As hospitals struggle to recover from the macroeconomic collapse in 2022, marked by the knock-on effects of Covid-19, including challenges associated with the workforce and payers, they need to develop ways to add and retain patients. In a recent webinar sponsored by AVIA, Providence and Praia Health, executives discussed how hospitals could adopt a digital flywheel to create more intuitive forms of communication and engagement on the clinical and patient sides and bring more patients to health systems’ facilities.
The panelists for the discussion included Sara Vaezy, executive vice president and chief strategy digital officer, Providence; Justin Dearborn, executive-in-residence with Praia Health, Providence Digital Innovation Group; and Sonia Singh, chief insights officer, AVIA, who served as the moderator.
Hospitals need to build relationships with prospective patients. They can do that by developing a more personalized approach to advertising and marketing.
On average, a patient interacts with about four or five providers each year, according to Vaezy. They have developed habits over time that work for them. Providers are challenged to convince patients to use them first among a plethora of options. Hospitals historically are better positioned to react to people who are sick or injured with fee-based services rather than provide preventive, value-based care. Legacy tech systems can make patient outreach challenging for providers. But the current environment requires hospitals to change the way they think about marketing and advertising even though the cost of patient acquisition or re-acquisition is too high to be sustainable for hospitals.
“We aim to remove that friction, adjust, and be present for consumers in ways that are more intuitive,” said Vaezy. “It’s not just about our services. It’s doing things like single sign on and having all the data pieces connected so you can have personalization.”
Vaezy described an ecosystem of services that hospitals can knit together called “the federation.” She said, “We’re trying to engage, not entrap [patients].”
Panelists observed that hospitals are well-positioned to market to patients. With personal health data extracted from electronic medical records they can develop customized approaches to reaching specific patient populations with gentle reminders to get a colonoscopy or mammography. But they need to overcome tech challenges such as legacy systems and develop ways to aggregate this data in a logical manner.
Dearborn noted that a third-party solution will enable healthcare providers to “leverage existing investments health systems have made to enable better patient engagement.”
To access the full recording of the webinar, please fill out the form below:
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