For healthcare marketers it's a time to rethink basic assumptions, challenge institutional bias, breakdown silos, and force debate around longstanding approaches to marketing. Tomorrow's marketers will be healthcare orchestra leaders. They will help set strategic pillars, sequence strategic execution, and lead go-to-market implementation that is results-driven and measurable.
Following are six healthcare impact trends that will challenge marketers in the upcoming year.
1. Payers-providers blurring the lines. Its healthcare's Wild West as health insurers become providers and health providers become payers. With spending for hospital care and total private health insurance expenditures each topping $1 trillion, paying for and delivering health services is truly in a transition. Health insurers, are venturing into primary care centered delivery models, value or outcomes-based payment schemes, retail-type customer experiences, and innovative frameworks fostering prevention and wellness. For hospitals tackling the 'business of insurance', selling and retaining health plan members is very different from traditional hospital-patient marketing. Similarly, as insurers acquire or launch provider organizations, whether retail primary care, urgent-care clinics, or hospital service centers, marketing challenges such as service-line marketing, physician engagement, and community-based branding require new approaches.
2. Navigating an out-of-pocket ecosystem. At a time when one-in-three Americans say healthcare is the biggest financial burden they face, high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) have gone mainstream. HDHPs are approaching half of all employer-based coverage and almost all individual policies. This shifting financial burden creates an out-of-pocket ecosystem forcing consumers to take a close look at their healthcare budgets. It's the fuel of the healthcare consumerism movement. Once consumers find themselves in control of spending health dollars out of their own wallets, you get their attention. However, buying healthcare services--from insurance to prescription drugs to routine check-ups to MRIs--in a ways similar to other consumer goods isn't easy given health literacy disparities and inconsistent access to consumer-centric resources, plus..."Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated."
3. Healthcare consumerism, a dilemma of health inertia. We live in a nation where 190 million people have at least one chronic condition. These patients account for $3 out of every $4 spent on medical care. Still, most people believe they are significantly healthier than they are, lessening their interest in taking action to improve their health. To affect behavior change, marketers need to shift their orientation from education to inspiration, from features and functions to gut-level appeals that move people to act and engage. It's about connecting across the customer lifecycle around personal, relevant motivations and deep, sometimes even unconscious desires, like freedom, happiness, personal goals, or the ability to be a better parent or partner.
4. Social engagement is king and content is queen. Social media cuts across every customer segment and every aspect of the customer relationship. every minute there are 452,000 tweets sent, 120 new LinkedIn accounts created, 46,200 Instagram posts, and 900,000 Facebook logins with more than 50% on a mobile device, according to Business Insider. Healthcare companies are creating social communities to connect, collaborate and communicate with consumers. Today's perpetually connected consumers are impatient. Their most valued brands engage with them in an evocative, relevant dialogue. They look for social media content that is shareable, fresh, unique, and above all, worth reading. Its compelling healthcare content that attracts their interest and holds their attention around a personalized, interactive value exchange.
5. Value is in the eye of the beholder. Truth be told, value-based care is a trend that has appeared in previous years, however as momentum continues to build, it needs to be highlighted once again. Pay-for-performance reimbursement--from basic risk sharing to accountable care organizations to bundled payments--are rapidly moving healthcare toward outcomes-based financing system. Incentives and disincentives based on quality of care and patient clinical results are the new normal. Marketers must use successes to demonstrate the value in value-based care, and use any failures as lessons learned.
6. Innovation disruptively disrupting market disruptors. Innovation is sweeping across the healthcare landscape. Over the last six years there has been more than $18 billion invested in healthcare technology ventures with 2017 going down as the largest year ever for digital health funding. Entrepreneurs and risk-takers are making stunning advances in cancer, Alzheimer's, population health, and wellness. And, they're the agile innovators breaking down barriers with wearables, blockchain, artificial intelligence/AI, Internet of Things, and precision medicine. If storytelling is the new marketing, marketers will have a treasure trove of material to draw from in this era of digital health technology.
Healthcare marketers have seen sweeping changes over the last few years. Gone are days where 'product, price, place, and promotion' is the ultimate marketing framework. As healthcare marketers face full-blown marketplace transformation, there's a new priority: the need for marketing to have a power seat at the c-suite business strategy table. Why? 72% of CEOs believe the next three years will be more critical to their industry than the last 50 years--and the question is how many are ready, according to KPMG. Marketing can no longer take a functional or tactical focus, it has to expand its influence and integrate with leadership's vision-driven corporate business strategy.
Source: Managed Healthcare Executive (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on November 30, 2017 07:44 AM
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