6 Takeaways from the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit
I was privileged to join and speak at the 2022 Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit (#hmps22) in Salt Lake City, my first time attending this conference. As a digital health leader, I'm particularly excited by the opportunities to collaborate across marketing, IT, clinical and operations to improve not just the front-door experience, but also to improve the overall patient experience as well as to leverage marketing principles and practices to enable more continuous, virtual-first care models.
Here are my six takeaway themes from the conference:
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Cross-functional collaboration. To succeed in improving patient experience, engaging patients, and improving care, traditionally siloed areas like Marketing, IT, and Operations all need to work together much more deeply than they have before. This means building cross-functional teams with a shared vision and purpose and shared KPIs. Paul Matsen & Edward Marx shared how as CIO and CMO at Cleveland Clinic, they were the rhythm section, the bassist and drummer working in sync to enable so much more together.
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Unify voice of customer data. Develop a comprehensive data set to generate insights. Move away from historically siloed data sets like surveys that live in an Experience group, call center data that lives in Operations, and customer reviews and ratings that live in Marketing, to instead enable a comprehensive voice-of-customer data set, that can be leveraged by AI to drive insights. Those insights can be for operational improvements, service recovery, new products, or service line level insights. Centralize data sources and deliver data everywhere.
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Provider directory data. So many health systems are challenged by fragmented and siloed sources of physician directory data, and everyone sees the value in creating a unified single source of truth.
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Pressures of fragmentation at Academic Medical Centers. AMCs seem particularly challenged to unify data and technology platforms at an enterprise level due to the pressures of service line specific needs, which drives fragmentation of platforms and data. It’s a detrimental cycle.
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Talent is scarce. Health systems are challenged not only with retaining doctors and nurses, but now are also challenged with hiring and retaining digital talent, such as skills in digital marketing, data science and analytics, design, and others. Everyone is considering the right balance of insourcing talent vs partnering and outsourcing.
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Rising importance user generated content, especially Google. We’ve seen this happen in retail, media, and other industries. It’s now in healthcare. 72% of patients read online patient reviews when considering a doctor or healthcare facility. Google is the number one review site used by consumers for healthcare, and it is important to ensure visibility and quality information through that channel. Every health system needs to have a strategy around how to proactively nurture user-generated content.
If you were at #hmps22, what do you think? What did you learn, and what themes did you take away?
– Aaron Neinstein, MD