[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":839},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-index":3},[4,155,259,406,439,589,623,669,751],{"id":5,"title":6,"body":7,"category":141,"ctaHeading":142,"date":143,"description":18,"extension":144,"image":145,"meta":146,"navigation":147,"ogImage":148,"path":149,"position":150,"seo":151,"stem":152,"updated":153,"__hash__":154},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F17-the-secret-patient-conversion-killer-hiding-on-your-website.md","The Secret Patient Conversion Killer Hiding on Your Website",{"type":8,"value":9,"toc":135},"minimark",[10,15,19,22,25,28,31,34,37,43,46,49,59,62,65,68,71,74,77,80,83,86,89,92,97,100,118,121,129,132],[11,12,14],"h2",{"id":13},"how-one-change-boosted-online-appointments-by-300","How One Change Boosted Online Appointments by 300%",[16,17,18],"p",{},"Math and I never got along very well when I was a kid. I scraped by but found it difficult to get excited about the subject: a fact that my grades reflected.",[16,20,21],{},"As an adult I’ve found a genuine enthusiasm for numbers (particularly in spreadsheets) and have developed a better understanding of why little kid Marc didn’t care. It turns out I need the numbers to be connected to something that matters.",[16,23,24],{},"In junior high math class the concepts were abstract and equations were solved because that’s what the teachers demanded of us.",[16,26,27],{},"As a healthcare marketer I’ve got numbers that I can connect to things that I care about deeply.",[16,29,30],{},"Numbers like Return on Ad Spend (RoAS) that can help me to keep my job and justify next year’s marketing budget.",[16,32,33],{},"Numbers like conversion rates from specific sections of my funnel that tell me where and when patients are having a hard time getting past a step.",[16,35,36],{},"Tara Nooteboom, UC Irvine’s Director of Consumer Digital Strategy said:",[16,38,39],{},[40,41,42],"em",{},"“If you can’t track users across your digital journey, it’s hard to evaluate return on any one aspect of the journey.”",[16,44,45],{},"Those two sets of numbers alone, when combined, tell a story and turn math into something you can use to make a very real difference in the lives of the people you serve.",[16,47,48],{},"I’ve spent a lot of time investigating lower-than-expected RoAS rates and find the same two culprits again and again:",[50,51,52,56],"ol",{},[53,54,55],"li",{},"A hard-to-use doctor finder with an appointment scheduling tool that doesn’t think about what the patient wants",[53,57,58],{},"Phone calls being handled by physician’s offices that don’t know why the patient is calling or how to help them. Or don’t answer the phone at all.",[16,60,61],{},"Since I’m only trying to write an article here and not a whole book, I’m only going to address the first subject.",[16,63,64],{},"A good doctor finder gets out of the way of what a patient wants to do: find a provider and schedule an appointment with them.",[16,66,67],{},"A bad doctor finder tanks your marketing conversion rates, prevents you from growing referrals, and destroys a potential patient’s trust in your organization before they ever step into one of your buildings.",[16,69,70],{},"If your digital tools leave your users frustrated or confused or hunting for documents, those users will likely give up. The best case scenario is that they pick up the phone but the more likely case is that they’ll go to a competitor’s website or just put off scheduling the appointment until it is an emergency. Something as simple as a few too many form fields or a slow-loading page can drive away people that need care. People that you have spent money and effort into identifying, segmenting, and driving to your website with ads and partnerships.",[16,72,73],{},"People that want to book an appointment right now but are left feeling like they can’t.",[16,75,76],{},"Which maybe raises a couple of questions. First, how big of a deal is this really? Surely a sufficiently motivated site visitor will push through the clunky-but-functional scheduling tool your EMR vendor offers, right? Second, why should I listen to anything this article says?",[16,78,79],{},"The answer to both of those questions lies in another number that I really (really) care about. One of our clients (they’re one of the largest and most prestigious health systems in the country) moved from their EMR-provided tool (Epic Open Scheduling) to Sparkle. Within six months of the move, with the same providers and the same appointment availability, this client saw almost a 300% increase in appointments scheduled online.",[16,81,82],{},"The only thing that changed was the user experience.",[16,84,85],{},"They moved from a tool that made users think to a tool that removes obstacles and puts effort into making things easy.",[16,87,88],{},"If you dig into that 300% increase, you’ll find cost savings, marketing-attributable revenue growth, and happier patients.",[16,90,91],{},"Another client received lots of positive feedback from their patients after launching Sparkle but this email was printed out and taped to the wall:",[16,93,94],{},[40,95,96],{},"“I've tried to book appointments with other clinics, and it's always such a mess. This online tool actually worked! Finally, healthcare that makes sense.”",[16,98,99],{},"I’m not doing the hard work of ‘removing complexity’ but I’m often there to see the end results in in-person user testing or in the raw conversion data. Here are the things that we know matter:",[101,102,103,106,109,112,115],"ul",{},[53,104,105],{},"Usability matters: your tool should emphasize intuitive design, keep advanced search tools accessible but unobtrusive, make sure everything looks amazing on mobile devices",[53,107,108],{},"The search experience should be based on how users actually search, not opaque specialties and service lines put in place by a clinical committee. Test your tools with layperson terms",[53,110,111],{},"The first set of returned results should reflect as much as you know about the visitor with as little of their input as possible: did they get referred by a specific service line ad group? Where are they searching from? Are they more likely to prioritize available appointments (primary care) or depth of expertise (oncology)?",[53,113,114],{},"Online open scheduling is the key to conversion: put available appointments in front of site visitors at every available opportunity. Syndicate them into Google search packs. Aggregate them on location and service line pages. Put them front and center in the doctor finder search results. Be ready to say “YES!” as soon as a site visitor thinks, “I wonder if this doctor has any open appointments?”",[53,116,117],{},"Slight revision: EASY online open scheduling is the key to conversion. When someone decides they want to schedule an appointment don’t make them go looking for their insurance card or their patient portal login information. Choose a platform that does the heavy lifting in the background.",[16,119,120],{},"When I’m beginning an assessment of a hospital’s provider finder, I’ll often start with a simple two-step process. Try it on your website and let me know how it goes using the form below!",[50,122,123,126],{},[53,124,125],{},"Enter a vague search term. I like “heart situation” which is something a patient typed in during an in-person user testing session over a decade ago. Did your website return the right set of providers?",[53,127,128],{},"Put on your patient hat and see how quickly you can find and schedule an appointment. Pretend you don’t have a patient portal account or your insurance card handy. Go all the way through the scheduling process and watch out for moments where you feel frustrated, angry, or confused.",[16,130,131],{},"A tightly-optimized set of doctor discovery and appointment scheduling tools can be the most important part of your patient acquisition funnel. It can provide the connective tissue between your marketing campaigns and real downstream conversion events. It can preemptively improve patient satisfaction and retention. It can lower your cost per acquisition and give you the data to prove it.",[16,133,134],{},"Improving your doctor finder and scheduling tools isn't just about technology; it's about patient experience. It demonstrates respect for patients' time, creates a sense of trust, and most importantly, improves health outcomes. When people can easily connect with the care they need, the equation for success becomes clear. (Math joke…)",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":138},"",3,[139],{"id":13,"depth":140,"text":14},2,"Health","Get in touch with us to learn more about Sparkle","2024-05-27","md","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-17.jpg",{},true,"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-17-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F17-the-secret-patient-conversion-killer-hiding-on-your-website",0,{"title":6,"description":18},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F17-the-secret-patient-conversion-killer-hiding-on-your-website",null,"Fofoh4BLCgpDdbx7jdXwKwtty84chungw1OSoQGJeyE",{"id":156,"title":157,"body":158,"category":141,"ctaHeading":142,"date":250,"description":162,"extension":144,"image":251,"meta":252,"navigation":147,"ogImage":253,"path":254,"position":255,"seo":256,"stem":257,"updated":153,"__hash__":258},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F16-2-easy-things-healthcare-marketers-can-do-to-start-2024-with-a-bang.md","2 easy things healthcare marketers can do to start 2024 with a bang",{"type":8,"value":159,"toc":246},[160,163,166,169,172,176,179,182,185,188,191,194,197,201,204,207,210,213,216,219,222,225,228,234,237,240,243],[16,161,162],{},"2023 was a tough year for healthcare marketers. Budgets were cut, priorities slid in a dozen different directions at once, and tools we’ve used for decades became poisoned chalices locked behind glass by our Security and Compliance teams.",[16,164,165],{},"2024 looks like it is going to be a year of recovery: healthier margins, more favorable patient mix, and higher volumes.",[16,167,168],{},"Thinking you might be bored? Don’t worry – there will be exciting new challenges and being able to ‘prove it’ is going to be even more important. Marketers that can get it right will have real ways to show their contribution to the organization’s bottom line and will see their budgets grow.",[16,170,171],{},"Don’t get overwhelmed by trying to fix everything all at once. Every journey begins with a single step so here are two bite-sized things you can do today to set yourself up for success in the year ahead:",[11,173,175],{"id":174},"connect-your-marketing-campaigns-to-your-online-appointment-scheduling","Connect your marketing campaigns to your online appointment scheduling",[16,177,178],{},"When your CFO is looking at operational budget requests (your marketing budget falls into that category) they’re typically evaluating them through an ROI lens: will spending this money result in our hospital making more money. You’ve got a much better chance of having your requests approved if you can say “yes!” with confidence.",[16,180,181],{},"Your CFO wants to understand how marketing spend results in conversion.",[16,183,184],{},"Getting realtime reimbursement or margin back from your EMR or financial systems can be a long journey that requires the blessing of lots of IT and operational committees. Those looking for an easier path to similarly ROI-focused metrics might want to try feeding awareness of marketing campaign referral sources directly into your appointment scheduling tools.",[16,186,187],{},"Your marketing platform (or digital marketing agency) should be able to deliver a unique identifier for every campaign segment or referral source. This is typically fed into your analytics platform (your newly HIPAA compliant analytics platform…) to understand engagement and conversion.",[16,189,190],{},"You just need to take it one step further!",[16,192,193],{},"In your appointment scheduling platform there is likely a field for referral source attached to individual appointment records. Talk to your platform vendor or internal technical resources about populating that field with the marketing referral source identifier. The parameter can typically be passed in the URL or as a session variable. The identifier is generic, even when attached to a patient’s session, and so still complies with HIPAA regulations.",[16,195,196],{},"Your campaign effectiveness reporting gets a lot more interesting when you can speak directly to how many actual appointments were generated by which campaign segment. Jazz it up even more by segmenting by which appointment type each campaign drove.",[11,198,200],{"id":199},"improve-the-usability-of-your-doctor-finder-and-appointment-booking-workflow","Improve the usability of your doctor finder and appointment booking workflow",[16,202,203],{},"Now that you’re attaching campaign segments (and corresponding marketing spend) to actual appointments, you can start to understand how much each of those appointments costs to generate.",[16,205,206],{},"Which is great news!",[16,208,209],{},"But, as Spiderman learned the hard way, with great power comes great responsibility.",[16,211,212],{},"Knowing your marketing cost per appointment (CPA or cost per acquisition or cost per conversion) means that you are now responsible for lowering it.",[16,214,215],{},"There are a lot of different factors that contribute to that CPA: keyword competition, medical specialty, patient demographics, and market demand. There’s one critical factor that you can address directly as a healthcare marketer: doctor finder and appointment scheduling usability.",[16,217,218],{},"Through the millions of appointments booked through our platform, Sparkle, we have seen how incremental improvement in user experience results in outsized gains in conversion metrics. Gains that translate directly to a dramatically lower cost per acquisition.",[16,220,221],{},"The majority of your site visitors are new to healthcare and searching for and selecting a doctor can be a confusing task. Wading through healthcare-specific language and unfamiliar insurance requirements to book an appointment can be even more difficult. Put in extra effort to make the whole process as straightforward and user friendly as possible and you’ll be rewarded with not just higher patient volume but also happier, more loyal patients.",[16,223,224],{},"Look to your doctor finder and appointment scheduling platform’s reporting tools to understand where people are getting stuck.",[16,226,227],{},"Sparkle’s first-party, HIPAA-compliant reporting makes great use of visualization tools like Sankey charts that break the acquisition pipeline down, showing you exactly where people are dropping off. Use charts like this to understand what parts of your pipeline need some extra attention:",[16,229,230],{},[231,232],"img",{"alt":136,"src":233},"\u002Fimg\u002Fscreenshot_2024-01-16_at_10.49.32_am.png",[16,235,236],{},"In our experience, the next step is to put your I’m-pretending-I’m-a-patient hat on to walk through the search and booking experience yourself. If you find yourself getting frustrated, there’s a good chance you’ve uncovered something that needs repair.",[16,238,239],{},"Your doctor finder and appointment scheduling platform should be doing as much of the thinking for the patient as possible. If they’re searching for a layperson term related to a condition, does your doctor finder return the most relevant physicians? If you’re an existing patient scheduling an appointment as a guest, is your platform smart enough to validate that appointment against EMR decision trees?",[16,241,242],{},"Once you start to look more deeply, you’ll be surprised how much delicious low-hanging fruit there is to gobble up.",[16,244,245],{},"2024 is brand new and full of potential. We’d love to show you how Sparkle can help you to turbocharge your marketing efforts, demonstrate success, and give your patients the best possible digital experience.",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":247},[248,249],{"id":174,"depth":140,"text":175},{"id":199,"depth":140,"text":200},"2024-01-02","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-16.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-16-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F16-2-easy-things-healthcare-marketers-can-do-to-start-2024-with-a-bang",1,{"title":157,"description":162},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F16-2-easy-things-healthcare-marketers-can-do-to-start-2024-with-a-bang","Pmu5Aa-9N-OoZAB8xu_s11vRWqt64_e-TvgEkKaVMCs",{"id":260,"title":261,"body":262,"category":141,"ctaHeading":142,"date":398,"description":274,"extension":144,"image":399,"meta":400,"navigation":147,"ogImage":401,"path":402,"position":140,"seo":403,"stem":404,"updated":153,"__hash__":405},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F14-google-raised-sem-prices-and-didn-t-tell-you.md","Google raised SEM prices and didn't tell you",{"type":8,"value":263,"toc":395},[264,269,272,275,278,281,292,295,312,315,318,321,324,327,330,347,350,353,361,364,378,381,384,387],[16,265,266],{},[231,267],{"alt":136,"src":268},"\u002Fimg\u002F1695936100889.jpeg",[11,270,261],{"id":271},"google-raised-sem-prices-and-didnt-tell-you",[16,273,274],{},"It turns out Google’s executives are under the same pressure to perform that everyone else is.",[16,276,277],{},"Healthcare marketers put a lot of money and effort into advertising on Google because it delivers those delicious point-of-choice search consumers that we can drop directly into our patient acquisition funnel.",[16,279,280],{},"In addition to money and effort, we also put a lot of trust into Google search advertising:",[101,282,283,286,289],{},[53,284,285],{},"Trust that the auction is fair",[53,287,288],{},"Trust that we’re not going to have an unacceptable number of bot clicks",[53,290,291],{},"Trust that the pricing is stable and based on advertiser demand.",[16,293,294],{},"As part of the Department of Justice’s ongoing antitrust trial, a Google ad exec revealed that Google sometimes arbitrarily raises auction prices by as much as 10%.",[16,296,297,298,305,306,311],{},"Bloomberg’s ",[299,300,304],"a",{"href":301,"rel":302},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.linkedin.com\u002Fin\u002Fleah-nylen\u002F",[303],"nofollow","Leah Nylen"," ",[299,307,310],{"href":308,"rel":309},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.bloomberg.com\u002Fnews\u002Farticles\u002F2023-09-18\u002Fgoogle-tweaks-ad-auctions-to-hit-revenue-targets-executive-says",[303],"reported on the situation"," and said:",[16,313,314],{},"“In one May 2019 email, Dischler and his team discussed how they were ‘shaking the cushions’ to find potential changes to the ad auctions that would ensure Google met the revenue targets that Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat had conveyed to Wall Street for the quarter,”",[16,316,317],{},"Jerry Dischler, vice president for Google’s advertising products, said:",[16,319,320],{},"“Google doesn’t typically tell advertisers about pricing changes…”",[16,322,323],{},"For most healthcare marketers this change would have been invisible. A faster burn through monthly ad spend. Fewer clicks and calls that your agency might blame on bot traffic or seasonal shifts in interest.",[16,325,326],{},"But that quiet increase in spend resulted in decreased efficiency for advertisers. It resulted in a higher cost per acquisition (CPA). And that higher cost per acquisition has more significant consequences now – with marketing budgets under more scrutiny and performance expectations being higher than they ever have before.",[16,328,329],{},"The only way to really understand what is happening in the shadows around your marketing effectiveness is to have full visibility into all areas of your funnel. This can be simplified when you have a single roll-up metric like CPA that shines a light into every step of the process:",[101,331,332,335,338,341,344],{},[53,333,334],{},"Cost per click",[53,336,337],{},"Landing page performance",[53,339,340],{},"Conversion mechanisms (forms, assessments, click-to-call buttons, etc…)",[53,342,343],{},"Call center agent performance",[53,345,346],{},"CRM-based patient nurturing journeys",[16,348,349],{},"Getting a true and clear picture of your CPA can be difficult to do without direct and real-time access to downstream conversion data. Preferably directly from the source: your hospital’s electronic medical record or financial systems.",[16,351,352],{},"Even healthcare marketers who have climbed that (very steep) hill to access admissions and reimbursement data sometimes face skepticism from executive stakeholders. A common issue arises when conversion metrics from various marketing platforms don't align. Discrepancies between CDN data, call center data, and your new HIPAA-compliant web analytics can erode confidence in the marketing ROI calculations used to justify next year's budget.",[16,354,355,360],{},[299,356,359],{"href":357,"rel":358},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sparkle.health\u002F",[303],"Sparkle"," provides a unified patient acquisition platform with direct EMR integration, ensuring marketers can rely on secure patient admission and reimbursement data. This unified approach lets you access conversion data from any point in the patient journey for optimization opportunities.",[16,362,363],{},"Having a clear view of ALL of the data allows healthcare marketers to not only demonstrate real ROI but also to uncover opportunities to improve the patient user experience.",[101,365,366,369,372,375],{},[53,367,368],{},"Why are patient dropping off at this specific point in the appointment booking process?",[53,370,371],{},"How did a change in user experience impact conversion success?",[53,373,374],{},"Which call center agents are conversion outliers?",[53,376,377],{},"Where are your potential future best practices hiding?",[16,379,380],{},"Having the right data and reporting tools makes that easy to find out.",[16,382,383],{},"The right set of tools will show you when ad platforms like Google are quietly raising prices and ruining your CPA.",[16,385,386],{},"Google's behavior in the advertising space is putting them at a higher risk of antitrust penalties but today's tightening healthcare marketing budgets can't wait for congressional action to save them.",[16,388,389,394],{},[299,390,393],{"href":391,"rel":392},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sparkle.health\u002Frequest-a-demo",[303],"Get in touch with us today"," to find out more about how Sparkle can help to support your goals.",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":396},[397],{"id":271,"depth":140,"text":261},"2023-12-14","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-14.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-14-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F14-google-raised-sem-prices-and-didn-t-tell-you",{"title":261,"description":274},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F14-google-raised-sem-prices-and-didn-t-tell-you","FFBrQjQCzvV2weSEdcYbfbL5O5Ci--WlRRgexDtTQCU",{"id":407,"title":408,"body":409,"category":141,"ctaHeading":142,"date":430,"description":431,"extension":144,"image":432,"meta":433,"navigation":147,"ogImage":434,"path":435,"position":137,"seo":436,"stem":437,"updated":153,"__hash__":438},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F15-understanding-user-journey-and-appointment-drop-off-in-healthcare-marketing.md","Understanding User Journey and Appointment Drop-Off in Healthcare Marketing",{"type":8,"value":410,"toc":428},[411,416,425],[16,412,413],{},[231,414],{"alt":136,"src":415},"\u002Fimg\u002Fscreenshot_2023-12-15_at_4.26.32_pm.png",[16,417,418,419,424],{},"Sparkle's Marc Needham talks to Dr. Jay Parkinson and Bryan Cush on their ",[299,420,423],{"href":421,"rel":422},"https:\u002F\u002Fhealthimpressions.podbean.com\u002F",[303],"Health Impressions podcast",".",[16,426,427],{},"In a wide-ranging conversation about healthcare marketing and patient acquisition, Marc shares insights on common problems in healthcare marketing and how Sparkle helps marketers track the effectiveness of their efforts by analyzing the digital user journey. They dive into the data from a Doctor Finder experience to show the importance of understanding where users drop off and creating a better user experience.",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":429},[],"2023-09-06","Sparkle's Marc Needham talks to Dr. Jay Parkinson and Bryan Cush on their Health Impressions podcast.","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-15.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-15-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F15-understanding-user-journey-and-appointment-drop-off-in-healthcare-marketing",{"title":408,"description":431},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F15-understanding-user-journey-and-appointment-drop-off-in-healthcare-marketing","rPL4kHgvb7sloZaJxqgEo1bmUta9orTUgP83Kgd1F5A",{"id":440,"title":441,"body":442,"category":141,"ctaHeading":142,"date":580,"description":450,"extension":144,"image":581,"meta":582,"navigation":147,"ogImage":583,"path":584,"position":585,"seo":586,"stem":587,"updated":153,"__hash__":588},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F11-bright-lights-big-data.md","Bright Lights, Big Data",{"type":8,"value":443,"toc":572},[444,448,451,454,457,460,465,469,472,475,478,481,484,487,490,493,496,500,503,506,509,512,515,518,522,525,528,531,534,537,541,544,547,550,553,556,559,563,566,569],[11,445,447],{"id":446},"building-a-platform-for-optimized-healthcare-marketing","Building a platform for optimized healthcare marketing",[16,449,450],{},"When my kids first meet other kids their age they perform a funny little ritual. There’s typically some introductory smalltalk and then they start to drill for common interests, normally video games, “Do you play Roblox? How about Minecraft? Fortnite?” They’ll circle around a little bit, find a common interest, and then the rest of the time flows easily with something they’re both enthusiastic about.",[16,452,453],{},"One of my favorite parts of going to conferences were the random conversations with other healthcare marketers over dinner or wandering the exhibitor halls. Like little kids the conversations often involved a little bit of drilling to find common interests. Unlike little kids, the topics we rattled off were typically healthcare marketing headaches. “Oh, your CRM vendor closed their doors too?” or, “Have you managed to get direct access to EMR data yet?”",[16,455,456],{},"So many long term friendships blossomed from those moments of sharing pain.",[16,458,459],{},"And with healthcare marketing sitting at the junction of referral growth goals, tight operating budgets, patient expectations, and systems with isolated inaccessible pools of data there was always plenty of pain to go around and lots to talk about.",[16,461,462],{},[231,463],{"alt":136,"src":464},"\u002Fimg\u002Fscreenshot_2023-12-15_at_4.59.59_pm.png",[11,466,468],{"id":467},"feeling-our-way-through-the-dark","Feeling Our Way Through the Dark",[16,470,471],{},"I’ve been a healthcare marketer for what seems like a very long time (20 years) with a big chunk of that at Scripps Health in San Diego. Over that very long period of time, I’ve seen lots of seemingly impossible problems vanish and other problems that seemed easily remedied prove to be more tenacious.",[16,473,474],{},"One problem that I was sure was going to be a piece of cake was “proving marketing ROI and justifying my operational budget”. How hard could it be? We pay for ads, people click them, they become patients, and we look at how much money they bring to the organization.",[16,476,477],{},"It isn’t even hard math.",[16,479,480],{},"Then you start trying to follow people on their journey to new patient admission.",[16,482,483],{},"“What do you mean the call center can’t tell me if this marketing lead went on to become a patient?”",[16,485,486],{},"“I can only get EMR data for lead matching once every six months?”",[16,488,489],{},"And now I’ve waded through the various IT Security Committee meetings to get the data, my CFO is telling me that my “... attribution is too vague and that those people would have become patients anyway?”",[16,491,492],{},"For years we nibbled around the edges of this problem. We optimized the marketing calls to action. We integrated more tightly with call center operations: first with pre-call ‘whispers’ and then with a marketing-connected CRM that call center agents entered leads into directly. We added referral source IDs to leads to help us to find them (thanks for nothing ‘fuzzy matching’) when they showed up in the EMR.",[16,494,495],{},"The problem never went away though. The funnel was leaky. The attribution was too soft. The data was too squishy.",[11,497,499],{"id":498},"the-first-spark","The First Spark",[16,501,502],{},"So we found a way to move what we had always assumed was an immovable object. We plugged our marketing funnel directly into the EMR.",[16,504,505],{},"The missing piece of the puzzle was the connection between marketing lead and EMR-based patient record. We unlocked a new world of funnel transparency by giving contact center agents (no longer just a call center) the ability to not only qualify leads but to begin that admission or conversion process.",[16,507,508],{},"The new process was rolled out service line by service line. For some service lines this meant that the contact center agents needed consultation scheduling access. For others it just meant an extended set of lead qualification criteria. A slice of that conversion step moved out of the hands of specific locations of physician offices and into the hands of a centralized group of marketing-adjacent resources.",[16,510,511],{},"Because we had spent so many years building and refining our marketing referral and attribution practices we had great data all the way up to that last moment. With the new API-based EMR integration, we were able to join all of that marketing data to all of the rich data the EMR fed back. Campaign type connected to admission data. Call center agent performance connected to patient conversion propensity. And the holiest of holy grails: individual ad campaign spend connected to reimbursement dollars!",[16,513,514],{},"There were literal tears in my eyes when I pulled that fully-connected report for the first time.",[16,516,517],{},"Being able to demonstrate true return on ad spend was a dream realized. Having the ability to measure real campaign effectiveness at a high level and then being able to dive in and slice the data by location or region or individual keyword groups or times of days made me feel like I was drowning in something delicious and sweet. Overwhelming and joyful.",[11,519,521],{"id":520},"shining-a-light-on-dark-data","Shining a Light on Dark Data",[16,523,524],{},"Bristling with this new data we started to root around looking for that big opportunity that was going to help us to blow the doors off referral growth numbers. There were some little ‘aha’ moments but we mostly found lots of small places to round rough corners and smooth small areas of the funnel. The conversion data was used to justify lots of minor usability improvement projects.",[16,526,527],{},"But something was wrong with the doctor finder conversions.",[16,529,530],{},"Our doctor finder was amazing, award-winning, a thoroughbred race horse of a tool refined and optimized over years of hard work. At the time we used Epic Open Scheduling: a scheduling widget that allows new and existing patients to schedule appointments directly with physicians. Tens of thousands of people made successful physician and provider searches every month… but a surprisingly small number of those people went on to schedule an appointment with the physicians they found. Most people were either fading away into the void or picking up the phone to request an appointment through our contact center team.",[16,532,533],{},"Users in focus groups and one-on-one usability sessions consistently told us that they wanted to use online tools to schedule appointments. Why wasn’t this translating to heavier use of the appointment scheduling opportunity we were putting in front of them.",[16,535,536],{},"A lot of time was spent exploring the ways to improve the Epic Open Scheduling experience before we decided that we needed to build a native solution.",[11,538,540],{"id":539},"illuminating-the-entire-pathway","Illuminating the Entire Pathway",[16,542,543],{},"Epic’s wonderful and well-documented APIs allowed us to build a realtime connection to appointment information. Pulling it into our doctor finder and website as a whole, and pushing scheduled appointments back into the EMR.",[16,545,546],{},"Following the change appointments went from being an afterthought, displayed in quiet little frames, to being the heroes of the doctor finder experience. We put them directly into doctor finder search results and allowed patients to sort by “next available appointment”. We added them to location pages. We created map tools that showed patients where the nearest and soonest appointments were.",[16,548,549],{},"The appointment scheduling workflow changed too. We didn’t need to force people into MyChart (Epic’s patient-facing portal) any longer. Now we had a streamlined and usability-focused set of forms that new patients could fill out to make that first appointment.",[16,551,552],{},"The changes were subtle but significant. Within six months, with no additional promotion or marketing efforts, online appointments scheduled rose by over 140%.",[16,554,555],{},"People that might have previously decided to pick up the phone or, worse, give up and go to a competitor’s website were now scheduling appointments with our physicians.",[16,557,558],{},"And this might just be the beginning. Google is currently running a limited pilot that allows providers to display available appointments directly on the Google results page – deep linking those clicks into your appointment scheduling workflow. This type of syndication can only happen when you pull appointments out of your EMR and expose them in a meaningful way on your website. It also exposes conversion opportunities to an audience you might have never reached.",[11,560,562],{"id":561},"funneling-into-the-future","Funneling Into the Future",[16,564,565],{},"A fully integrated and transparent funnel allows you to focus your efforts where they’re going to really make a difference. This has always been important but with tighter budgets, a smaller pool of patients to compete for, and patient usability expectations that things “just work” it is now critical to a healthcare marketer’s success.",[16,567,568],{},"The problems we have to solve will only get more difficult (ask me how to track the success of marketing campaigns in a world without cookies…) and more clinically and operationally focused but with the right data and tools, we can all do amazing things. I’m going to be attending the Healthcare Internet Conference in Miami this fall – my first conference since COVID started – and I am so excited to catch up with old friends and hopefully make some new ones.",[16,570,571],{},"Do any of you play Roblox?",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":573},[574,575,576,577,578,579],{"id":446,"depth":140,"text":447},{"id":467,"depth":140,"text":468},{"id":498,"depth":140,"text":499},{"id":520,"depth":140,"text":521},{"id":539,"depth":140,"text":540},{"id":561,"depth":140,"text":562},"2023-05-10","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-11.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-11-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F11-bright-lights-big-data",4,{"title":441,"description":450},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F11-bright-lights-big-data","ElmzdhBdpBElrt26Edvp_WMkOM8efUyYFpQmHl6n3ag",{"id":590,"title":591,"body":592,"category":141,"ctaHeading":614,"date":580,"description":601,"extension":144,"image":615,"meta":616,"navigation":147,"ogImage":617,"path":618,"position":619,"seo":620,"stem":621,"updated":153,"__hash__":622},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F12-the-ultimate-guide-to-building-a-provider-finder-that-delivers-results.md","The Ultimate Guide to Building a Provider Finder That Delivers Results",{"type":8,"value":593,"toc":612},[594,599,602,605],[16,595,596],{},[231,597],{"alt":136,"src":598},"\u002Fimg\u002Funnamed.png",[16,600,601],{},"In the world of healthcare, a great provider finder can make all the difference. It's the first point of contact for patients seeking care, and it's also a crucial marketing tool for healthcare systems.",[16,603,604],{},"But what makes a great provider finder? A recent case study produced in collaboration with Scripps Health highlights the key qualities that matter most.",[16,606,607,611],{},[299,608,610],{"href":609},"mailto:hello@combinaut.com","Email us"," for a free copy of this comprehensive guide.",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":613},[],"Get a copy of the case study:","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-12.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-12-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F12-the-ultimate-guide-to-building-a-provider-finder-that-delivers-results",5,{"title":591,"description":601},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F12-the-ultimate-guide-to-building-a-provider-finder-that-delivers-results","lZ_koBhCF6eeIzHPDiENjuWenBr14K_mLWVep4gc7Gc",{"id":624,"title":625,"body":626,"category":141,"ctaHeading":142,"date":659,"description":660,"extension":144,"image":661,"meta":662,"navigation":147,"ogImage":663,"path":664,"position":665,"seo":666,"stem":667,"updated":153,"__hash__":668},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F10-how-one-pixel-disrupted-the-healthcare-industry.md","How One Pixel Disrupted the Healthcare Industry",{"type":8,"value":627,"toc":657},[628,633,641,644],[16,629,630],{},[231,631],{"alt":136,"src":632},"\u002Fimg\u002Fscreenshot_2023-12-15_at_6.45.00_pm.png",[16,634,635,636],{},"Posted from ",[299,637,640],{"href":638,"rel":639},"https:\u002F\u002Fblog.whiterhino.com\u002Fhow-one-pixel-disrupted-the-healthcare-industry",[303],"White Rhino",[16,642,643],{},"\"On June 16, 2022, healthcare marketers woke up under a microscope. A small line of code on their website was being called into question for sharing sensitive patient data back to Facebook without patients’ consent. And even those that were not using the pixel in question suddenly found themselves in deep conversations with their IT and compliance teams.",[16,645,646,650,651,656],{},[299,647,649],{"href":638,"rel":648},[303],"Listen"," as we discuss the matter with special guest Marc Needham from ",[299,652,655],{"href":653,"rel":654},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.combinaut.com\u002F",[303],"Combinaut"," – specializing in website content management tools tailored to the unique needs of hospital websites. \"",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":658},[],"2022-06-16","On June 16, 2022, healthcare marketers woke up under a microscope. A small line of code on their website was being called into question for sharing sensitive patient data back to Facebook without patients’ consent. And even those that were not using the pixel in question suddenly found themselves in deep conversations with their IT and compliance teams.","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-10.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-10-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F10-how-one-pixel-disrupted-the-healthcare-industry",6,{"title":625,"description":660},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F10-how-one-pixel-disrupted-the-healthcare-industry","9jM9ovBXC0cBRM9tOm2hZPbRKBUlygc3l-0cuzRfT1A",{"id":670,"title":671,"body":672,"category":141,"ctaHeading":153,"date":742,"description":676,"extension":144,"image":743,"meta":744,"navigation":147,"ogImage":745,"path":746,"position":747,"seo":748,"stem":749,"updated":153,"__hash__":750},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F9-the-perfect-match-building-a-friction-free-provider-finder.md","The perfect match: building a friction-free provider finder",{"type":8,"value":673,"toc":740},[674,677,680,686,689,692,695,698,701,706,709,718,721,724,732],[16,675,676],{},"Helping potential patients to find the right doctor is one of your healthcare system website’s most important jobs.",[16,678,679],{},"Ensuring that your patients have an exceptional experience means starting at the beginning: uncovering hidden bottlenecks and sticking points in the digital patient journey. During one particularly memorable website user testing session with a hospital client, a test subject was asked to recall a time they had tried to find care. He said he had a ‘heart situation’ and typed “heart situation” into the search field. No results were returned and the client realized they were probably failing lots of other website visitors.",[16,681,682],{},[683,684,685],"strong",{},"Make it easy",[16,687,688],{},"Whether your user is new to the area, new to needing healthcare, or have a health “situation” that requires specialty care, your website should make their experience effortless and pleasant. Moving a potential patient from confusion and crisis into an educated decision that they feel confident in should be a priority for every healthcare provider.",[16,690,691],{},"Most of the visitors to your website aren’t swimming in healthcare jargon every day. They don’t always know what specialty to search for or why one credential or accolade might be preferred over another. All they know is that they need care — care that meets their health needs, isn’t too far, and is with someone who can see them soon.",[16,693,694],{},"If they’re looking for a new primary care physician, they might want to know more about that doctor’s personality and style. If they have just received a serious diagnosis, they will want to be reassured that your specialists provide the best possible care.",[16,696,697],{},"The best answer to a lot of these issues is to have tightly optimized physician profiles with easy to understand language. Having high ranking physician profiles on your own website means that people can find them directly from a Google search (where most of your potential patients will begin their journey).",[16,699,700],{},"Once a potential patient has found the pool of doctors they’re looking for, the next highest items on the list are distance and availability. Does your website allow users to easily compare providers in that way?",[16,702,703],{},[683,704,705],{},"Open your books",[16,707,708],{},"Pulling available appointment times out of your electronic medical record and exposing them to your site visitors is a fantastic way to improve their experience. Adding those appointments as easily-accessible elements allows you to prioritize and filter providers in ways that really matter to someone hoping to get seen quickly.",[16,710,711,712,717],{},"A lot of electronic medical records, like ",[299,713,716],{"href":714,"rel":715},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.epic.com\u002F",[303],"Epic",", allow you to embed their appointment scheduling tools on your consumer website. This is a great first step but those tools often fall short on user experience and don’t allow you to hitch the conversion data up with other sources. Consider exploring the use of a platform that integrates deeply with your EMR and allows you to pull appointments out in a more meaningful way.",[16,719,720],{},"Having those appointments available also allows you to deploy them in interesting and useful ways across the rest of your website. Our experience building and optimizing healthcare provider websites shows us how much more effective a service line landing page call-to-action is with “next available appointment times” displayed.",[16,722,723],{},"The next critical piece of the patient journey is the ability to book an appointment quickly and easily through the website without having to create a new account in your patient portal. Not only does this empower your patients to manage their own care, it also allows you to connect a very real conversion to your marketing or promotion efforts.",[16,725,726,727,731],{},"Only a handful of providers offer a truly excellent and integrated patient onboarding experience. Let us show you how ",[299,728,359],{"href":729,"rel":730},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sparklecms.com\u002F",[303]," can help you to make the most of your marketing spend and your Epic investment.",[16,733,734,739],{},[299,735,738],{"href":736,"rel":737},"https:\u002F\u002Fwww.sparklecms.com\u002Frequest-a-demo",[303],"Schedule a demo"," today.",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":741},[],"2022-03-30","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-9.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-9-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F9-the-perfect-match-building-a-friction-free-provider-finder",7,{"title":671,"description":676},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F9-the-perfect-match-building-a-friction-free-provider-finder","BOzgwWZyrS1_pb8gC9-Z0q30YYlI9ZjFK3q0uxLWaNM",{"id":752,"title":753,"body":754,"category":141,"ctaHeading":153,"date":830,"description":758,"extension":144,"image":831,"meta":832,"navigation":147,"ogImage":833,"path":834,"position":835,"seo":836,"stem":837,"updated":153,"__hash__":838},"blog\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F1-chasing-roi-in-healthcare.md","Chasing ROI in Healthcare",{"type":8,"value":755,"toc":826},[756,759,762,768,772,775,778,781,785,788,814,817,820,823],[16,757,758],{},"Since advertising has existed, a central question has been, “How do I know that I’m spending my money effectively?” As the old joke goes: half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.",[16,760,761],{},"Digital marketing arrived on the scene and promised to change this. An abundance of data and baked-in tracking and measurement tools mean that discovering real return on investment (ROI) is a reality for many now. But healthcare marketers are often left out in the cold, peering through the window watching online retailers and others segment audiences and tie advertising efforts directly to revenue.",[763,764,765],"blockquote",{},[16,766,767],{},"“You have the tools and the power to capture market share from your competitors, to increase referrals, to target and capture specific patients.”",[11,769,771],{"id":770},"so-why-cant-we-join-in","So why can’t we join in?",[16,773,774],{},"Some people say that healthcare is different. We’re behind the times. Our patient revenue data is locked away in monolithic electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Data access is closely guarded by bureaucratic and notoriously unhelpful IT departments. Systems don’t speak to one another and marketing doesn’t have a loud enough voice in the organization.",[16,776,777],{},"But proving the ROI of your marketing efforts is a great way to make your voice heard in an organization. When your CFO is looking around for budgets to cut, do you really want to justify your existence with meaningless website views or ludicrously inflated newspaper circulation figures? It shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that marketing departments are often the first to be slashed when budgets are tight.",[16,779,780],{},"You know that doesn’t make sense! You know that you have the tools and the power to capture market share from your competitors, to increase referrals, to target and capture specific patients. Proving that to a skeptical organization means that you need to speak the same language as the rest of the C-Suite.",[11,782,784],{"id":783},"how-do-you-get-there","How do you get there?",[16,786,787],{},"We think that a great interim goal to achieve is to establish a basic ROI model. What does that consist of?",[50,789,790,796,802,808],{},[53,791,792,795],{},[683,793,794],{},"Connections"," to any marketing platform that you use so that you can segment and track traffic referral sources",[53,797,798,801],{},[683,799,800],{},"A platform for experiments."," Sparkle, an industry-leading content management system, offers the ability to test different types of content, calls-to-action, assets, and user flows against one another with a clear picture of how the changes affect conversion",[53,803,804,807],{},[683,805,806],{},"Patient data."," This doesn’t need to mean ‘all’ patient data or read\u002Fwrite access to your EMR. It can be as simple as a monthly feed of a few select data elements. Talk to your data warehouse folks -- odds are good that someone in your organization has already established precedent for this.",[53,809,810,813],{},[683,811,812],{},"A place to mash it all together and make sense of the conversions",". This can be an Excel document on your desktop or a new module in your customer relationship manager (CRM) depending on your needs.",[16,815,816],{},"One Combinaut client, Compassus, a national hospice and palliative care provider, chose Sparkle and Salesforce as the two central pieces of their direct attribution ROI model. Using an easy-to-implement set of integrations they are now able to measure the downstream financial impact of every single dollar they spend on digital marketing -- right back to the keyword level.",[16,818,819],{},"Compassus’ Vice President of Digital Marketing told us, “I love the system we’ve built together. It allows me to not only optimize our campaigns efficiently but also to make sure that I’m able to easily justify my budget and spend. We can see very clearly what works and what doesn’t and I feel confident when I present my reports.”",[16,821,822],{},"Don’t make up hand-wavey conversion formulas based on hunches. Don’t take Google Analytics reports to your steering committee.",[16,824,825],{},"If you take the time to build an ROI model you will have a firm platform to launch all of your future ambitions.",{"title":136,"searchDepth":137,"depth":137,"links":827},[828,829],{"id":770,"depth":140,"text":771},{"id":783,"depth":140,"text":784},"2018-04-30","\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-1.jpg",{},"\u002Fimg\u002Fpost-1-og.jpg","\u002Fblogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F1-chasing-roi-in-healthcare",8,{"title":753,"description":758},"blogs\u002Fpain-points\u002Fposts\u002F1-chasing-roi-in-healthcare","vcREzg_QK7kT7p3yHiz231_N5Y1o2LzysoERVfPyYeg",1785617685183]