Personalizing the Healthcare Patient Experience with Segmentation

Traditional marketing strategies for healthcare and life science services, products, or devices no longer deliver results in a digital-first marketplace. Without the right segmentation strategy in place organizations will fail to connect with their most influential target audiences and lead to diminished returns on investment. Data-driven marketing campaigns built on scalable digital asset management platforms can address the unique needs of individual patients.

Utilizing enterprise data & insights will help you develop real-time unified profiles of your patients and clinicians to deliver an enhanced, relevant, and connected health experience across channels. Every digital strategy should include 3 key components:  

Acquiring New Patient and Clinician Audiences

• Develop high-value segmentation plans to drive new growth to key audiences. Utilize advanced analytics and data-driven insights to identify and target high-potential patient segments, enabling marketers to optimize their messaging, channels, and tactics for maximum impact and growth.
• Identify barriers to conversion and develop marketing strategies to improve performance. Conduct comprehensive analysis of patient touchpoints to uncover pain points and barriers to conversion. Implement targeted marketing strategies to address these challenges, fostering improved patient engagement and higher conversion rates.

Enhancing the Experience

• Create consistent omnichannel journeys that connect where consumers want to engage. Develop seamless, personalized patient experiences across all channels, including online, offline, and mobile touchpoints. This approach ensures a cohesive brand experience and supports patient engagement.
• Improve access to care through self-service portals and educational materials. Offer convenient and user-friendly self-service options, including appointment scheduling, prescription refills, and access to medical records. Provide easy-to-understand educational materials to empower patients to make informed decisions about their care.
• Provide personalized service through digital platforms that enable patients to take control of their healthcare journey. Leverage data-driven personalization to deliver customized content, recommendations, and services, meeting the unique needs of each patient and fostering a sense of control and ownership over their healthcare journey.

Lead with Data & Analytics

• Unify disparate systems to a single source of truth to understand and act on from one place. Integrate diverse data sources, including electronic health records, marketing campaigns, and patient feedback, to create a holistic, unified view of patient and clinician information. This centralization allows for more efficient decision-making and targeted marketing efforts.
• Develop a real-time 360-degree patient view to drive marketing and patient experience tactics. Employ advanced analytics tools and techniques to generate a comprehensive, real-time understanding of patient needs, preferences, and behaviors. Use these insights to inform marketing strategies, enhance patient experiences, and improve overall healthcare outcomes.

Personalization of content and delivery channels, access to digital channels, and opportunities for self-service are widely held expectations even though they are relatively new concepts for healthcare. We have identified 3 primary imperatives that are driving the need for digital transformation in healthcare and life sciences.

Growing revenue despite pricing pressure & increased competitive disruption.

The first step in addressing this challenge is data – accessing and using the data you have, to inform acquisition strategy, and to help identify patients most in need. Use to data to identify who we want to target, how, and where.  Using the data you already have and are currently collecting via digital channels to identify and execute patient acquisition strategies is a much lower cost alternative to traditional marketing and awareness building efforts.

Building these new relationships and growing your understanding of your patients by actioning upon the data, you will be able to identify potential gaps in your services and offerings.  Your patients will be telling you what they want, and if you are not providing them those service – or self-service opportunities – they will seek them elsewhere.  Deepening these relationships and listening to your patients, will also help you grow.

And finally, you can increase revenue by driving new growth and retention through differentiated experiences -- leveraging personalization of content and journeys is another way to proactively grow market share by telling your patients you understand them – you know who they are and where they are in their personal journey with you.  And you are going to meet them where they already are rather than requiring them to come to you.  Personalization leads to higher engagement, and higher engagement leads to increased revenue.

Improve outcomes in response to transition from fee-for-service to value-based models.

Healthcare is one industry where data is not an issue.  We have tons of data! The main challenges are do we have the data we need, and do we know how to use it?  Can we turn that data into actionable insights into our patients and their behaviors?  Can we make that data and those insights available to everyone who needs them?  Integration of these discrete data sets, be they first, second, or third party, is the key to making the data usable.  Unifying data, freeing it from silos, is what will empower you to deliver connected experiences across the enterprise based upon a true 360-degree profile of every patient or patient segment.

This will enable you to not only better understand your patients, but it will empower you to better manage high-cost populations – being able to provide them treatment guidance, make recommendations based upon lifestyle choices and population health data, how they wish to be engaged and when – all of these things will help you to become a trusted advisor in their healthcare ecosystem.

Going beyond traditional care settings by engaging in a consumer-friendly way.

Today’s healthcare consumers expect to be able to move seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds, moving from one engagement channel to the other be they an in-office visit, talking to a call center, or scheduling appointments or renewing prescriptions online.  Connecting online & offline interactions, creating that holistic patient experience, will create a more engaged patient, and a more engaged patient will ultimately have better outcomes.

We note once again, the merging importance of self-service and healthcare consumers who are actively seeking out opportunities to do and manage things for themselves through digital channels. Empowering your patients through digital self-service options increases convenience, access, and enables price transparency for you to provide new and varied services. Moreover, it demonstrates to your patients that you understand them, are listening to them, and are changing your offerings and services to better serve them.

Developing an effective healthcare segmentation strategy

In today's competitive healthcare landscape, personalized marketing campaigns are key to capturing the attention of healthcare professionals (HCPs) and building lasting relationships. To do so, providers must delve into data and pinpoint their target patients. By categorizing them based on specific attributes, they can adapt their campaigns to cater to  individual requirements.

Consider these four fundamental concepts for developing an audience segmentation strategy:

1. Crafting the ideal segments: Before forming audience segments, it's critical to gather high-quality customer data by merging information from various sources. Alongside basic data like age, gender, and profession, collecting specifics on your target audience's location, native language, and medical specialty can enable you to divide patients into segments. By recognizing trends within each segment, you can inform marketing choices and efficiently allocate resources. According to McKinsey, companies that use customer analytics to create targeted campaigns achieve up to 30% higher return on investment (ROI) than those that don't.
2. Focused campaigns yield enhanced engagement: By customizing campaigns to captivate your target audience's specialized knowledge, you can drive higher engagement rates. While these targeted campaigns may have fewer impressions, their relevance to a specialized audience can lead to a more effective marketing budget allocation. In fact, a survey by Adobe found that personalized campaigns have an average conversion rate of 5.4%, compared to just 2.7% for non-personalized campaigns.
3. Success hinges on personalized, educational content: Healthcare professionals appreciate educational content, and audience segmentation enables sharing more intricate and specialized information with your target demographic. By delivering personalized, educational content to the right audience, you can establish credibility and build trust with your target audience. According to a survey by HIMSS, 90% of healthcare professionals said they would engage with companies that provide personalized educational content.
4. Selecting the optimal channel mix: While audience segmentation centers on digital channels, adopting a multichannel approach is most effective. Integrating online and offline data from disparate systems can strengthen the data foundation, deepen understanding of patients & prospects through advanced insights, and power real-time action. Delivering consistent and relevant experiences across channels and sites of care surfaces the next best action to impact engagement & outcomes. By identifying where your audience spends their time and positioning ads where physicians primarily research clinical content, you can ensure that your message is being delivered through the right channel.

Key Actions

• Strengthen data foundation by integrating online and offline data from various systems, deepening understanding of patients and prospects through advanced insights, and enabling real-time action.
• Deliver consistent and relevant experiences across channels and sites of care, surfacing the next best action to impact engagement and outcomes.

To remain competitive in today's healthcare landscape, providers must adapt by delivering the right message to the appropriate audience on the most effective platform. Employing audience segmentation allows for the categorization of physicians and patients into specialized groups, addressing individual needs, and identifying the channels that best engage your target audience.