Digital Healthcare
Article | November 29, 2023
Introduction
Healthcare supply chains are highly regulated, high-margin domains with stringent quality criteria, such as the demand for cold-chain storage and shipping. In addition, due to a lack of adequate understanding of the complicated rules governing healthcare products and services, medical aid providers are encountering inefficiencies while outsourcing capabilities to logistics service providers (LSPs).
In today's value-based care paradigm, healthcare leaders are tasked with improving patient outcomes while decreasing costs. With surging globalization, the growing cross-border nature of several medical products, and rising complexities in healthcare logistics, the need for building a robust supply chain is rapidly increasing across the healthcare industry.
Key Ways to Enhance Healthcare Supply Chain
A resilient supply chain plays a vital role in managing supplies, procuring resources, and shipping medical goods, among others, which assists in improving patient outcomes, enhancing service efficiency, and declining costs. Healthcare organizations are aiming to strengthen their supply chain to enjoy these benefits such as increased reimbursement, improved quality control, reduced inventory and overhead costs, and better collaboration with suppliers.
Here are some of the key ways to assist medical aid providers in building a strong healthcare supply chain
Develop effective inventory management
Manufacturers frequently encounter difficulties with timely inventory movement through their supply chains. Revenue is lost, and profit margins are harmed when products expire because they are not used adequately. This is why it is crucial to effectively manage the inventory process.
Hence, healthcare executives should deploy a high-quality equipment management system and increase collaboration between organizations, suppliers, and manufacturers to assist them in controlling inventory levels and effective inventory management.
Use technology and analytics to make operations run smoother
When it comes to supply chain management automation, the healthcare sector continues to lag behind other sectors. This is true for both the enterprise resource planning (ERP) functions and data analytics use for making decisions about forecasting and product choice.
Healthcare executives should make use of efficient technologies, such as solid analytics, in order to successfully improve a supply chain. Implementing data analytics and automation tools can assist in making healthcare supply chain management more efficient and effortless.
Widen and strengthen the supplier base
One of the most effective ways to build a robust healthcare supply chain is by increasing the number of suppliers and enhancing supplier base management.
Manufacturers and purchasers should abandon using single-or limited-source supply chains for raw materials and finished goods. This will assist healthcare companies in expanding their network of raw material suppliers and helps in careful consideration of which suppliers to use for procuring which resources.
Improve order accuracy and order cycle times to lower costs
Healthcare providers sometimes encounter a large number of errors during the ordering process. When incorrect products are ordered, the facilities face losses in revenue and are sometimes unable to deliver specific services due to the unavailability of products they need. Errors in placing orders can also result in medication errors. This can lead to a decrease in patient outcomes and negatively impact the company’s revenue growth.
To reduce the frequency of errors, these providers should deploy a computerized provider entry system. This will help improve order accuracy, increase supply chain efficiencies, and shorten turnaround times in healthcare ordering processes.
Consistently track and calibrate performance
Regardless of the size of the healthcare facility, it is of great importance for medical aid providers to carefully track and calibrate their performance frequently or on a specified timeline. This enables clinically integrated supply chains in healthcare to use key performance indicators (KPIs) to compare outcomes in terms of cost and quality and make decisions about products.
What’s Next?
The rising integration of novel disruptive technologies such as data analytics, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain into healthcare supply chain management software is facilitating smooth operations, transparency, growth, and security across the life-science industry.
With a growing need for enhancing supply chains, healthcare providers are focusing on deploying advanced supply chain management solutions, such as healthcare logistics software, to strengthen their supply chains. As the trend continues to grow, the sales of healthcare supply chain management software and services are anticipated to rise from the US$2.2 billion registered in 2020 to US$3.3 billion by 2025.
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Healthtech Security
Article | November 29, 2023
Before we discuss the importance of telehealth and how it is changing the nursing industry in general, it is important to understand what telehealth is all about. With the advent of new-age technologies and their impact on the fast-paced, growing population, medical health is an essential department that requires special attention. One’s health is of utmost importance, and to enhance the medical facilities, we as responsible citizens and experts in this particular field must come up with novel and quick solutions to provide optimum precaution and cure. Hence, one of such technological achievements is telecommunication,s and by utilizing such a useful resource, health-related services too can be offered. Telehealth promotes the distribution of various services related to medical health through electronic devices and telecommunication technologies. What can one possibly do if he or she lives in a different country and is pushed to an emergency situation where he requires medical advice from a physician who lives in another corner of the world? Of course, through telecommunication devices, the whole process of exchanging information becomes smoother and easier. Several health-related services such as medical advice, medical care, monitoring, education, remote admissions, and intervention can be extended to a long-distance patient with the help of telehealth facilities. Hence, the contemporary picture of health and medicine has been radically improved with the introduction of these electronic telecommunication systems.
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Healthtech Security
Article | August 31, 2023
Is your health technology company publishing content online? Not sure how to make your health tech content marketing effective?
Each step taken in the process of content marketing matters. Skipping essential steps may negatively affect the whole process. The following steps are critical in your content strategy:
• Defining your ideal buyer
• Gathering insights about how they make decisions
• Documenting how your content will address their needs
Lately, health tech companies are facing too much competition. Thus it would be wise to equip yourself with a good marketing strategy, including a clear content marketing plan. This blog focuses on making your health content marketing more effective, overcoming challenges, and eliminating the chances of failure.
Content Marketing challenges for Health Tech Marketers
Heath tech brands face multiple obstacles with health tech content marketing. They must deal with many challenges such as content proliferation, uncoordinated and inconsistent content creation, and difficulty in reaching out to customers and prospects with relevant and timely content.
A lot of hard work and time is required to create great content. Let us have a closer look at the challenges faced by health tech marketers related to content marketing.
Determining Content Marketing ROI
Many of the health tech content marketers are struggling to show ROI from their content marketing efforts. They cannot claim a specific conversions rate from a channel or a piece of content. Often digital conversion paths of the health tech industry cannot be analyzed or tacked.
Some other biggest challenges of health tech content marketing are tying content to conversions, defining appropriate and relevant metrics for measuring and evaluating the impact of the content marketing efforts on its bottom line.
Figuring Out How to Feed the Content Beast
Including health tech brands, many brands spend too much time thinking and worrying about creating compelling content. Or they worry about making content thattheir boss, salespeople, or other stakeholders need. The goal should be creating content consistently that is necessary for the client's journey. Your health tech content marketing should focus on your target audience searching online for your product and business.
Proving Credibility and Authority
Many health tech marketers struggle with defining a credible and authoritative voice for their brands. They fail in the process of cutting through the noise and grabbing the attention of their target audience for this very reason.
A health tech content marketing strategy should maintain the brand’s identity, improve its authority, and boost ROI. Here, thought leadership has a role to play. Use your people, their expertise, and their passion effectively to share what they know about your product with your target audience. Trust and credibility will follow.
Maintaining Volume, Quality, Speed
Another significant challenge of health tech content marketing is developing compelling, engaging content fast without compromising on volume and quantity. For many marketers, a big pain point is trying to stay agile and nimble within a large corporate structure.
Continuous Learning
The marketing landscape is ever-changing. It means health tech marketers have to dedicate themselves to learning throughout their life.. They also have to reinvent through innovation to avoid extinction. Primarily, health tech content marketing needs constant innovation and learning. Everyone is trying to navigate the learning curve. It is very challenging for marketers to train teams and update them with the latest marketing practices.
Influencer Marketing
Another challenge faced by most marketers in their health tech content marketing efforts is identifying influencers to amplify content. Creating great content is just the first step. Having an effective promotion strategy to reach your prospects with your content helps.
Reasons for Health Tech Content Marketing Failure
A study by Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) on health tech content marketing shows a vast gap between results and goals. Is there discontent in health tech content marketing? Eighty-five percent of the survey participants said they have a content marketing strategy, but only 4 percent only said their content marketing strategy was effective.
So, it's clear that something was not working for them. Here are some of the key reasons:
The Absence of a Content Strategy
Except for some large tech companies, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce, most vendors do not have a content marketing strategy. For many tech companies, content marketing is part of their overall business strategy. So consider building a health tech content marketing strategy to have a leg up on your competitors.
Lack of Sponsorship
Creating compelling content is a low-priority task for most B2B tech companies. A small marketing team usually takes care of health tech content marketing with limited resources and budget. It results in content that does not align with your market positioning and business strategy.
Content-Creation Bottlenecks
Content marketers need quality content for marketng. For this, subject matter experts (SME) should be involved in the process of content creation. SMEs, most often, are too busy to participate in the process. As a result, the content may turn out low in quality and might not be consistent
Lack of a Content Distribution Strategy
Unless you promote high value content on all the digital and social media channels, no one will hear about your health tech brand. Most B2B health tech companies fail to promote themselves through effective health tech content marketing on multiple digital and social media channels.
No Patience
B2B health tech companies want instant results. The survey by in 2020 HIMSS points out the minimum time needed to fetch results from content marketing programs. A health tech content marketing program launched in this quarter will not bring you any developments in the same quarter.
Effective Content Marketing Plan for Health Tech Marketers
The global pandemic has accelerated the shift towards digital marketing. Many healthcare technology marketers focus on pure sales collateral and product-centric content instead of thought leadership and human-centric content.
Here are five areas that deserve more attention in your health tech content marketing plan. These should be top priorities in your content plan.
Planning the Process and Setting Reasonable Goals & Objectives
Data shows that most healthcare technology companies do not have an effective health tech content marketing plan. It is not surprising that these companies, accelerating ahead everyday, do not have the time to plan or enough resources to execute it. There are three reasons behind it:
• They never made planning a proper priority.
• They realize they don’t have the time.
• The team doesn’t know where to start.
Good planning with realistic goals and expectations solves this issue. Quality content marketing is a long-term investment, not a short-term performance vehicle.
Benchmark the Market & Your Competition
Investigating your competition may get you down. Analyzing every aspect of your competitors’ content, including approach and strategy, will help you learn many essentials things. You will get ideas to improve your health tech content marketing from your competitor analysis.
Do not get confused between your sales competitors and content competitors. Your sales competitor is the one who sells your exact product or service. Your content competitors are companies ranking on search engines for the same content that you want to ranked for on search engine result pages. In addition to pure sales competitors, these content competitors can include major publishers such as trade associations and newspapers.
Fine-Tune Your Messages, Themes & Topics
It is effortless to come up with a long list of content ideas. It is vital to understand the themes and topics, which will work better for your business goals. The topics should be worth the time and effort you put in. Your themes, topics, and other content ideas in your health tech content marketing plan should support your core health tech messaging.
People usually tend to create content randomly and wonder why their content marketing does not work in the end. Fine-tuning your themes, messages, and topics and making sure they are all unified in the process is a big part of ensuring your content succeeds in the end.
Address All Four Content Distribution Channels
Creating great content is just a first step to your health tech content marketing. You may have to think of the content distribution channels: owned media, internal channels, earned media, and paid media. All of these channels have multiple options for content distribution. Depending on your company’s business goals and particular situations, you can choose the best-suited application from these channels.
Get the Most Out of Your Content Marketing Efforts
Maximize your health tech content marketing investment with the three Rs: refresh, repurpose, and repromote.
Refreshing means updating old content that performed well in the past. It may include changing the published date and updating the internal links to timely and more current information. Repurposing means changing the format. You can make a blog post out of a webinar or create an infographic out of a case study. Promoting and redistributing older content that performed well in the past is repromoting.
With content marketing, it is tough to have long-term success without a documented strategy and commitment. With a detailed process, you will have clarity about your goals and the tactics you will use to achieve them. If you do not have this practice, it's better to develop your strategy and write it down to improve your health tech content marketing's better effectiveness.
Content marketing is a proven way to connect with the tech industry audience, especially in health tech. Creating great content about your business, which the audience finds reliable and helpful, will make your company reliable and a trusted source to solve problems.
Doing it alone may be a tiresome job. We, at Media 7, provide all the assistance in marketing technology products online. We have the right solution for all your demand generation, lead generation, sales, and marketing problems. Media 7 converts leads and turns them into your happy customers forever. To know more about Media 7, visit: https://media7.com
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is content marketing important in health tech?
Content marketing is crucial in health tech as unique content makes your target audience trust your brand and consider it a trustworthy source for solving their issues. Moreover, to build your brand, content marketing is a vital component.
How do you create a successful health tech content strategy?
When you create a successful health tech content strategy, an ideal buyer profile, buyer persona, customer journey, etc., should be considered. Along with that, you should have clear objectives and goals when you make a content strategy.
What is the essential step in creating a health tech content marketing plan?
The essential step in creating your health tech content marketing plan is defining your targeted audience and understanding the buyer persona. It will help you create relevant and audience-focused content.
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Article | April 20, 2020
Across the spectrum of healthcare delivery – payor, provider, vendor, consumer, there is a land rush underway to embrace consumer-centric care. With tools like value-based care, chronic disease management, retail services, analytics, and remote patient monitoring, healthcare organizations are pivoting towards capabilities that provide a deeper understanding of patient behaviors and address the whole patient and not just the condition.
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