Healthcare Trends: The Value of One-to-One Communications in Value-Based Care
The healthcare industry today is evolving in many ways. Looking at the big picture, it is rapidly changing with consolidations and partnerships. In 2018 alone, 803 mergers and acquisitions and 858 affiliation and partnership announcements were reported moving the industry in the direction of a value-based care delivery model.
The Rise of Value-Based Care
What is a value-based care model? In simplest terms, it’s care that pays providers on patient health outcomes. A significant change from traditional fee-for-service billing, providers in this model are rewarded for helping patients improve their overall health, or for reducing the effects of chronic diseases, and living healthier lives.
How Does Value-Based Care Work?
Well, providers don’t get paid for the amount of services they deliver, like what we are used to seeing. Instead, with a value-based system, the health outcome is measured against the cost of delivering that outcome. The benefits to this type of system are plentiful. Patients actually spend less money to be healthy.
Value-based care makes managing a chronic disease or condition like diabetes, cancer, or high blood pressure less costly. Instead of maximizing billables over the life of a patient, this model focuses on helping patients recover from an illness more quickly – possibly avoiding chronic disease in the first place. So naturally, patients have fewer doctor’s visits, tests, and procedures. It has also been shown that they spend less money on prescriptions.
Spending more time up front on prevention equals less time spent on chronic disease management by both patients and doctors. Society will become healthier and reduce overall healthcare spending.
Focusing on the value instead of the volume is key to changing the way physicians and hospitals provide care. With this new model comes a team-oriented approach to patient care, not to mention sharing of patient data so that care is coordinated and outcomes can be measured easily.
Why Does This Matter?
It’s more important than ever to build a personalized experience, eliminating generic communications. Patients want to be recognized as individuals and marketed to as such.
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Improving Healthcare Marketing to Match Value-Based Goals
In the midst of consolidations and with a push toward better value, healthcare marketing must continue to evolve as well. In this, healthcare consumers expect to be communicated to on a one-to-one level. Rather than a one-size-fits-all communication strategy, communication needs to fit the patient, ultimately helping ensure check-ups and preventive health practices stay top-of-mind.
Marketers can easily deliver personalized patient outreach by utilizing data. The more actionable information you can provide a consumer the more they can take charge of their own healthcare. This should also result in more overall patient engagement and satisfaction.
Those marketers that do practice personalization are five times more likely to see an increase in overall customer spending. We know that today’s healthcare consumer is frugal, and tech-savvy, pouring through online reviews, and often looking for convenience.
After all, today’s healthcare organization isn’t simply staving off the merger-heavy environment, it’s fighting against a growing number of post-acute environments, like retail clinics. In fact, over the past four years, the number of consumers who reported using retail clinics jumped from 9% to 24% for younger generations. It’s clear that there is no longer a “one-size-fits-all” care model in place. You must personalize.
Marketers need to consistently engage with patients across multiple channels in the mediums in which they choose to receive communications. Put them at the center of your strategy to focus on the customer experience. Identify how they prefer to communicate and implement a strategy that incorporates all of those channels. Sending relevant, timely and personalized content is critical for engagement.
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Bring One-to-One Communications Goals to Life
To be successful, organizations need to take a data-driven approach to marketing and communications. Personalization is key, but getting there can be a challenge—especially for marketers.
You should be collecting data on your customers to understand how to best deploy communications both online and off that will make meaningful connections with patients, stakeholders, and more. And you should learn how to use that data if you hope to bring your value-based care goals to life.
That’s where Sepire can help! With significant experience helping healthcare organizations connect with patients through direct mail, we know what it takes to help. Reach out to ask us how.