As medical technology and the ability to integrate its findings advances, the smart use of data becomes increasingly paramount. The field of healthcare analytics is transforming the way medicine is practiced and it should also impact the way you market your practice online.
Healthcare analytics is generally understood to be the practice of using data analysis at all levels of medicine—including facility management—to generate insights and predict trends. Essentially, it’s what professionals have always tried to do with data, but modern technology has given us a lot more of it.
It goes without saying that the most important use of healthcare analytics deals with improvements in the quality of care patients receive. We’re going to focus on how it can impact your digital marketing efforts.
There is plenty of opportunity for improving the patient experience—at least in the eyes of the most important judge, which would be the patients themselves. Studies show that a stunning 81 percent of patients are not satisfied with their healthcare experience and that nearly half are actively seeking a new provider. That means your practice has the potential to gain a lot of market share or suffer serious attrition. Using healthcare analytics is a way to put yourself on the right side of the market uncertainty.
Here are 3 ways to take the data you get from healthcare analytics to improve your website.
1. Market segmentation
To ward off patient attrition, find out which types of patients are leaving your practice. Is age the primary predictive data? Is it a certain medical condition? Whatever the case, you can review how your website approaches these patients. The odds are good that the patients who left have been on your site. Perhaps the content can be strengthened to appeal to readers who fall into the “problem” demographic.
2. Prevention tips
Prevention is a big driving force in the analytics movement and that can bear fruit on your website in the form of informative blog posts advising people on preventive steps to take. Whether it’s cold and flu or heart conditions or diabetes, your analytics data will tell you what needs to be talked about.
3. Using risk scores
Another objective of healthcare analytics is to create “risk scores” for patients for specified conditions. Obviously, the privacy regulations prevent you from talking directly about any single patient, but this is another area where you can look at a large pool of risk scores, draw broad conclusions and then make sure those conclusions are shared on your website.
All of this is aimed at the single most important thing your website can provide: valuable content. If your website is delivering, then the site is doing its job in recruiting new patients and holding on to current ones.