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Health System Takes Data-Driven Approach to Demonstrate the Value of Marketing

By The SHSMD Team posted 05-08-2019 11:05 AM

  
Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) marketing leaders have been on a three-year journey toward building a dynamic process that shows a precise and transparent return on investment for health system marketing initiatives.

"It was clear that the marketing team needed a new marketing vision that would balance brand and demand generation efforts in reaching our customers," said Kelly-Anne Suarez, new acting administrator of marketing for LVHN, located in northeastern Pennsylvania. "And just as important, LVHN needed a new data governance vision that would give us a better understanding of its patients' needs and value at all touchpoints along the continuum." The shift sparked new levels of collaboration between marketing and various internal groups, such as the information technology department, the clinical leadership in charge of LVHN's electronic medical record, finance and other departments that had pockets of patient-related data.

The team merged all that information with LVHN's customer relationship management (CRM) databases, marketing campaign activity and purchased consumer data to create an enterprise-wide solution for reaching potential patients and tracking their health care journey, all the way through revenue generation and actual reimbursement.

LVHN partnered with Evariant to implement the necessary technologies and processes to show marketing's value to the bottom line. "Data is the common language that changes the conversation between marketing, the CEO, the chief financial officer and clinical leadership," said Dan Lavelle, vice president of healthcare marketing at Evariant. Lavelle was at LVHN during the move to data-driven marketing and recently joined Evariant. "And that truly marks a shift from using a word like 'expense' to a more powerful one: 'investment.' LVHN's approach goes beyond ROI to show the net-net bottom-line contribution, based on actual revenue with network expenses backed out."


The Top 6 Metrics for the C-Suite


To provide the C-suite with an easy-to-digest format for understanding what the marketing data and metrics collectively mean for the organization, the team created a dashboard with the top six most significant key performance indicators.


1. Competitive brand standing.

2. Rollup marketing performance.
3. Payer mix.
4. Lead metrics.
5. Cost per lead.
6. Campaign metrics.

By building an IT architecture that leverages data from many functional areas across the enterprise, the LVHN marketing team has demonstrated that for every dollar invested, the system generated a positive ROI.


To learn more...

SHSMD members, read the article “Demonstrating Marketing ROI to the C-Suite” published in a recent issue of SHSMD’s Spectrum newsletter.

Nonmembers, for more content like this, join SHSMD!

This blog features interviews with:

Kelly-Anne Suarez
Acting Administrator, Marketing
Lehigh Valley Health Network
Allentown, Pennsylvania

Daniel Lavelle
Vice President, Healthcare Marketing
Evariant, Inc.
Farmington, Connecticut
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