In today's digital world, consumers are interacting with businesses across a variety of channels, from websites and mobile apps to social media and email. This can make it difficult for any organization to understand their customers – and their needs.
Never has this been more true than in healthcare, where silos abound and legacy technologies are standard. From these silos, providers are left to piece together the patient journey from fractured data.
How can healthcare providers gain more visibility into consumer behavior? This information is necessary to develop insights into how patients and consumers are interacting with your organization – but it's impossible to be data-informed without consistent and reliable data.
Fortunately, as the world evolves, so does technology. For organizations wanting to improve consumer and patient experiences while reducing costs, a next-generation content management system is the answer.
"Next-generation" is a term that represents a large movement throughout the tech sector, consisting of massive upgrades to software and hardware alike. The term refers broadly to modern technology that is meant to solve modern problems.
A next-generation content management system, or CMS, can provide consumer insights to healthcare organizations by collecting and organizing customer information. Native integrations allow data to flow between a source and an analytics dashboard. Your CMS could even be the key to automated data analysis and real-time customer insights.
Enabled with AI, a CMS can help healthcare organizations in a number of ways, including by:
A next-generation CMS often leverages built-in integrations and APIs to transfer important consumer data from one system to another. By ingesting data from a variety of sources and storing it in one central location within your CMS, IT, and marketing teams can break down information silos. This makes it easier for your internal teams to access and analyze data, which can lead to better decision-making.
To do this yourself, execute on a data mapping exercise with your various IT, Marketing, and Strategy stakeholders. Your team will be able to follow the flow of data and understand where your silos might exist today – and how to break them down for the future.
Rather than relying on a variety of individual analytics platforms – each of which displays different data from different parts of the customer experience – your CMS should integrate with analytics tools to help collect data from all of your customer touchpoints. This includes data from websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and more.
Then, the data can be analyzed to create a singular dashboard for healthcare organizations to easily analyze customer behavior. This will give your team visibility into the true customer journey, and where it might fracture. You can use these learnings to make data-informed decisions and optimize the patient experience.
Here's a real-world example: When LasikPlus reviewed their first-party data from their website's search experience, they realized that consumers were asking questions that had not been addressed on their website. Since they began analyzing search queries in 2020, LasikPlus has answered more than 8,500 queries. The brand's click-through rate for site search results is now greater than 25% — indicating that more than a quarter of all site searches performed on the LasikPlus website led patients to useful information.
Many of the rote, time-consuming tasks involved in data analysis can be automated, such as data cleansing and data preparation. From there, marketing teams can leverage smart analytics tools like Tableau, PowerBI, or Google Data Studio. These dashboards enable your team to find insights from the data faster and more efficiently.
Your CMS should empower your team to make data-informed decisions. A CMS that allows your team to track, cluster, and analyze site search queries can help you understand how or when to invest in new service lines. Or, you can leverage sentiment analysis within your websites' reviews to help your organization calculate the lifetime value of a patient.
With the right technology integrated with the right CMS, your team can spend less time preparing and analyzing data, and instead focus on strategies and solutions.
Your healthcare organization can create actionable, unified profiles of your consumers based on their interactions on your owned channels. Ideally, all of your owned channels – and first-party data – are managed from your CMS. This information can then be used to personalize consumer experiences and deliver more relevant marketing messages.
Analyzing search intent is a classic use case. For example, since the COVID-19 pandemic, we've started to see a progression of search data from "coronavirus" queries, to "covid19" queries, and finally, to "covid vaccine" queries over time. The data makes it clear that consumers have not only become more educated about the virus, but also are signaling to the health systems that they are seeking more information about prevention.
When your CMS integrates well with your customer relationship management system, or CRM, it can help your healthcare organizations make optimal communications choices by understanding how your patients prefer to interact with you.
For example, if a patient notes during their inquiry that they prefer to communicate via email rather than phone, your business will know to send them email marketing messages. This is important because some demographics, like Gen Z consumers, prefer digital experiences, and will change providers based on whether there are digital engagement options available.
In this case, a next-generation CMS takes on a new meaning: it's truly built for the next generation of healthcare consumers.
It is important that your CMS is compliant with governance, security, and privacy due to the restrictive and important HIPAA laws that need to be followed. What is standard for other industries may not be secure enough for healthcare systems.
Choosing a new platform means ensuring the platform has the appropriate security and access controls, and will follow HIPAA regulations. This is especially important to ensure data leaks – and the resulting legal liability risks – are minimized.
By reducing the time it takes to gather important data, your team is able to collate information more quickly. Armed with these insights, your team spends less time on problem analysis, and more time creating high-impact solutions.
With an AI-enabled CMS that breaks down data silos, your customers and their needs become clear. This is empowering information: with these insights, your healthcare organization can improve the patient experience. And by fixing any fractures in their journey, you can decrease patient attrition and encourage customer loyalty – ultimately, impacting your bottom line with cost-savings and increased revenue.
Healthcare organizations are faced with a pivotal choice: they can stick to the status-quo, or they can mend any broken digital experiences to cater to their consumers and their needs.
As consumers increase their expectations of healthcare providers, next generation technology can reduce costs while meeting those needs. Ultimately, the visibility into customer interactions provided by a modern tech stack is a rising tide that lifts all boats – patient experience, revenue, and even team workflows become more efficient and sustainable.
And it all begins with an investment in the right CMS.
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The original version of this page was published at: https://www.yext.com/blog/2023/05/streamlining-healthcare-unlocking-patient-insights-with-your-cms
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