engagement levels – track the behavior of consumers from their initial touchpoint to their first conversion to ongoing proactive engagement after moments of episodic care. With this information, marketing teams gain an understanding of where and why attrition occurs in the care funnel, and how to prevent attrition by sending the right message at the right time.
While it's quite likely you have a population health data strategy for existing patients, the same robust data set provides the opportunity to also identify and target those consumers with a high risk for the same disease.
From there, it’s not difficult to create hyper-targeted messaging to reach the right populations. In the case of certain population health initiatives (such as diabetes and pre-diabetes screenings), this effort has two positive outcomes: First, it encourages more people to become aware of their diabetic status, thereby reducing the number of patients coming in with more advanced, costly health problems. Second, it raises awareness about diabetes symptoms encouraging and providing the right information to someone who does have diabetes or pre-diabetes to make an appointment. Overall, this enhances your patient engagement strategy by aligning the marketing team, who are great communicators, with broader population health initiatives that deliver the right message, about the right conditions, at the right time.
Continuously Innovate
Healthcare organizations that stick to standard, outdated tactics and technology to fuel their engagement strategies struggle to meaningfully measure, let alone increase, ROI. Many organizations aren’t even aware of their lack of innovation in this area – they become complacent in their outreach efforts, accepting a certain (typically low) conversion rate as the “norm” for their industry.
In this day and age, healthcare organizations benefit from taking a page out of the marketing playbooks of retail and other direct-to-consumer brands. Cutting-edge digital marketing tactics aren’t all hype: They’ve proven effective and well worth the investment. For one, you’ll reach more consumers – especially younger patients and caregivers – on the channels they frequent most. Second, new digital platforms allow for continuous campaign optimization for improved engagement, along with powerful analytic capabilities (so you can measure ROI and quickly produce C-suite ready reports and dashboards more precisely than ever before).
Tools such as marketing automation add an important layer to nurture and engage patients with relevant information (such as related seminars, flu season best practices, new specialists at your practice, etc.) long after they’ve been brought into your care funnel. HCRM platforms, integrated call centers, and robust databases all play a part in the modern-day marketing toolkit.
For patient engagement purposes, the value of an HCRM-enabled call center cannot be understated. Call centers must change their focus from simply trying to get off the call as soon as possible into an integrated engagement contact center that provides a valuable and strategic human-to-human touchpoint. This allows organizations to not only obtain more robust data to inform their strategy (improving the understanding of campaign conversion rates and ongoing optimizations), but also provides an opportunity to proactively identify, engage, and resolve additional called needs. A seamless experience such as this not only increases patient satisfaction, but it creates operational excellence.
Additionally, don’t underestimate tools that collect and analyze physician data. Physicians play a central role in boosting patient engagement and health system growth: To create the best patient experience possible, identify opportunities for ongoing physician learning and development. Resolve any physician-related challenges to ensure not only that patients have a positive care experience and remain loyal to your network, but that your referring providers do as well.
Final Thoughts
Leverage the power of data-driven digital marketing tactics to create highly-targeted, personalized campaigns. Ultimately, these campaigns both help available new patients and engage existing patients so they stay with the health system. Since it is five times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer, targeted retention campaigns are perhaps even more important for long-term growth.
For many organizations, creating a successful patient engagement strategy requires a complete restructuring of legacy marketing tactics and the adoption of new technology like a CRM, marketing automation, and business insights tool. However, organizations that take the time to carefully undergo this data-driven initiative gain new perspective on what it means to be successful – and, in doing so, gain a competitive edge to become leaders in their market.
About The Author
Gary Druckenmiller, Jr. is Vice President, Customer Success at Evariant. He functions as lead strategist, digital marketing thought leader and C-level executive sponsor for all of Evariant’s enterprise clients, primarily focused on advising health system leadership of opportunistic methods to improve their digital presence and interactive growth potential.
