On Oct. 10, 2015, at the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD) conference in the District of Columbia, I presented a workshop with Mark Clark, Healthgrades Vice President of Strategic Development, called: “Your Data Wants To Talk—How Can You Hear It?”
The focus of o
ur presentation was the enormous challenges hospital marketers are facing as they grapple with how to turn an abundance of data into smarter marketing strategies.
Afterwards I wrote a blog about the intersection of data and storytelling and what it means to healthcare providers, which has just been published in FierceHealthcare and which I’ll touch on here.
Healthcare providers now realize they cannot continue to market just patient-centric, high quality care as their brand differentiator!
This is no longer enough to stay competitive. Hospitals are going to have to make their organizations’ customer experience different from other healthcare institutions’ and relevant to consumers. How? Big data combined with crucial insights into consumer behavior.
As you’re probably well-aware, there is an abundance of big data these days and the challenge is to make it valuable. In other words, what can big data tell us about a healthcare user’s journey?
What is the “real” story in the data?
While we search data to understand a population’s or a person’s healthcare journey, there is something else happening here—a person’s own story that gives that journey meaning. What we need to better understand is what these stories mean to the people who are living them, then how to use that meaning to help healthcare providers deliver better care to keep people living active and healthy lives.
As we learn more about the power of big data, we are expanding our understanding of people’s experiences before, during and after they are engaged with our healthcare system. Now it is time for our healthcare systems to begin to realize that they play a valuable role in the lives of these people. The stories that emerge from these engagements become part of people’s life stories and those of the healthcare systems that they embrace.
To read my entire article in FierceHealthcare, click here.
