4 Strategies for Personalizing the Patient Experience
The healthcare industry has often lagged in digital transformation, but it can no longer afford to rest on its laurels. Competition from new, digital-savvy companies and more demand from consumers for better experiences is placing significant pressure on healthcare organizations. According to a 2021 Digital Trends report from Econsultancy and Adobe, 40% of healthcare organizations have experienced churn from their existing customers.
Healthcare organizations must move beyond providing personalized attention to patients or members when they visit a hospital, clinic, or practitioner to personalizing the entire journey— including the digital touchpoints. According to the 2021 Digital Trends report, a significant proportion of providers are offering personalization by providing “exclusive services and privileges” (32%) and “direct-to-consumer products and services” (31%).
These strategies require a high level of personalization and segmentation that are only possible with the right data capabilities and a customer-centric mindset. They’ll not only improve the overall patient experience, but they can also have a tangible impact on patient outcomes.
So, what MarTech capabilities do healthcare organizations need to enable and scale personalized experiences? Here are the essentials:
1. Comprehensive Web and Marketing Analytics
Personalization must start with knowing your customers. Without detailed insight into who they are, their interests, and online behaviors, it’s impossible to deliver relevant experiences. To do this well, you need to collect comprehensive data on your customers. Yet, nearly 3 in 10 healthcare executives describe their organizations as either “ineffective” or “highly ineffective” when it comes to gathering first-party data to deliver experiences throughout the customer journey, according to the 2021 Digital Trends report.
Adobe Analytics not only lets you collect and analyze data from anywhere in the customer journey from any channel, but it also brings all that data under one roof. With a more complete, unified profile, marketers can create personalized customer experiences across traditional and digital touchpoints. For example, a pharma organization can build new customer engagement campaigns around top areas of interest, such as health trends or medical breakthroughs.
2. Proactive Prediction Capabilities
Another key aspect of personalization is having predictive capabilities. This is a leading priority for many healthcare organizations as it allows them to improve outcomes by providing new service offerings that proactively help members or patients intelligently predict and prevent possible medical issues.
Using “wearables,” which are body-mounted sensors that monitor and transmit biological data like heart rate and blood pressure, you can analyze the results of the data collected. Then, with the predictive capabilities of a solution like Adobe Analytics, you can deliver personalized health recommendations to further improve patient outcomes.
3. Automate and Scale Personalization
True personalization for all customers requires automating and scaling personalized experiences. This requires having a unified view of your customers, the ability to draw actionable insight from your customer data, and quickly create content personalized to different audience segments.
Adobe Experience Manager content fragments make adapting and reusing content for different audiences easier and faster. Adobe Target further enables you to automate and scale experiences with its personalization engine, which delivers personalized content based on a combination of rules-based and machine learning approaches.
For example, using Adobe Target in conjunction with Adobe Experience Manager, a healthcare organization could quickly build a landing page for a COVID vaccine campaign. Behavior-based rules, such as whether the site visitor had scheduled a vaccination appointment on a previous visit, would be used to determine what content to serve the visitor. This way, the content delivered on the landing page is personalized to different audiences based on their current vaccination status. Those who have scheduled an appointment would see information about how to prepare for their upcoming vaccination visit, while those new to the site would see content about why they should get vaccinated.
4. Omnichannel Delivery
The final capability your MarTech needs in order to succeed at delivering more personalized experiences is the ability to deliver personalized content on any channel. While the majority of healthcare consumers still prefer to talk to their provider on the phone and or meet in person, preferences for digital channels are rapidly increasing.
In Avtex’s Omnichannel Healthcare Experience Report, 31% of respondents preferred email. Preferences for mobile apps, patient portals, and online chat were similar. Moreover, Millennials and Gen Z were even more likely to prefer digital channels. More than a third listed apps, portals, and chat options in their top three channels.
Adobe Experience Manager Sites support web, mobile, and emerging channels, to enable marketers to deliver content across multiple touchpoints. And, when integrated with Adobe Target, its algorithms can determine the right digital experience to serve an individual in real-time—regardless of where that interaction occurs.
Right Time, Right Place, Right Channel
Personalization is all about getting relevant content to the consumer when they need it and on the touchpoint they are using. To do this at scale with thousands or millions of customers requires an integrated and robust MarTech that can bring customer data, intelligent decision- making, and fast and automated content creation together—and this is exactly what Adobe brings to the table.
About LeapPoint
LeapPoint Consulting is changing the way companies connect work, technology, and talent to solve big business challenges and drive successful outcomes. Established by Big 4 alumni who sought more flexibility and agility in meeting clients’ most critical business needs, LeapPoint is committed to making life and experiences fundamentally better for employees, customers and those they serve. As the go-to Adobe and Adobe Workfront partner in healthcare and across industries, LeapPoint’s break-through Connected WorkTM services are the essential framework for the Future of Work. To learn more about LeapPoint and its Connected Work services, visit www.leappoint.com.
