Key Takeaways
- Prioritize privacy and compliance: Always ensure outbound communications related to health screenings are HIPAA-compliant and protect sensitive information like PII and PHI. Privacy and personalization can coexist with the right safeguards.
- Enhance user experience: Simplify access to health screenings through relatable content, clean design, and frictionless user experiences to improve engagement and adherence.
- Communicate based on preferences: Offering communication options (like email or print) through a preference center fosters self-service, reduces customer-care requests, and cuts costs while building trust.
- Personalize deeply: Tailoring health care information with specific and actionable details helps break down barriers, making individuals feel seen and more likely to take preventive actions.
Health screenings are an important part of everyone's overall health and wellness. They enable people to understand what's going on with their health, alert them to potential risks that may be ahead, and empower them to better manage an existing condition. They're also important to business health, where they impact finances, industry ratings, and more.
Our previous discussion described important points to cover when it comes to talking to your audience about health screenings. Now, we'll take a look at ways to improve engagement, access, and adherence while reducing business costs and boosting revenue.
Putting privacy first
Before we get started, it's important to mention that communicating about health care requires compliance with laws, rules, and regulations—the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is chief among them. Some types of information are suited to unsecure methods of communication. Some definitely are not.
The good news? Privacy and personalization can coexist in health care, and we'll explore how in just a moment. For now, though, if you're ever in doubt, consult an expert who specializes in HIPAA compliance. Always exercise caution when PII and PHI are concerned, and always ensure your outbound communications are HIPAA-compliant.
Focusing on experience
Let's say you took the advice we shared in our first article, and now you have some ideas in mind for presenting preventive care's value propositions to your audience. Great! What's next? Your goal is to not only make it easy for people to understand why health screenings matter, but also to simplify the process of accessing the preventive care they need.
This is where combining relatable editorial content, clean visual design, and simplified user experience comes into play. If you can increase personalization, surface important details and guidance quickly and accurately, and remove friction along the journey, you'll earn audience engagement, improve adherence, and uncover measurable cost savings for your business.
When you think about it, health care—even something straightforward, like a health screening—becomes a high-consideration decision for many because it's hard to understand, hard to find, and hard to pay for. Any one of those obstacles could prevent someone from getting routine preventive care. Many people have to deal with all three. Your organization can help. Here's how.
Communicate with people according to their preferences
If people want email, email them. If they want printed communications, then send them information in the mail. Investing in integrating a preference center into your patient or member portal yields ROI in several ways:
- It shows people in your audience that you want to connect with them on their terms.
- It offers people self-service capabilities, and that helps you deflect high-volume, low-value requests away from your Customer Care Team.
- It helps you comply with a variety of communication rules and regulations by requiring formalized opt ins and opt outs.
- It gives you an opportunity to save money. The more opt ins you get for electronic communications, the more you'll save on printing and postage costs.
Personalize content as deeply as possible
When you personalize health care information for people, you make it clearer, more relevant, and more actionable for them. You break down barriers to care in meaningful ways by creating a 1:1 conversation.
Seeing a doctor's name, the address of a care clinic nearby, or specific guidance on using health insurance during a care visit will help a person see that the information is for and about them. As a result, they'll be more likely to take the action you're trying to persuade them to take.
Tailoring information for people doesn't have to be risky. You can protect your audience and your business while still delivering a lot of value by safeguarding PII or PHI behind your portal's login. Your outbound communications can address topics—even sensitive ones—at a high level and without tying the recipient to a medical condition, doctor, or health plan.
For example, you could say something like this in an email: Steve, did you know that blood-glucose tests help detect risk for diabetes? Schedule a test today.
On the other hand, you couldn't say something like this in an email: Steve, your blood glucose level was high the last time you had it checked at Dr. Smith's office.
Surface information
Bring key information to the forefront immediately when someone logs in to your portal. If a person is due for a blood glucose screening, mention it right away and show them where they can have one done. If you are able to share information about costs (real or estimated) and insurance coverage right away, based on that person's health coverage, then pull those details up, too. Take away all of the guessing by explaining the who, what, when, where, why, and how. If the user has to take multiple steps to complete a task—or go offsite to get it done—they won't be as inclined to complete it.
Use plain language
Eliminate clinical and technical terminology from the communications and resources you share with your audience. Keep your sentences short and strong. Use active voice. Make information scannable by using bullet lists, subheads, and bold type. Be thoughtful about white space in your visual design. Modular layouts are very helpful.
The easier you make it for people to find, read, and understand information, the more likely they'll be to use it. Health literacy is dangerously low for many. When you actively work to solve that problem, you're showing your commitment to improving health outcomes—and meeting your business's top- and bottom-line goals. Check out our two-part series on plain language for more information.
Orchestrate your digital outreach
Overserving your audience, especially across multiple channels, create fatigue that will cause them to ignore your outreach—even when you have to communicate something very important to them. Campaign and communication orchestration prevents message fatigue.
This is, perhaps, the only place artificial intelligence (AI) adds true reward in health care communications and marketing without exposing your business to significant risk (again, PII and PHI are extremely sensitive data). Machine learning (ML), in particular, is a very good solution when it comes to orchestrating your digital outreach. Many digital marketing platforms integrate their own flavor of ML into their products, which is important because:
- You don't need to invest in a separate, stand-alone solution or worry about making it get along with your marketing tech stack.
- ML doesn't need to access PII or PHI to do its job.
- ML can work seamlessly across different marketing channels. If you have email and text messaging under the same roof, for example, ML will deploy communications via those channels according to what it discovers about audience behavior—and it'll adjust frequently, which optimizes your efforts. You can't do that stuff by hand.
- ML is contained within the platform, which means it's not on your servers or systems. It also means that your vendor partner is responsible for it, just as they are for the functionality of the other tools you use on their platform.
Embracing alternatives to in-person screenings
Telehealth and at-home testing are options that more people need to know about. They are legitimate, effective, and growing in popularity—especially for care visits that don't absolutely require in-person interaction. As a result, it's very wise from a strategic standpoint to give these alternatives as much exposure as you give to the more conventional or traditional methods when appropriate.
We talked about providing a great user experience earlier. Including telehealth and at-home testing up front—when they are available options—streamlines people's access to care, gives them more choices than they had before, provides a sense of agency, and shows your organization is with the times.
Incorporate telehealth and at-home testing into your personalization strategy. Offer them when you can alongside simplified access to conventional treatment.
The possibilities for calls to action are enticing because they offer immediate task completion.
- You're due for an XYZ screening. A doctor is available to see you right now. Let's get your telehealth visit started.
- An at-home test can help you and your doctor understand your risk for prostate cancer. Order a test kit today at no cost.
Medicine and technology are meeting in innovative ways these days with the goal of enabling people to perform health screenings and tests at home with a doctor monitoring everything in real time on camera. Some health insurers are partnering with companies that develop these technologies to equip their insured members with devices that allow doctors to check heart, lung, and ear functions—and a whole lot more—from the comfort and privacy of the patient's home.
One day, perhaps, everyone will be able to complete just about any health screening imaginable whenever and wherever they choose. Until then, make sure your audience can take advantage of telehealth and at-home testing.
Building trust builds business
Establishing and nurturing trust between your audience and your business depends on your ability to communicate clearly, share relevant information in a timely and convenient way, and demonstrate that the relationship you have is about more than just revenue cycles or monthly premium payments.
Trust isn't only about driving brand growth. It's also an important part of doing business in health care. In the context of our discussion, if people don't trust the information or the experience you're providing, then they may not get the preventive care you're recommending. That will impact your ability to close gaps in care—just one measure of effectiveness that has wide-ranging impact. Failure to close gaps in care affects practice / payor negotiations, patient / member satisfaction, and ratings across key industry metrics (HEDIS, CAHPS, and Stars, for example).
As you can see, trust is a powerful resource for everyone involved in health care: patients, practitioners, and payors. The more you invest strategically in communications, campaigns, creative services, and experience design, the more returns you'll see—better health outcomes, brand affinity, referrals, renewals, and lots more. Helping people take care of their health is an effective and rewarding way to take care of your business's health.
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