Written By David M. Williams | Chief Strategy Officer | LEVO Health

Over the past 5 years, retail and hospitality businesses have begun using predictive analytics to better assess profiles of customers most likely to buy or have the greatest potential of needing a product or service. With increasingly narrow margins due to regulatory and competitive pressures, healthcare organizations have begun to embrace predictive analytics as well to engage with past, present and future healthcare consumers to better allocate marketing dollars and attract the right types of patients.
Better Patient Engagement Through Big Data

In the past, healthcare marketers threw a wide net hoping to capture the interest of a single subset of patients suffering from a specific ailment or those seeking information on various treatment options. Sometimes these campaigns hit their mark, but more often than not, spend was wasted serving marketing impressions to the wrong audience.

With the advent of marketing software and online data clearinghouses that can produce large data sets like web traffic, purchasing habits, demographics and geo-specific data, understanding the research and decision making habits of prospective patients has become much more accessible to savvy healthcare marketers today. Armed with this information, healthcare marketers are now able to provide targeted messages to patients based on their condition and even the stage of progression. This increases visibility can help provide patients with the information they need at every stage of the care decision making process to help them make more informed and confident decisions about their care.

Here are the 3 ways predictive analytics can be used to increase patient engagement with your brand or message:

1. Focus on the Right Patient at the Right Time – Predictive marketing analytics allow healthcare marketing and sales departments to increase conversions by leveraging the digital breadcrumbs potential patients leave during their research phase. This increases patient conversion rates by focusing on the most engaged patients ready to make a healthcare decision.
2. Understand Healthcare Consumer Habits – More information available about past, current and potential healthcare consumers allows for more personalized marketing messages. This decreases patient acquisition times by personalizing messaging to patients based on the stage of their decision making process.
3. Refine Marketing Spend – Understanding the engagement levels and habits of current, past and potential patients allows healthcare marketers to identify and understand current and future seasonal trends wit respect to demand and competition. This decreases marketing acquisition cost by determining the marketing channel that attracts the most engaged patients at the right time.

Healthcare marketing powered by data and predictive analytics can be used to help healthcare marketers increase patient engagement through more effective, personalized messaging. More relevant messaging delivers more engaged patients.

Ethical Considerations

Of course, increased visibility brings many ethical considerations as well. For example, a few years back, Target came under fire for outing a teenage girl’s pregnancy by direct mailing coupons targeting expectant mothers to her family’s home (she hadn’t told them yet).

This unfortunate event demonstrates the need for careful planning and oversight at every stage of campaign development and syndication. Consideration of a current and prospective patient’s HIPAA privacy and list Opt-ins should be taken into account to protect the patient’s privacy as you serve theme with these hyper-targeted campaigns.