As the healthcare industry emerges from one of the most disruptive periods in its history, organizations are still facing mounting pressures, such as staff shortages, declining reimbursement, and increasing administrative costs. They’re looking for stable ground — to operate in more cost-effective and efficient ways while also elevating the consumer experience and strengthening trust for individuals navigating their health journeys. One of the industry’s inefficiencies is the reliance on disparate legacy systems with siloed data, which leads to a fragmented consumer journey.
As consumers expect more personalized wellness journeys, marketers often depend on technology teams to come up with the solution. Digital leaders can implement consumer experience management (CXM) tools that unify data, facilitate cross-channel intelligence, and harness real-time insights that empower marketing teams to deliver relevant content to healthcare audiences.
Implement a system for managing individual and consumer account profiles
Every consumer is on a different health journey that is always evolving. To deliver the most relevant experiences to each individual, you need to understand who they are and where they’re at — whether they’re managing a new condition or trying to improve their lifestyle choices.
With heightened regulations around data management, consumer data is often siloed in different systems within health organizations. From both an IT and marketing efficiency standpoint, it’s important to bridge those silos to deliver the best service to patients and members. Many digital leaders turn to customer data platforms (CDPs) as the solution. They consolidate data from across channels and unify it into customer profiles, with the best CDPs for healthcare making it possible to responsibly manage and protect data in a HIPAA-ready environment. Then, IT teams can work in a silo-free environment for smoother workflows and have more bandwidth to focus on other digital transformations in the organization.
When navigating the healthcare system, consumers often interact with numerous people and departments, and want each one to be familiar with their personal information and medical history for a seamless experience. For example, a patient may contact your company’s call center to ask a question regarding an upcoming appointment. Instead of the patient having to repeat information, a CDP with their unified profile — a repository of all the data gathered on a single person — prepares agents with advanced cross-channel intelligence about the caller’s benefits plan, appointment history, and any content they recently engaged with. The patient can get straight to their question, and the agent can provide them with pertinent information. Not only does this provide a more satisfying consumer experience, but it also saves resources by shortening call times.
Make it possible for marketers to perform end-to-end journey analysis
It goes without saying that healthcare journeys are not linear. It’s important to be able to make sense of consumer data from every touchpoint to see how and where you can improve your strategies. After you’ve unified all the data from the various points of engagement, your next step is to analyze it in the full context of a consumer’s journey across channels.
Having end-to-end visibility allows teams to analyze a consumer’s engagement history across both digital and physical channels. With a cross-channel analytics tool enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), your marketers can quickly understand the full picture of a consumer’s journey without relying on data scientists to identify patterns and propensities, which can take days or weeks. When marketers are empowered with real-time insights, the IT resources they would otherwise need can be reallocated toward more technology-related tasks better suited to their unique skill set. With greater autonomy, marketers can be more responsive and make quicker decisions to improve consumer journeys, which in turn leads to cost savings and greater efficiency.
With real-time, cross-channel analytics at their fingertips, marketing teams can see which strategies are working, and which are not. Then they can zero in on the most effective engagement content and channels to inform next best actions that help patients receive the best care. Consider a runner who recently rolled her ankle while on a trail. She received an ankle brace from her care team and made an appointment with her primary care doctor through the patient portal. These touchpoints paint a picture of what’s going on with this person so healthcare providers can analyze and track her journey and shift their engagement strategy accordingly.
Ensure you have data-driven decisioning for all your campaigns
Once you’ve organized and unified data, and gained insights from cross-channel analysis, your teams can use this intelligence to better orchestrate and automate consumer engagement across touchpoints. For example, a consumer might click on an email banner about flu shots. This triggers a pre-orchestrated communication thread using information about their location, age, insurance, and medical history to surface locations and appointments near them. The benefits of these efficiencies can also be seen in your bottom line. With each improvement in the CX digital journey, you spend less by increasing the speed of care and eliminating time wasted on searching for the right data.
For the runner with the injured ankle, her care team can access the data generated at each point of engagement and ensure she has the right information at the right moments on her road to recovery. The providers send a text to schedule an appointment with an orthopedist and an email with ankle-strengthening exercises. Using AI-driven insights, you can have the greatest impact by adapting to a consumer’s relevant needs — at the moments and in the channels that will be most effective.
A customer journey management system can help your organization make intelligent, real-time decisions on what consumers will be most interested in engaging with next. It can also provide better self-service health materials, prominently surface trending topics, and enable personalized chatbots to efficiently resolve questions before consumers opt to switch to a call center. This consistency of care at each touchpoint can reinforce your role as a trusted partner who is invested in the consumer’s well-being.
Build better healthcare journeys with Adobe
Every consumer’s well-being journey is important. To deliver consistent care and communication to each person, you need powerful, secure solutions that work together seamlessly. With Adobe, you can harness the only end-to-end healthcare-specific platform that’s fully and natively integrated and HIPAA compliant. Adobe Real-Time CDP, built on the Adobe Experience Platform, makes it possible to safely unify consumer data while prioritizing data governance, privacy, and regulatory compliance. With Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, you can safely integrate consumer data from across every touchpoint and harness AI-driven capabilities to understand each unique journey in real time. And Adobe Journey Optimizer equips you with intelligent campaign orchestration to reach consumers with meaningful care at the most impactful moments. Together, these solutions support a personal journey for every consumer.
Explore more about how you can safely and securely use cross-channel consumer data and insights to drive operational and marketing efficiencies in healthcare.