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Case Study Shows How Texas Health System Successfully Uses Automation to Deliver Personalized Content

By The SHSMD Team posted 03-19-2019 09:15 PM

  
To enhance its digital marketing, Children’s Health in Dallas has implemented marketing automation to deliver personalized content to current and prospective patients. “In today’s competitive landscape, it’s a great way to deliver tailored messaging to help us achieve organizational business goals,” Kay Kerman, manager of email and customer relationship management.

Getting Started
The first step, according to Kerman, is working with your internal teams to determine the most important goals they want to achieve and what manual processes could be automated. In addition, marketers need to know who the target audience is and what the call to action should be. It is also important to test the messaging.

Brief Case Study
During her due diligence, Kerman learned that the finance and health information management departments had concerns that Children’s Health could be losing out on significant Meaningful Use (MU) incentive payments that are tied to patient use of electronic medical records.

Starting in September 2017, one of the first marketing automation initiatives Kerman’s team developed was an engagement campaign to establish a relationship with the parents of their pediatric patients (see Figure 1). The goal was to engage them in a frictionless registration of their child in MyChart, Children’s Health’s electronic medical record. MU requirements mandate that providers have at least 5 percent of their patients using a patient portal in order to qualify for the MU incentive payments. MyChart enables parents to message their child’s care team, access medical records, view appointments, request prescription refills and pay bills.

Through the campaign, the parents of discharged pediatric patients not enrolled in MyChart re-ceived an email the following day from Children’s Health. “The email highlights the benefits of MyChart and has a link to sign-up.” said Kerman. Registering for MyChart is a two-step process that involves access codes that are valid for only 30 days. After learning that many access codes were expiring without activation in MyChart, Kerman’s team introduced seven- and 28-day email reminders to register, resulting in a 12 percent decrease in the number of codes that expired. Over the last 12 months, Kerman noted that 56,000 new MyChart accounts have been created, thanks in part to this initiative.

“There is no easy button for marketing automation,” said Sara L. Hartley, senior director of client development at Healthgrades, which is Children’s Health’s customer relationship management provider. “But if you do it right, you can break through the noise to create a personalized, positive customer experience.”

p4_personalization.pngKey Takeaways
For hospitals and health systems considering marketing automation, Kerman and Hartley recommend mapping out your marketing automation strategy as a flow chart so you understand what action to take next, depending on the response of the consumer. They also suggest involving your operational teams to understand how you can address their business concerns and gain buy-in before implementing marketing automation strategies.

To learn more...

SHSMD members, read the full article “How to Use Marketing Automation to Personalize the Customer Experience” published in a recent issue of SHSMD’s Spectrum newsletter.

Nonmembers, for more content like this, join SHSMD!

This blog features interviews with:

Kay Kerman
Manager, Email and CRM
Children’s Health
Dallas, Texas

Sara Hartley
Senior Director, Client Development
Healthgrades
Denver, Colorado
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