November
26 of 2020
15 min reading
Opinions expressed by Businessman the collaborators are his.
One in seven men tends to wait as long as possible to see their doctor. Don’t worry guys, you’re in good company. On the contrary, women are more health conscious. They are 33% more likely to visit a doctor when they have a health problem or injury.
Last year was my first experience with telesalud, after about a year postponing the visit to a doctor. I rarely get sick and it wasn’t a critical issue with the mission (although it was something I didn’t feel comfortable discussing with my doctor). Fortunately, I discovered that Blue Shield offered an online portal that provided access to healthcare professionals on demand. After a few clicks, I was live with a professional nurse who provided me with the care I needed. Although the problem was inevitable (it comes with age), I found the care efficient and enjoyable without the hassle of a live visit.
Related: Here is the biggest barrier to quality healthcare (and there are no pre-existing conditions)
Telehealth eliminates waiting times, unnecessary travel, and the hassle of leaving home. Thanks to COVID-19, it has become a catalyst for traditional and nascent healthcare providers to accelerate the adoption of non-traditional (e.g., digital) services. Certainly, this includes telesana and telemedicine, but it also customizes awareness and educational programs that satisfy patients where they live. And finally, there is the change marketing budgets for digital campaigns. Although spending on digital advertising has outpaced non-digital spending in 2019, the duopoly of Google and Facebook are struggling to run more ads. For the first time, Google predicts a decline in advertising revenue. That slap stings, especially because Facebook expects an increase in advertising revenue by the end of 2020. Both are angrily watching Amazon a few inches from their territory, as Amazon has been sneaking, well, almost everyone else’s territory (healthtech included).
Being an avid observer of human behavior, he was curious to know how to do it customer research, digital platforms and marketing strategies have shifted to health and well-being brands. Finally, I enrolled in Dan Ariely’s Behavior Economics course, Changing the Master Class of Customer Behavior. After interviewing more than a dozen marketing professionals, what I learned from the course validated some of the ones I had already taken on, but ideas like “cancer doesn’t stop,” from Bill Lepler, director of marketing. Analytics in City of Hope, it reminded me that although behaviors have changed, systemic diseases have not.
Know what customers want and success soon
“The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated demand for existing products,” said Steven Keller, Steven Keller, global director. Digital marketing and Strategy, Ultrasound and Life Care Solutions, GE Healthcare. “While hospitals were being invaded by patients in critical care units, we forged partnerships with technology and thought leaders like Microsoft and Oregon University Hospital of Health and Science to securely connect physicians with patients.” This collaboration, and others like it, facilitated more secure connections and allowed them to expand to meet rapidly increasing demand. A much needed wish from your customers. In addition, seeing the impact COVID-19 has had on its healthcare customers, Keller and the team focused their marketing efforts on providing information to educate and empower, rather than flooding their customers with untimely, sales-style messages.
Knowing what your customers want is key. “Insufficient knowledge is the biggest challenge that many companies make,” says Matt Dixon, director of product and research at Tethr, a cloud-based conversation intelligence platform. He explained that while the design and management of the customer experience is often poorly executed, it is not due to a deficiency in equipment, resources or tools. Their low performance results from a lack of knowledge, insight, or data. “Companies keep leading with assumptions and never go out to test the data. If you throw bodies at your unproven assumptions, you’ll just be quicker to make mistakes.”
Related: 5 Technological innovations that change medical practice
The mantra, “fail fast,” that Eric Ries popularized in his 2011 book, “The Lean Startup,” was misunderstood. “Fail fast” focuses on creating agility and increasing speed through decision making that is rooted in data-supported assumptions. Dixon’s advice is to develop those assumptions by taking the time to understand what your customers really want, like, and dislike, not what you like. he thinks they want. “You will be much more effective, even with minimal resources, limited tools and less capital than a company that leads by assumption and establishes an army of people who are pursuing the wrong direction.”
Craig Kartchner, vice president of marketing and customer experience at HonorHealth, agrees. One of his first goals, when he joined HonorHealth, was to develop a deep understanding of the client. He asked people directly what they wanted and how they wanted it delivered. “We learn, directly from our patients and clients, about their biggest frustrations, biggest barriers and major delight points.” Additional questions included the infamous Start / Stop / Continue framework; what should we start, what should we stop and what should we continue to do? Perhaps the key information Kartchner shared lies in what they did with that data. “We gathered a huge amount of pain points and ideas on how to improve. So after we organized the list, we went back to the customers and asked them where we should invest.” This is getting skin in the game. They are now getting under the list, based on customer feedback and internal information that fits theirs brand aspirations. As an additional step, they could take the newly developed enhancements and check them out with the customers who recommended them, as a group of top-quality beta tests that perpetuate themselves as brand ambassadors.
For those with immediate needs who don’t have the time to prepare and submit a survey, grab a page from Chuck Eberl’s playbook. He is Navvis ’head of strategy and marketing, healthcare market innovator and customer trend analyst. “We thought we weren’t generating enough content, so we analyzed our content strategy and compared it to our competitors. What we found out was that the only people involved were other marketers.”
With that vision, they looked at the people they wanted to sell to and the ones they were currently reaching. “We were able to see that there were three categories of content they liked. One was about their company, the second about their community, and the third about peer updates.” He explained how challenging it would be for them to heal content within these topics, so instead we explained, “We are taking a sniper approach to finding the right profile of people based on title and leadership.” For B2B brands, LinkedIn comes to mind. Segmentation by title, check. Antiquity, check. And while LinkedIn (and by extension Microsoft) generates a small share of advertising spending (3.8% of net advertising revenue in 2019, compared to Google with 37.2%), its targeting opportunities for certain data demographics proved to be vastly superior.
By identifying unmet customer needs, things that exist but surveys have not yet been discovered, can also be discovered through cost analysis. Robb Vaules, vice president of sales and marketing for ONRAD, a full-service radiology service provider, explained how they empower rural hospitals. “Many small regional hospitals do not have full-time staff for full-time radiologists. We provide them with flexible, scalable capabilities so they can meet their radiology needs remotely, usually within minutes.” Even the largest hospitals that have the volume use their services for night shifts, again reducing costs and providing relief to overburdened internal staff. They have adapted and evolved their services to meet the needs of their clients and plan ahead for future changes in practices, including the growing need for radiologists as many retire from the field. Vaules went on to explain the unique service value that ONRAD offers, which is, in part, the transformation of healthcare as we know it: “Using the Internet to provide medical services opens many doors and that’s great, but it can (unfortunately) commercialize the same health service. We are changing the way health care is provided while fighting negative perceptions about changing a model of medical service delivery that has existed for decades, if not more. ” Sometimes it is easier to identify the needs of unmet customers in the face of the effort to meet them. This is because the solution to bridge the gap is so innovative that it requires a systemic transformation within an industry.
Preference for digital and self-service
Matt Dixon, director of product and research at Tethr, shared the story of a recent webinar he attended. His comments and observations resonated deeply with me. The webinar speaker said that in the current environment, certain preferences will shoot through the time tunnel and take root faster than their normal pace. “One of them is the preference for digital and self-service, and telehealth fits into that area.”
Time tunnel. COVID-19 destroyed common routines. To many, it seemed like a warp of time. Courtney Wakefield, director of digital strategy at Children’s Health, explained that when COVID-19 arrived, they could not see children in their clinics, but still needed to schedule follow-up appointments. “We quickly adapted to strengthen our online visits and changed the approach of the entire team to developing a patient journey that facilitated the process of scheduling and explaining how patients can access their virtual visit.” He discussed how the priorities of various teams have changed, literally overnight. The information, integrated marketing, strategy and communication teams worked together to chart the new digital service.
Related: What the death of Chadwick Boseman tells us about health at work
What patients and professionals once misjudged is now the number one service option, says Mike Maron, president and CEO of Holy Name Medical Center. “Patients love telehealth. It is fast, convenient and effective. My staff also loves it, for the same reasons. It eliminates so much hassle and makes people more productive. “Perhaps one of the most important points is that the quality of care is increasing: care is really better with telehealth. It’s also the safest option.” Keeping patients at home reduces accidental contact points, “Maron said. At the peak, they had more than 5K people in home monitoring and virtual connections in telehealth, which is exponentially more than before COVID-19. Maron fully recognizes this change in behavior, both who are investing heavily to expand their entire experience on the hospital platform.
Maron was not the only one to notice how the telesana benefited the staff and how they adopted her with open arms. Howard Reis, CEO of The TeleDentists, explained how dentists, many of whom were locked up under COVID-19 mandates, flocked to his platform to leverage telehealth for the remediation, prescriptions and emergency visits of his patients. The TeleDentists platform enables people with dental problems to quickly find on-demand care. If the problem warrants a visit to the office, they can schedule it with a local dentist within 24 to 48 hours. Their platform is unique because they offer direct access to their network of dentists and also offer a white label version that dentists can use in their own practices.
Digital is not just about software-based healthcare developments. It is also about improving and advancing the hardware that the software contains. “Interest in small, portable and affordable handheld ultrasound devices, such as Extend Vscan™, they exploded during the pandemic. Primary care and other physicians already wear these devices on a daily basis in the same way that doctors wear a stethoscope around their necks for more than 100 years, “says Steven Keller, GE Healthcare. Because this technology is easy to use at the point of care and helps confirm and monitor the progression of acute respiratory and heart disease, may be helpful for physicians in choosing patients.
As with most modern digital technology, the real magic lies in the intersection of a hardware platform with a data-rich layer of software. “There are many protocols and data sources that hospitals can use to help determine which patients need care the most,” Keller says. He used the example of Mural, GE Healthcare Virtual Care Solution, which extracts data from various devices and systems in near real time to present and help physicians determine which patients should receive care by digitizing hospital-defined protocols. *
The concert economy started with fractional information workers. Now radiologists, dentists and other health professionals can also work and earn distance. Although telehealth continues to be adopted en masse compared to the previous one at COVID-19, the hockey stick growth chart has retreated as many return to their old routines and preferences. But recent telehealth practices have set a high watermark and many people, both patients and doctors, will continue to enjoy the benefits of digital care.
Use all marketing channels together
“Marketing and advertising are additive and cumulative: just because there are new digital channels, doesn’t mean you still don’t use OOH, media, and print,” says Craig Kartchner of HonorHealth. He explained that although preferences have changed (or been forced to change) to digital, we should use all channels simultaneously. It’s not a case of neither / nor, but E. Chirag Kulkarni, CMO of Medly Pharmacy, agreed. “It’s not / or either, it’s about optionality.” He also pointed out how marketing and services should be inclusive “although research and common knowledge say older customers resist change, in fact, they are more than happy to change if it benefits them”. He used his strategy of providing digital and telephone support, letting his customers choose their preferred channel as an example.
Karchner went on to explain how marketing is about “determining the time, channel, and message that works best for the customer.” Corey R Jentry, PhD, Marketing Director and Business The development in Iris Healing, agrees. “The challenge is to perfect the message. I don’t know anyone who has broken the code because preferences and interests change as the market changes. ”The old debate about synchronizing messages, content, and channel faces the same challenges in digital as in traditional media. That said, more companies are increasing their spending on digital platforms, perhaps noting that they have become the preferred channel.According to Bill Lepler, Director of Marketing Analytics at City of Hope, “good practice says there is a mix of offline and online awareness. So in that moment of truth, when the patient needs you, the digital comes out into the arena in acquisition. “
Brands such as Compound Solutions, Inc., a scientifically proven distributor of patented ingredients to improve human health and performance, have been forced to adopt new channels. Brand and content manager Chelsea Airola explained that two major trade shows used to generate the majority of their potential customers and sales. As the fairs were canceled throughout 2020 and some in 2021, Airola worked with its team to lead the transformation of digital marketing. “We were ready for our fairs. Our posts were ready and our team was ready. Then COVID-19 happened. We decided to take our strategy online. “
He explained how digital marketing has become his only channel to generate leads. “We have adapted our digital strategy to serve B2B customers through LinkedIn (among others), which has become our best source.” He started posting content on his company’s website and then became the paid advertising platform. “COVID-19 has become a catalyst for investing in these platforms. We wouldn’t have done it before. ”She says her strategy now extends to Facebook and Instagram and they are seeing good results. Her view was that even when trade fairs are back in operation, they can stick with digital and avoid demonstrations by She said, “There are more opportunities to try different things online.”
And online events are all the rage now. For example, GE decided to move from the traditional fair to virtual events. “We recently launched a product, Voluson SWIFT, using a virtual launch platform which allowed attendees to browse the rooms, interact with augmented reality videos and demonstrations, and listen to speeches from clinical experts, “says Steven Keller of GE Healthcare. He and his team launched this virtual event using social media and paid, in addition to send physical invitations to select customers for a personal touch.
Early adopters they are great for launching new technologies, solutions, services or products. Remember how many people said they would never get in a stranger’s car (Uber), or stay at a stranger’s house (Airbnb), or buy groceries online (Instacart)? Once the initial inertia is overcome by those who adopt the early years, the fear diminishes and other users turn to the new services. Telehealth is no different. Perhaps fears and concerns about privacy are stronger, but as with all innovations of the past, early adopters, with the help of COVID-19, accelerated their acceptance.