Commentary

Improving Patient Relationships Through Customer Relationship Management

Reaching and engaging patients in today’s fast-paced digital landscape requires a new way of thinking for healthcare industry marketers, business development and strategy professionals. Patients are more connected than ever before through mobile and other electronic devices, and in return, they expect the same when they enter a hospital or health system environment. This transformation is putting pressure on healthcare marketers to diversify hospitals’ outreach methods to meet digital expectations and continue to do more with less.

This is why healthcare marketers need to make the shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing.

Hospitals and health systems can only provide compelling messaging to a targeted audience with the right insights, derived from analytics that are based on multiple sources of segmented data — and they must do so in a way that satisfies the tech-savvy consumer’s wants and needs at the right time and place. Here are a few ways that digital marketing can improve patient relationships:

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Empowering Consumers Through Digital Marketing

According to a national survey from Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 72% of internet users say they looked online for health information of one kind or another within the past year. The same study revealed that one in three American adults has searched online to research a specific medical condition. With the wealth of healthcare information available, consumers are empowered to take a proactive approach to address their own health, which ultimately results in better decision-making. For hospitals and health systems, traditional marketing needs to adapt and change to reach the online consumer. 

To help determine the appropriate target audience for marketing campaigns, healthcare marketers are beginning to embrace a critical capability that is standard in many other industries – customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. When used in healthcare, CRM produces actionable insights by targeting a specific segment with the appropriate message. This provides marketers the ability to build meaningful relationships with patients and formulate campaigns that align with long-term goals. In the past, traditional marketing campaigns were spent reaching consumers through offline channels that typically are not integrated, making the ability to accurately measure return on marketing investment (ROMI) difficult. Today, through predictive analytics, multi-channel digital marketing campaigns are able to provide insight into metrics that marketers need to know to measure their ROMI.

What to Do With All the Data?

With a CRM platform and advanced analytics, hospitals and health systems are able to interpret, synthesize and analyze the necessary information in order to inform future interactions with patients, prospects and populations — ultimately generating new and repeat business for the hospital. Utilizing these analytics to produce actionable insights can help healthcare marketers create effective campaigns for segmented patient populations.

The Key to Patient Engagement

With a more competitive patient recruiting landscape, healthcare CRM is more important than ever before and hospital and health system marketers must be able to anticipate patient needs in order to reach past, present and future patients. 

Final Thoughts

By utilizing multichannel digital marketing campaigns, hospitals and health systems can better understand patient behavior, allowing healthcare marketers to build stronger relationships with patients from the very first appointment throughout the lifecycle of the patient treatment. With digital marketing techniques fueled/powered by a CRM platform, patient campaigns are able to reach the right audience at the right time, enhancing the patient experience and delivering high-quality care.

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