Healthcare Marketing For Better Patient Outcomes
Healthcare marketers are optimistic about the future and driving innovation by accelerating and prioritizing digital-first strategies. According to Forbes, most companies have already embraced digital routes to market including websites and social media. The big change is that customers are increasingly more likely to connect with a business via a digital channel before traditional methods.
Digital experiences and data are reshaping every aspect of the business model. The “new normal” of selling virtually and working from anywhere is creating a demand for transformation both internally and externally. Marketers are embracing a new era of engagement so they can continue to compete. If you are working in the healthcare space this is the challenge facing you today and Summit Technologies LLC can help.
Companies are forced to evolve or shrink. Healthcare companies are no exception. Healthcare and life sciences companies face the difficult challenge of balancing the needs of the customer with the reality of doing business today. Macroeconomic conditions like inflation, supply chain issues, labor shortages, and sustainability have disrupted business as usual for this industry. Great healthcare providers are a key to providing great patient experiences but technology and digital-first strategies are nearly as important.
Navigating this evolving health care environment requires organizations to adopt tools and technologies that let them do more with less. The right tools are ones that gather information and data in real time to better understand the customer — whether that’s a patient, member, provider, employer, or otherwise.
When companies understand their customers better, they are more equipped to unlock efficiencies that reduce costs, increase productivity, and deliver more personalized experiences. And in healthcare, that means healthier people and more lives saved. Summit Technologies LLC understands this changing landscape and our technical expertise paired with your quality care will create amazing client experiences.
Most healthcare and life sciences companies already have the information they need to better understand their customers. Electronic health records (EHRs), customer relationship management platforms (CRMs), and other systems hold an immense amount of data. However, to get the most out of that data, it needs to be consolidated into a single platform that updates in real time.
Digital first can be categorized in three specific areas: apps, the omnichannel experience, and digital-only products and services.
All industries are being disrupted by apps. And in the health space there are probably many apps your prospects and customers currently use on a regular basis. Companies like Onduo and integrated apps like the Dexcom G6 caused consumers to expect an app based interface.
Apps are a central point of contact with your customers and a tool for acquiring customers, learning more about them, and improving their experience with your brand.
Successful businesses are going beyond apps to create a hybrid omnichannel world where customers interact with the brand and its products and services across multiple channels in an integrated way. Tools that capture and process that integrated omnichannel experience help provide you with a 360 degree view of the customer like never before.
Digital only products and services are the next step in the journey. The line between the real world and the digital one is dotted at best, porous in the near future. Digital only products and services aren’t just in high demand from the consumer. They provide you with many more opportunities to collect data on their actions and preferences. This data enhances your 360 degree customer view and helps you design smarter products and services with more personalization and interact with your customers and prospects at more precise moments in their customer journey.
What does this mean for a healthcare company?
Certainly there has been a huge uptick in virtual care, virtual appointments, and virtual solutions for patients. Healthcare providers and insurance companies have greatly enriched the amount of products and services available for patients. Including digital first and digital only solutions.
Patients are not the only ones insisting on better and more seamless interactions with their providers. Healthcare organizations also want to improve the patient experience, and many are hoping to achieve that outcome through digital transformation.
To promote a consistent and continuous healthcare experience, interoperability is key. Data needs to move around freely and support everyone involved in patient care. Every provider needs to have the right data at the right time. In a compliant rigorous space like healthcare, that is a challenge. Salesforce’s HIPPA compliant software is a good place to start. Salesforce Health Cloud provides a complete view of the patient giving you the platform to deliver consistent and continuous healthcare.
Salesforce’s software solutions for managing partner relationships are a great tool for providing the continuum of care expected today. Salesforce Experience Cloud and Community Cloud keep everyone involved in the patient care delivery of service connected.
The Salesforce ecosystem is a great place to start with a digital-first transformation towards marketing as well. Summit Technologies has found there are three primary areas where our Salesforce custom solutions help healthcare companies thrive.
The Pandemic-Driven Impact on Strategies, Challenges, and Priorities
Marketing has moved from supporting revenue generation into a stakeholder position within the healthcare organization, charged with creating revenue growth and aligning efforts with the business’ mission and strategy. In this new era of engagement, modern healthcare marketers need modern approaches to meet changing consumer expectations across all communication channels while balancing financial goals.
The Prioritization of KPIs and Alignment with Organizational Goals
Through a unified view of patient/member data, marketers can engage with patients, members, and partners using real-time insights. These insights are the key to meeting expectations, delivering service excellence, and elevating the customer experience across channels and devices, ultimately resulting in higher patient/member satisfaction and loyalty, and stronger relationships across their life cycle. With a focus on KPIs, organizational goals and Salesforce’s Einstein toolkit every interaction with patients and members moves them forward through the customer journey.
Building Organizational Structures for Internal and External Collaboration
Marketers can’t improve ROI and adapt to collaborative value-based care models and the current market-from-anywhere era without effective collaboration and cross-company data sharing. Siloed data has no place in modern health care marketing. Marketers are reshaping the way they leverage and share data to help COOs run their business and optimize engagement opportunities for greater efficiency and stronger patient/member and partner relationships. Summit Technologies analyzes your organization and data silos and connects the information you need to meet the top healthcare marketing priorities.
Top Healthcare Marketing Priorities
Creating a cohesive customer journey across devices and channels
Sharing a unified view of customer data across all business units
Improving marketing ROI attribution
* “State of Marketing, 7th Edition,” Salesforce Research, August 2021.
In order to grow and stay competitive, healthcare marketers must create an exceptional patient/member experience. In a fiercely competitive landscape, customer loyalty and retention are driven by meaningful and personalized interactions. In the new era of engagement, organizations are transforming their marketing functions and teams to align with patient/member expectations for a cohesive, digital-first, personalized, multichannel experience.
The right technology platform can also layer in automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics to enable teams to spend less time on manual tasks and more time focusing on their priorities. This results in increased productivity for the business, and better outcomes for the patients, members, and providers they serve.
Healthcare and life sciences is a large and diverse industry. It's made up of sectors each with their own issues and needs. For that reason, the tools and technologies that a business chooses must meet the unique challenges each sector faces to help them innovate and grow.
According to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), 80% of health systems said they plan to increase their investment levels in digital health over the next five years, and 75% of clinicians said they expect investments to increase over the same time period. They’ll be rewarded for their efforts, with 66% of marketers expecting company growth in the coming 12–18 months.
While the healthcare marketing landscape was already shifting prior to 2020, the digital evolution sped up dramatically with real-time, radical changes in patient and member expectations for service and care access.
Salesforce Health Cloud uses the power of the cloud, social and mobile technologies to create an environment that enables everyone from admins to patients to specialists to get the information they need at any time and on any device.
Forty-eight percent of healthcare marketers report their data management strategy completely changed to meet patient/member expectations as a result of COVID19. Now, with marketers acting as co-owners of revenue growth, marketing teams for payers and provider organizations must better understand and personalize experiences through a unified view of customer data to facilitate engagement for acquisition, onboarding, and retention. Salesforce Health Cloud meets these challenges.
After over a year of varying shelter-in-place orders, healthcare organizations and teams came to the realization that their teams can work from anywhere and deliver reimbursable care to patients and members remotely through telehealth. Whether the challenge is delivering reminders to get flu shots or appointment scheduling options, a digital-first approach speeds the time to value for a telehealth approach.
This new way to work — combined with marketing’s role in driving revenue — is creating new opportunities for collaborative partnerships, unprecedented levels of data sharing, and organizational structures and processes that drive efficiency, meet stakeholder needs, and build better relationships throughout the healthcare ecosystem to support patients and members with connected, seamless holistic experiences.
The role of marketing in the healthcare industry is to develop and execute strategies geared toward engaging and educating patients on their healthcare journey through SEO, digital advertising, website, content marketing, and more. Healthcare marketing has evolved and grown to be a sophisticated process of finding creative ways to engage with patients where they are on the patient care continuum.
The most effective marketing in healthcare is patient-centric, meaning it focuses on who the patient is, what information they care about, and building a know, like, and trust relationship. The Salesforce tool box provides you with a 360 degree customer view and allows you to provide patient-centric marketing at the right moment with the right message.
An integrated healthcare platform unifies systems by breaking down silos and focusing all data in one place. This allows providers to easily identify appropriate next steps in a person’s care journey and share essential information with other care providers like hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, and billing.
Salesforce Health Cloud resolves three primary challenges for healthcare providers delivering patient-centered care. A unified, 360 degree patient view, smarter patient management, connected patient engagement help health care providers focus more on patient care and satisfaction.
Yet providers today are burdened by legacy systems and are challenged to make the shift to healthcare that is 1-to-1, smart and connected to patient needs. Summit Technologies LLC ends the challenges of patient satisfaction with Salesforce Health Cloud implementations customized for your organization.
Summit Technologies is a Columbus, Ohio based Salesforce Consulting Partner consisting of a talented and creative team of Salesforce certified Consultants, Developers, Analysts and Project Managers. We specialize in building innovative solutions for our clients within the Salesforce family of products including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CPQ, Experience Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, Pardot, Field Services and Salesforce Communities. Summit Technologies strategic services solutions bring custom Salesforce technology to work for your business.