Personalized experiences are a given in consumer marketing strategies, spanning industries from retail to banking. However, healthcare has lagged behind due to regulatory, technical, and logistical challenges. Nonetheless, new research indicates that the future of patient experience will rely on personalization. Personalized engagement is a transformative practice in healthcare, enhancing patient health outcomes, satisfaction, and trust. In this use case, we'll use our expertise with the Salesforce platform to break down the barriers that prevent healthcare providers from delivering genuinely personalized engagement across all patient interaction channels.
Personalizing patient experiences across email, websites, social media, and mobile apps
Marketing Cloud Personalization and Salesforce Data Cloud
More engaged patients, higher satisfaction, better health outcomes
According to the Journal of Patient Experience, personalized experiences in healthcare strategies require three key components:
Let's run through how all of these requirements can be solved by Salesforce.
While its common for healthcare organizations to jump right into creating content, personalized experiences begin with data aggregation. For that, we'll need data from a variety of sources.
Unfortunately, the data we'll need access to is stored across disparate platforms, like EHRs, marketing systems, clinical systems, and survey tools.
Fortunately, there's a solution that ties them all together. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) like Salesforce Data Cloud are built to unify data from disparate systems to create unified patient profiles. For the personalization use case, we typically configure them to aggregate clinical, demographic, claims, marketing, and behavioral data to create distinct patient profiles.
Salesforce Data Cloud can be used to create defined populations. These are commonly used to address challenges related to population health management, and creating personalized marketing journeys serve that end. We typically ask ourselves, "which groups have specific problems that can be addressed or prevented through personalized attention?"
Here are some examples of defined populations we've created in the past:
Once patient populations are defined, unique content can be created for each one and built into a variety of engagements across email, websites, social media sites, and mobile apps. In conjunction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization, we use first-party cookies, IP addresses, or device IDs to identify visitors in order to push relevant content. Let's take a look at the common channels we create personalized patient experiences for.
Email and SMS journeys often focus on improving wellness or prevention. Because we have unified patient profiles and defined populations in Salesforce Data Cloud, they can be triggered based on medical histories, treatment goals, or seasonal conditions.
For instance, population wellness can be improved by engaging patients who struggle with seasonal allergies via communications in the spring about how to manage symptoms. In terms of preventative care, women of a certain age could be reminded to schedule a mammogram appointment.
Thanks to Marketing Cloud Personalization, healthcare websites can be personalized in real-time based on past visits, location data, or information from Salesforce Data Cloud.
This means the website experience is consistent with other channel experiences. The website can:
Thanks to recent guidance from the Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, healthcare advertising on digital channels has come under well-deserved scrutiny. However, by using Salesforce Data Cloud in conjunction with a signed business associate agreement (BAA), many social channels can be used in a HIPAA-compliant manner. Salesforce Data Cloud acts as a compliant intermediary between ad platforms, enabling ads targeted to defined patient populations.
Redaction scripts unpair protected healthcare information (PHI) from any user identifiers, protecting healthcare organizations from non-compliance fines and lawsuits.
Like the web experience, mobile apps can be tailored in real-time to specific patient populations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. They can show upcoming appointments, respect language preferences, highlight the closest locations, and more.