Medical Marketing & Media | Lindsay Resnick
Healthcare
has become an amalgam of medical, financial and lifestyle transactions.
As
patients, consumers face tough decisions as healthcare morphs into a
retail-based direct marketplace. Navigating the complexities of both how, when
and where medical care is delivered and drugs are prescribed is difficult.
Combine this with the mind-numbing array of insurance benefit choices and it's
no wonder that many Americans say healthcare is so complicated they don't know
what's covered, what it will cost or where is the best place to go to get it.
Inside
healthcare's vast ecosystem—where payers offer benefits, providers deliver care
and drug companies market therapies—each of those three faces a similar
challenge: educating, motivating and engaging consumers to take a more active
role in their health. One approach gaining traction is strengthening the bond
between the chief medical officer and chief marketing officer. We call this
CMO², an approach for clinical direct marketing.
By
breaking down traditional organizational silos to bring together the chief
medical officer and the chief marketing officer in a CMO² collaboration,
companies can unite the forces of clinical best practices with
direct-to-consumer response marketing. The result creates a powerful force for
consumer health engagement. Clinical direct marketing can provide consumers
with the information they need in order for them to be savvy shoppers as well
as empowered participants in their personal health. Think of it as population
health management with a communication action button.
What's
population health management? It's the aggregation and analysis of patient data
into actionable profiles so care providers can improve both clinical
interventions and financial outcomes for at-risk patient segments. The result
improves the patient experience, lowers cost and can be measured.
What's
direct marketing? A data-driven discipline to encourage immediate consumer
interaction with a target audience through creative communication that
establishes and maintains an ongoing one-on-one relationship with a customer.
The result provokes action, gets personal and can be measured.
The
interoperability of CMO² leverages direct marketing's tool kit of data,
technology and precision outreach in tandem with programs of clinical-decision
support and patient-centered medical management. The resulting intervention
motivates customers to interact, empowers them with information and establishes
a platform that begins to change an individual's behavior toward his or her
health. Here's an example using a classic direct response principle for an
asthma program:
Qualify:
Use member or
patient data to identify your “high likelihood” asthma population and approach
it with strong yet carefully crafted language, including keywords and tone, to
quickly capture its attention and qualify your audience.
Offer: This is the promised payoff for
responding. Extend a compelling reason to engage, such as free “must-have”
information about asthma … “6 Easy Steps to Living with Asthma” or “Ten
Superstars Living with Asthma … and Loving Life.”
Product:
Present key
attributes and practical benefits of your asthma program, such as products or
services, to reinforce value and build on clinical credentials. Make it
personal, keep it simple and always answer the customer's question: What's in
it for me?
Call to
Action: Provide
clear direction for next steps when the audience reads or hears your message.
Ideally, you'll have data points on your targeted customers or you can acquire
them through a third party to provide insight and direction on their most
preferred channels for interaction and engagement.
Effective
patient engagement is about helping individuals make smart personalized choices
in a healthcare system where choices are getting more complicated every day:
emergency room vs. retail clinic; HMO vs. PPO vs. ACO; concierge medicine vs.
virtual doctor visit; exchange plan vs. supplemental coverage. At a time when
“own your health” is a popular mantra, responsibility falls to the payer and
provider communities to step up and support the underlying ideology that
educated connected healthcare consumers will help drive better care, better
outcomes and, ultimately, better value.
Clinical
direct marketing created by a CMO² cooperative effort meets the challenge of influencing
and engaging healthcare customers in a self-directed, self-quantified
marketplace. A value-add within this approach is the built-in testing
practices, a fundamental of direct marketing, that allows for systematic
learning of which tactics are most effective for the different segments and
different programs.
Simply
offering undifferentiated off-the-shelf programs to improve patient health
around chronic conditions, prevention, early detection or wellness isn't
enough. Success only comes when you can get individuals to respond, interact
and engage in a meaningful two-way relationship built on trust. For that, CMO²
is a pathway to true consumer-centric health engagement.