DIGITAL STRATEGY
Consumerism, Tech Advances Driving Health care Marketing Developments
The development and widespread acceptance of emerging technologies is transforming the health care experience—both for consumers and health care professionals—and creating opportunities for creative approaches to health care marketing.
Details of these developments, as well as tips on how marketers can use them at their organizations, were shared during a Credentials Course webinar presented by the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) last September.
“Consumerism is fueling a lot of what is going on in health care, and it is also driving the emerging trends,” says Kathy Divis, the president of Greystone.Net, a health care marketing and digital consulting firm. “This is causing patients to behave differently than they did in the past.”
Today’s patients are knowledgeable, are making better and more informed decisions, and are getting information from sources beyond the hospital itself, such as social media, friends and family. And with that “they are driving their own care,” Divis adds.
Additionally, patients are hyper-connected to technology via multiple access points and expect the same from their health care providers. This change is pushing marketers to shift from a marketing communications (Marcom) to a marketing technology (MarTech) mindset and to deploy tools that engage across all consumer touch points, using data to personalize communications, solutions and actions. It is also prompting the move toward greater reliance on technology and data to drive marketing decisions.
If you look at consumerism today, Divis explains, individuals enjoy highly efficient, quality, mobile-friendly digital experiences across many aspects of their lives, including logistics, travel, hospitality and financial services. Unfortunately, health care has lagged behind.
“We’ve begun to expect to have the ability to interact with a business very effectively from our mobile devices,” says Kathy. “And that is in almost all industries except for health care.”
While Divis notes some exceptions within the health care space, the industry overall is not yet operating at the level of digital excellence found in many other spaces.
COVID Advances and Complications
COVID-19 altered the digital experience in health care and other industries. While this was a positive step forward for many consumers, the rush by health systems to deploy digital initiatives resulted in numerous complications that ultimately worked against fostering a cohesive patient journey.
“As consumers have taken more control over their lives through these tools, it’s important to point out that while COVID definitely had an impact, it was because we released all of these new tools into the wild during the pandemic,” explains Brian Gresh, the president of Loyal, an artificial intelligence–driven platform that provides health systems with patient feedback tools. “It’s very hard to create and connect a seamless journey when you are deploying 10, 12 different point solutions.”
“Consumers now are expecting a seamless, consistent, high-quality customer experience regardless of what device they are on or why they are coming to your portals, websites or apps,” Divis adds. “And they expect their data and the context of what they were communicating to you to flow between all of those different channels.”
Divis notes that brands that implement an omni-channel solution—consisting of connected, multimedia contact channels—are significantly more likely to retain customers than those that don’t. In health care, these emerging technologies can broadly fit into at least three core categories: the digital front door, the use of AI and chatbots, and implementation of voice-activated tools such as virtual assistants and voice search.
“These things are impacting not only health care overall, but also health care marketing,” says Divis.
Digital Front Door Version 2.0
Creating digital experiences that are seamless, frictionless and minimize stress to both patients and providers is fundamental to the use of a digital front door, the initial access point for patients interacting with their health care community. This entails more than a patient portal.
Example of a Digital Front Door
"These days the digital front door isn’t necessarily a door, nor is it only digital," Divis notes. "It’s becoming a vehicle for discussing how we interact with patients throughout the course of their interaction with an organization."
The benefits of digital front doors include increased patient visibility and access, optimized patient access points and easier navigation of this access by simplifying and automating the user experience. They are also meant to increase patient retention, reengage with patients who have delayed care and shift from reactive to proactive care models.
The key to a successful utilization of these components is ensuring they integrate seamlessly.
"Most organizations have between 10 and 15 different point solutions that they’re using to connect with customers,” Gresh says. “From a marketing standpoint, making sure they are on brand and on tone is critical to a good customer experience."
The Rise of AI
As technology continues to evolve, more of a focus will be put on self-service and AI-based interactions.
“Moving away from human interaction and into AI-based forms of communication is increasingly important, even in a health care environment,” says Divis.
However, moving to such technologies can be particularly challenging within the health care space where management of sensitive data is of key importance.
“A lot of other industries have an easier path to self-service,” Gresh notes. “You have to move forward at an easy pace.”
AI is being discussed a lot across multiple industries and can mean many different things. “At its most basic definition, it is training computers to better understand human interactions and to mimic them,” Gresh explains.
The technology is being applied across many components of the MarTech experience and leveraged in multiple ways among these technologies and solutions. While phone and email remain the most common forms of communication between customers and companies, this is steadily changing.
“People of all demographics are comfortable using chatbots,” says Gresh. “If the chatbot fails to answer their question they tend to be less satisfied, but they’re willing to give it a try. That’s because the technology continues to get better.”
Like any AI model, chatbots learn, so the more conversation data that are put into the system the better they get at answering questions and solving problems.
“Customers are realizing that the more they use them the better the results become. You’ll see these stats continue to grow over time as people get their problems resolved via chatbot.”
In health care, chatbots can be very effective in reducing administrative burden, allowing 24-hour access and providing customers with the satisfaction of an instant response. “That’s where chatbots can really shine,” Gresh notes.
Additionally, leveraging use of a chatbot combined with “live chat” services can be a real sweet spot. “That can really help streamline conversations and resolve issues much faster.”
Virtual Assistants and Voice Search
Health care searches are very common, with Google reporting 70,000 health-related searches per minute. Google searches also drive three times more visitors to hospital websites than non-visitors to the search engine. Optimizing access via search—and how user searches are changing—is core to emerging marketing solutions.
While growing organic search traffic is a priority, health care websites need to be ultra-mobile, local and voice-friendly, as the use of voice-activated speakers grows. These evolutions in how people search online mean that marketers need to address how to compete in a logo-less world where voice requests are being met with information that’s pertinent to their organizations.
“We’re finding that more searches are starting via voice, are performed on mobile devices and are of local intent,” Divis says.