Healthcare brand marketing is at a crossroads. With patients taking a more active role in their healthcare, a proliferation of healthcare and consumer data available, and technology to apply advanced analytics, we’ve seen a significant shift toward patient-centric approaches and away from mass marketing techniques. With this shift, the industry has been met with many challenges and limitations, such as strict regulatory requirements and pre-defined or ‘black box’ audience segments that limit analysis.
HealthVerity recently hosted a webinar that discussed a solution that overcomes these challenges, uncovering new dimensions of the patient journey needed to make this approach a success. If you missed the webinar, here’s a recap:
Considerations for employing a patient-centric marketing approach
To be able to conduct patient-centric marketing, you need to understand patient behavior, both from a healthcare perspective, such as diagnosis and prescription fills, and from a consumer perspective, including demographics, socio-economics, online activity, digital media and lifestyle preferences, to be able to create personalized content that reaches the right audience through the right channels. This requires use of both consumer and healthcare data from multiple sources. Following are issues to consider when acquiring this needed data:
- Patient matching and de-identification - When working with multiple data sources, the patient's records need to be accurately resolved and matched across the different sources for a longitudinal view of the patient journey. Additionally, the patient needs to be de-identified to protect their privacy.
- Data provenance and transparency - Black box solutions tend to limit transparency as to where the data came from and what type of data is included, medical claims, electronic medical records, lab results, etc.
- Broad data ecosystem - To unlock the patient journey and discover new insights, you need a variety of data, but with black box solutions, you can’t be sure that you’re receiving the data you want.
- Open access to data - Not only do you want to be able to select the data that’s most appropriate for your use case, but you also want raw data so you can conduct your own analytics to uncover new dimensions of the patient journey and differentiate yourself in the market.
- Patient privacy and HIPAA compliance - If the data you receive is not already certified as HIPAA compliant via Expert Determination, you may have to do that on your own before you can even begin working with it, which can take six to nine months. Additionally, HIPAA privacy laws have historically not allowed the commingling of consumer and healthcare data for analysis because of the risk of re-identification.
- Data governance - A patient-centric approach requires managing multiple datasets, sometimes having to work with multiple vendors, and governing the data usage rights for each to ensure compliance.
Beyond gathering this data to better understand the patient and determine your target audience, you need to be able to measure outcomes, not just click through rates, but actual patient behavior, such as filling a prescription. You also don’t want to wait six to 12 months after a campaign to get this information, like with traditional static marketing mix models. You want real-time campaign attribution and measurement that allows you to make adjustments during the campaign based on performance.
Overcoming the challenges
HealthVerity built its business on the IPGE approach, which synchronizes the foundational elements of Identity, Privacy, Governance and Exchange, and allows us to overcome the challenges in patient-centric marketing:
- Identity - We use advanced patient matching techniques that resolve patient identity over time and across data sources with 10x greater accuracy than legacy tokenization methods. By using a unique but persistent universal identifier, known as a HealthVerity ID (HVID), you can accurately synchronize a near limitless combination of data sources for the most accurate and comprehensive view of the patient journey.
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Privacy - HealthVerity has synchronized HIPAA compliance across our entire data ecosystem by achieving Expert Determination from an independent third-party examiner—not an internal source with a potential conflict of interest—so you don’t have to waste time getting a HIPAA certification.
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Governance - No matter how many different sources you require, HealthVerity is able to manage all data usage rights.
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Exchange - Because our data partners trust us and the IPGE approach, they trust us to host, de-identify and make their data interoperable, creating the nation’s largest healthcare and consumer data ecosystem where we manage the contracting for you, allowing you to have a single contract to license multiple data sources. This also provides full transparency and data provenance, so you know exactly what you’re getting. The data is delivered directly to your environment when, where and how you need it.
The IPGE approach enabled us to develop HealthVerity Audience Manager, a self-directed analytics environment that synchronizes healthcare and consumer data in a fully HIPAA-compliant manner so you can gain a deeper understanding of patient behavior and more precisely target audience segments.
Powering the next generation of audience targeting
Audience Manager allows you to synchronize the healthcare and social determinants of health (SDOH) data of your choice from the nation’s largest healthcare and consumer data ecosystem while remaining fully HIPAA compliant. The SDOH data provides over 1,000 attributes from providers typically not available, such as Acxiom, Epsilon, Adstra and others. With these sources, you gain more granular demographics, including race data, consumer behavior, online activity, socio-economic profiles, lifestyle and digital media preferences. You can also seamlessly integrate your first and third-party data. This data can be used to create lookalike models and drive personalization with your content strategy for advanced targeting, as opposed to using off-the-shelf or black box targeting.
A safe harbor model is used to manage the healthcare and consumer data in a HIPAA-compliant clean room where your data scientists and analytics teams can perform analytics, run algorithms and leverage machine learning capabilities, all accessible through a Python supported software development kit so your teams can use the solutions they’re most comfortable with. We also offer account helpers who can assist with code or explore the available options. The solution has a computational power for querying capability that averages less than five minutes, allowing you to run hundreds of decision trees in no time. Additionally, team members can run queries concurrently, using the same datasets or different data without interfering with each other.
With insights gleaned from Audience Manager, you can determine a campaign strategy, develop aligned and personalized content, and use targeting and activation to find the right audience. You can then perform testing and learn which channels drive which behaviors so you can augment your strategy. By combining both SDOH and healthcare data, Audience Manager can also help you increase health equity.
Closing the loop
HealthVerity Audience Manager allows you to differentiate your value proposition and communicate with the patient in a way that was hard to do in the past with privacy regulations and black box offerings. By moving away from mass marketing techniques, you can use Audience Manager to pinpoint specific audiences, aligned with your specific requirements and activate against them to maximize return on advertising spend (ROAS). And by integrating Audience Manager with HealthVerity Media Measurement, which synchronizes your digital media ad and television exposure with your target audience's healthcare data, you can then see the outcomes of your campaign to optimize spend over time, providing even more value and creating a closed loop solution.
