From Access to Insights: Healthcare Marketers Weigh In

Experts from Phase2 partnered with Tufts Medicine and Southwestern Health Resources (SWHR) to deliver a Masterclass at the Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) to explore the potential of digital health. The room was buzzing with ideas on practical strategies to leverage digital solutions to enhance patient engagement, improve healthcare delivery, and drive profitability. 

Tufts Medicine and SWHR introduced their organizations’ unique perspectives as they differ in the consumers they serve and the goals they hope to achieve. However, they are faced with similar challenges and opportunities in the healthcare landscape, which led to an exciting discussion on what these two organizations can learn from each other.

Access to Care

Almost every healthcare organization faces challenges with access to care, and the results in a room full of healthcare professionals showed just that. Attendees of the session noted that their biggest access to care challenges are: 

• Inefficient physician practice operations
• Disparate systems with different data 
• Long wait times
• Confusing scheduling systems 

We discussed the need to better utilize existing resources and to ensure that care was being provided via the most efficient channel. Why have a patient drive to an urgent care clinic when they can be seen virtually in their home? Why wait in the ED when you can reserve a spot at a local urgent care? By guiding patients to the right type of care based on their needs, access can be improved.

Personalized Patient Communications

The rise of value-based contracts creates the need for improved personalized patient communications, but this must be balanced with the need to protect patient privacy and adherence to regulations.

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a good place to start. In a room full of healthcare professionals 67% were using CRM or marketing cloud solutions with the majority using Salesforce.

By allowing consumers to raise their hands instead of following them based on third-party data, it creates an extremely personal and rich experience that relies on the quality of the relationship rather than the quantity of them. And once quality is achieved, it can be scaled. 

Recruitment & Retention

Employee recruitment and retention continue to be a huge challenge for healthcare systems across the country. Staff shortages are no surprise when up against the current state of recruitment with new competitors entering the space and a shift in expectations from candidates. A room full of healthcare professionals stated the following tactics in how they are differentiating themselves from their competitors when it comes to recruiting and retaining their workforce:

• Leveraging the brand to present as the most accessible and friendly health system 
• Career concierge experience in nursing recruitment

Privacy vs. Insights

Saving the hottest topic for last, the Masterclass ended with a discussion on privacy vs. insights. It explored the short and long-term solutions SWHR and Tufts Medicine have implemented in response to regulations and updated OCR guidelines. 

Healthcare professionals shared the impact of not being able to collect data. Challenges included:

• Telling the ROI story looks different with new analytics platforms
• Discussions with senior leadership regarding budget when you don’t have the ROI to prove what’s working
• Flying blind by not being able to measure success and optimize marketing campaigns

So what is top of mind for healthcare marketers right now? Personalized Patient communications, access to care, balancing privacy and insights, recruitment and retention, and value-based care. Marketers are looking for ways that technology and strategy can address these challenges and opportunities and whatever change is headed our way next.