Healthcare campaigns are integral to patient engagement. They ensure patients have access to the latest information on everything from the common cold to nationwide epidemics.
A good campaign also reinforces the idea of shared responsibility. That, by maintaining an open dialogue with healthcare practitioners, patients can work alongside their doctor to develop more effective treatment plans.
Organising an effective healthcare campaign is one thing. There’s no shortage of reliable information available to healthcare professionals. But how do you guarantee you’re connecting with the right people and maximising your reach?
Decide on the Type of Campaign You Want to Run
The first step is to decide what type of campaign you want to run, as this will influence your strategy and goals. There are two main types to consider: awareness and direct response.
Awareness
An awareness campaign is geared towards educating patients. This could be on new treatment options for a particular illness, recent healthcare trends, or the latest practice updates.
Speed and accuracy are key to the success of any awareness campaign. Distributing unsubstantiated information two weeks after a sudden outbreak has passed doesn’t help anyone. If anything, it highlights the poor level of service your patients receive.
Direct Response
The goal of a direct response campaign is to encourage patients to take a specific action. This could be anything from booking an annual flu jab to updating their details to comply with new regulations.
Define the Audience Of Your Healthcare Campaign
Once you’ve settled on the type of healthcare campaign you intend to run, the next step is to define your target audience.
Modern healthcare campaign tools allow you to segment audiences by age, ethnicity, gender, condition, or location, and create targeted campaigns to address specific concerns within these groups. You can further refine your campaign parameters by using relevant clinical data.
You can then start creating personalised emails, SMS messages, and other content. Whichever method is best suited to sharing the type of information you want to share and meeting your campaign goals.
This reduces miscommunication, streamlines your outreach programme, and saves money on your campaign budget.
Go Digital
Old school thinking means many practices struggle to look beyond traditional approaches to information sharing. Many continue to disseminate important medical updates via leaflets rather than targeted, digital content. But this can seriously limit your reach.
A digital, cloud-based platform lets you coordinate healthcare campaigns across multiple channels anywhere, anytime, and on any device. It’s cheaper and easier than managing campaigns through a physical network and makes critical medical information freely available to everyone.
It also allows you to take advantage of the growing popularity of mobile.
Recent statistics reveal that 47% of people use a mobile application to check their emails. While, as of 2018, 52% of website traffic came from mobile devices – a number that will almost certainly have grown in the past two years. So, building your campaigns around a digitally-fluent, mobile audience extends your reach even further – it also keeps you connected with people in remote or hard-to-reach locations.
Embrace Automation
One of the main benefits of running your healthcare campaigns through a digital platform is automation.
It’s quicker and more efficient. Automation allows you to schedule vital healthcare information with patients days or even weeks in advance. Because it’s stored within a digital platform, you’re free to go in and make changes before the publish date, should new details emerge. This means you can be both proactive and reactive, ensuring patients always have access to the latest intelligence.
Similarly, automated reminders can be set to go out when a patient has a prescription review coming up or to keep them notified of updates relevant to their condition. Everything from basic appointment reminders to breaking healthcare stories is available at the click of a button, improving the patient experience.
At the same time, it frees administrative staff of another unnecessary burden. This helps to improve morale and reduces the likelihood of employee burnout. Crucially, it also helps to cut costs. AthenaHealth recently estimated that the simple expedient of automating appointment reminders using email or SMS could save a practice of 6,000 people between £295 and £2387 a month.
Measure Campaign Performance
Regardless of the campaign you’re running, it’s important to measure your performance at every stage. The best patient engagement platforms come with in-built analytics tools to help you do this.
The type of metrics you track will differ depending on the type of campaign you’re running. For example, open and bounce rates will be crucial to measuring the success of an email campaign. Whereas call-to-action (CTA) engagement will tell you how effective your longer-form content was at driving sign-ups to a new healthcare initiative.
These should be supported by regular patient feedback surveys. As well as helping you connect with your patients, it offers insights into the specific identify areas you can improve on. If you use a purpose-built patient survey tool, you can then compile the data into detailed reports. This lets you visualise your outcomes and communicate the data across your practice.
Measuring performance helps you achieve long-term success. If the results are positive, you know you’re on to a winner and should replicate your approach. If not, you know that either your demographic data was off and you were targeting the wrong audience or, more likely, that you need to rethink the type of content you create.
Either way, this will help you plan for future campaigns so you can maximise your reach.
Why are Healthcare Campaigns so Important?
Healthcare campaigns are vital for improving patient engagement.
Engaged patients are more likely to take an active part in their treatment. Whether that’s by making positive lifestyle changes to support their doctors or opening a dialogue to discuss new treatment options.
For doctors and practice managers, healthcare campaigns keep patients informed and in the loop. This reduces the number of unnecessary appointments and no shows, as well as increasing awareness. A well-run campaign also gives doctors the insights they need to improve aftercare and safeguard patient health.
