Personalization has been an increasing trend in marketing for the past several years. As technology improves, we have growing capabilities to send consumers messages targeted at their past behaviors and expressed interests. In healthcare, this personalization has shown great potential to improve patient outcomes and make patients feel better cared for. However, healthcare marketers have the additional need to balance helpful personalization with patient privacy. So, how do you do that exactly? Let’s take a closer look at how you can effectively personalize healthcare communications so that HIPAA compliance is kept at the forefront while balancing the perception from patients that you’re being helpful and not invasive.
The Advantages of Personalized Healthcare Messaging
Using personalization in your healthcare messaging and marketing strategies can really streamline the patient healthcare journey. It can help patients know what screenings they should schedule next, how to improve their health on their own to address specific concerns and provide deeper information on conditions they may be dealing with.
Personalized messages have shown to help patients:
- Be more likely to pay attention and act on messages if they are relevant to them
- Make more informed decisions about their healthcare
- Follow treatment plans and take medication properly
- Be more likely to feel satisfied with their healthcare regimen and provider
Balancing Privacy
It’s easy to see how those benefits of personalization can improve patient outcomes. But even with big advantages, it’s still important to balance patient privacy. Healthcare organizations have a legal obligation to protect sensitive patient data and comply with HIPAA regulations. Failing to do so could not only put your organization in legal jeopardy, but it also breaks trust with your patients and can significantly tarnish your reputation.
Remember that HIPAA requirements for personalization include:
- Informed Consent: This means you must have explicit consent from a patient before using their data for marketing purposes. Make sure your organization has clear communication on how patient health information will be used and a clear way for patients to give their consent. Once consent is given, patients must also have the ability to easily opt out in all communications.
- “Minimum Necessary” rule: This is a piece of HIPAA that states you can only access the specific, and minimum, Protected Health Information (PHI) needed to perform an initiative. In other words, marketing only gets access to what’s needed, not just any data.
How to Start Personalization
Now that we’ve covered some of the ground rules, it’s time to start to put personalization into action in your MarCom strategies. Here are a few ideas on where to start.
Look for opportunities to collect data points
The more personalized content and messaging is to the patient, the more helpful it feels. And the way to really narrow in on what someone cares about is to have a wide swath of accurate data points on them. So, remember to keep your eyes peeled for places where you can learn about your patients in a respectful way. Remember, the goal here is to provide value for the patients, be helpful and improve outcomes. Those efforts are hindered if patients feel like you’re being “creepy” or too invasive, so it’s important to collect data responsibly and above board. Look for opportunities to let patients opt in to receiving personalization communications, so they know to expect them.
Offer Health Risk Assessments
Creating a health risk assessment can be a helpful tool for patients and for marketers. By taking the assessment, patients are voluntarily sharing their data and have a chance to opt-in for follow up emails with relevant information based on the category they fall into from the assessment results. By providing patients an opportunity to opt-in for follow-up, you are again protecting privacy while offering value. A win-win situation for marketers and patients.
Create segments in your CRM
Using a HIPAA-compliant customer relationship manager (CRM) will allow you to segment your patients into different topic groups. A patient could select which health topics they’d like to receive information about (e.g. OB care, cancer care, heart health, etc.). Not only does this segment patients into interest groups for better personalization, but they are also actively opting in to what suits them. This gives patients the opportunity to choose to not receive information about sensitive topics and generally have more control over what content they receive. And when the content is more helpful and relevant, patients will feel more positively about it.
When you’re thinking about which of these segments to focus the most attention on, remember that patient retention costs less than new patient acquisition. For this reason, we recommend focusing your personalization efforts on your high-value CRM segments of current patients. This will yield the most value for your effort.
With a thoughtful strategy, personalizing messaging can be a helpful tool for healthcare marketers, while also improving outcomes for patients. If you want more ideas on how to initiate a personalization strategy for your health system or other great healthcare marketing advice, reach out to B&Y to start a conversation!