Health Technology, Digital Healthcare
Article | September 8, 2023
Technology in the 21st century is the fuel that drives innovation and ease in almost every industry today. The healthcare sector isn’t far behind. In fact, the medical industry has taken the concept of the Internet of Things and took it to a new level altogether to reimagine the use of medical technology.
Imagine multiple devices like phones, cameras, GPS sensors, and computers interacting with each other through a seamless transfer of data. Now consider wearable medical devices. The exchange of critical medical information through a web of real-time data networks activates near instantaneous responses from doctors, nurses, and medical services. The aim is to anticipate the need for medical attention long before it is needed and remedy the concerns before they reach a critical stage.
That is exactly how the future of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is shaping out to be.
How IoMT is Redefining Everyday Health?
IoMT is a next-generation solution that embeds cutting-edge monitoring and analysis of individual healthcare journeys through medical devices. The smart watch is the most recognizable wearable medical device that is used by millions of people daily to keep tabs on their vitals.
For instance, the Apple Watch series 6 maps blood oxygen levels, sleep patterns, ECG levels, and also reminds the user to wash their hands after returning home.
The market for healthcare IoT products is vast and is constantly expanding. The Tango Belt is a leading example of smart wearable technology that is revolutionizing elderly and disability care. The belt is designed to sense falls and deploy airbags to soften the impact. In addition, it alerts caregivers in the event of a fall. The belt also uses data analytics by collecting mobility data that is then synced to a smartphone app for displaying metrics.
Technologies that Empower IoMT
With the diverse tasks that medical devices must perform, applications exist across a wide spectrum, from artificial intelligence to 5G networks to the cloud.
Consider a pacemaker, for instance. Modern pacemakers are embedded with a multitude of technologies that communicate with each other to send critical patient data to physicians. A pacemaker is a bioelectronic implant that is placed in the chest to control the heartbeat. But a smart pacemaker goes a step further. It is equipped with wireless bluetooth technology that communicates with the patient’s wearable medical device. The smart device or phone will then transfer this data to physicians for check-ups and even alert doctors in the case of anomalies.
To Round It Off
IoMT will subsequently power all medical devices and usher in a future where technology forms the backbone of healthcare service delivery. Although wearable medical technology has been around for decades, the development of a streamlined communication channel between them has redefined their use. Smart medical devices are no longer just an aid but a source of vital individual medical data as well as a way to anticipate care and medical attention.
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Healthtech Security
Article | August 31, 2023
It is not an easy task to engage decision-makers in hospitals, insurance providers, health systems, and private practices. These high-powered directors, managers, and executives are busier than ever. This makes the process of health tech marketing difficult. Apart from overwhelming job responsibilities, these healthcare professionals are also inundated with ads, emails, and phone calls. So rather than sending them messages randomly, it is important to help your prospects when they are free from their daily disruptions and have time.
Inbound marketing, a new form of marketing, lays out various effective healthcare marketing techniques, tricks, or tactics. These health tech marketing techniques or methodologies are helpful in the three stages of your health tech client journey:
Awareness Stage: This is the stage where they do not know they have a problem, but you make them aware of the fact that they have a problem.
Consideration Stage: In this stage, they are aware that they have a problem and consider finding a solution from you or your competitor.
Decision Stage: This is the final stage, where prospects make a decision.
Here are some effective health tech marketing techniques to engage new health tech marketing prospects online all through these stages.
Offer Entertaining and Informative Blog Content
Content is king. Roper Public Affairs, in their research report, say that around 80% of B2B decision-makers prefer to gather information from articles and blogs over ads. According to the research done by HubSpot, companies that publish blogs frequently get 4.5x more leads. Engage your health tech prospects with regular content that can address their interests and the problems they face.
However, it is a mistake to focus only on your health tech company’s benefits, features, or sales pitches in your blogs. This may make your prospects think you are just after their money. One of the best health tech marketing techniques to engage your prospects online is to provide answers to the challenges they face.
You can even ask and encourage your clients to contribute success stories or guest posts. These posts will have more value and the chances of them being shared are high. It is also better to create a strategy to make sure the health tech marketing content you make is valuable and relevant to your potential clients.
Encourage Social Media Feedback and Blog Comments
Providing great and prospect oriented health tech marketing content is just the beginning. You can solicit reactions from your audience. Asking questions at the end of blogs and social media health tech messages is a great way to collect reactions from the audience. It is good to thank them for responding when they leave a comment. Also, give them a comprehensive answer.
This will help build your credibility and make the clients come back. Sometimes, you may get spam comments, which are not connected to your post. Weed them out to make all comments relevant to the post. This health tech marketing technique will make your potential clients stay engaged in what you post online.
Host Google Hangouts or Webinars
People love being visually engaged. So, webinars or Google Hangouts are powerful tools that allow real-time interaction with your customers. This helps you to establish a personal connection with your potential clients through video or audio. Various visual aspects, including slides, graphics, and live videos, make it easier for you to share your content with customers.
Being an interactive health tech marketing technique, at the end of webinar sessions or Google hangout, you can have a Q and A session to clarify any questions from the clients. Compared to merely writing blog posts and articles, this, as a two-way dialogue, and will help you a lot in building a strong relationship with your clients.
Create a Group or Community
One of the best health tech marketing techniques to engage new customers is to interact in online forums and communities. Your buyers can get added to your members-only group automatically and then these members can socialize with each other and discuss healthcare technology.
These forums can be used to share content that is not available to the public. To the members, you can also offer various discounts and special pricing. Your customers, being part of such a group, will feel special and increase the possibility of a repeat purchase.
Co-Create with Existing Customers
If you are planning to write an e-book, improve your website, or launch a new product, involve your existing customers by getting suggestions from them. For fostering loyalty, depending on the situation, it is very effective to make your customers involved in major decision-making processes. They will feel proud that they participated, at the end of the process.
This health tech marketing technique may even allow you to hold a contest to select an idea from your customers for your next design and offer rewards for the one which is selected. Rewards can be a special mention on your website, a discount, or a freebie.
Celebrate Together!
Another great health-tech marketing technique to build stronger relationships with your customers is to celebrate milestones with them. Any achievement, small or big, can be a milestone. Even, achieving an award for attaining a certain number of followers can be a milestone. Sharing such moments of success with your customers and social media followers may make them feel like they are part of your business and success.
It is also a good idea to give them a discount offer. Also, recognizing the success of your clients and featuring them will establish a good relationship with customers.
Monitor Social Media
The best place to engage your clients in conversations about your products and industry is social media. Selecting a topic that is trending in your industry may be a hot cake for you to have the conversation on your social media platforms. Tracking trending topics related to your industry will always give you an insight for your next blog post and social media posts.
By sharing, liking, and providing answers you can also take part in conversations. This will make you an authority and customers will feel good about your credibility. As a health tech marketing technique, monitoring social media will make you gain the trust of the customers and build your brand gradually but successfully.
Build a List of Leads and Nurture them
Email marketing, as a health tech marketing technique, is a very effective strategy to nurture B2B customer relationships. According to HubSpot, for business communication, 86% of people prefer emails. You will be in the minds of potential customers through your value-packed and attractive emails. They will remember you when they identify a requirement.
Through your emails, you can update and educate your potential customers about relevant topics and trends related to the health tech industry. A newsletter in a week will be fair enough to keep them engaged and updated about your brand and industry.
Summing up
The key to generating more qualified leads and increasing your brand recognition is engaging new prospects tough new and innovative health tech marketing techniques. This will make your sales team’s job easier; they can convert these leads into customers. The above-listed health tech marketing techniques to engage with your prospects can be effectively used with your well-crafted Inbound marketing strategy.
Doing all of these alone can be very challenging. We, at Media7, partner with healthcare technology companies and healthcare tech marketers to offer support, strategy, and extending help to implement these activities. Through the collaboration, we help health tech companies to attract more visitors to their websites, generate leads, convert, and make them your happy customers. For more details of our services, visit our website: https://media7.com/
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a health tech marketing strategy?
Health tech marketing strategy is a part of an inbound marketing process for marketing healthcare tech products. It uses resources that can trace various opportunities through lead generation and branding, and overcome threats of healthcare businesses, which is highly competitive.
What is the best health tech marketing technique?
The best health tech marketing technique is to generate leads through various content forms. Health tech Content marketing helps create awareness about the product and attract clients to it. Different forms of content can include blogs, articles, press releases, newsletters, and much more.
Where to start when creating your healthcare marketing strategy
The best way to start when creating your healthcare marketing strategy is to set your goals. This is because the success of your healthcare marketing strategy depends upon the goal you set for yourself when you start the business and the marketing for it.
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Health Technology, Digital Healthcare
Article | August 16, 2023
The COVID-19 virus (C19) pandemic is turning out to be the event of the century. Even World War seems timid in comparison. We are in the 4th month of the virus (in non-China countries) and have gone past the lockdown in many places. Isn’t it time we re-think the approach? What if there is another wave of C19 coming soon? What if C19 is the first of many such events in the future?
Before we get into analysis and solution design, summarizing the C19 quirks:
While a large section of the affected population is asymptomatic, for some it can be lethal
There isn’t clarity on all the ways C19 spreads
It’s known to affect the lungs, heart, and kidneys in patients with weak immunity
It has been hard to identify a definitive pattern of the virus. Some observations in managing the C19 situation are:
With no vaccine in sight, the end of this epidemic looks months or years away
Health care personnel in hospitals need additional protection to treat patients
Lockdowns lead to severe economic hardship and its repeated application can be damaging
Quarantining people has an economic cost, especially in the weaker sections of society
If one takes a step back to re-think about this, we are primarily solving 2 problems:
Minimise deaths: Minimise the death of C19 and non-C19 patients in this period
Maximise economic growth: The GDP output/growth should equal or higher than pre-C19 levels
One needs to achieve the 2 goals in an environment of rising number of C19 cases.
Minimise deaths
An approach that can be applied to achieve this is:
Data driven health care capacity planning
Build a health repository of all the citizens with details like pre-existing diseases, comorbidity, health status, etc. The repository needs to be updated quarterly to account for patient data changes
This health repository data is combined with the C19 profile (disease susceptibility) and/or other seasonal diseases to determine the healthcare capacity (medicines, doctors, etc.) needed
The healthcare capacity deficit/excess needs to be analysed in categories (beds, equipment, medicine, personnel, etc.) and regions (city, state, etc.) and actions taken accordingly
Regular capacity management will ensure patients aren’t deprived of timely treatment. In addition, such planning helps in the equitable distribution of healthcare across regions and optimising health care costs. Healthcare sector is better prepared to scale-up/down their operations
Based on the analysis citizens can be informed about their probability of needing hospitalisation on contracting C19. Citizens with a higher health risk on C19 infection should be personally trained on prevention and tips to manage the disease on occurrence
The diagram below explains the process
Mechanism to increase hospital capacity without cost escalation
Due to the nature of C19, health personnel are prone to infection and their safety is a big issue. There is also a shortage of hospitable beds available. Even non-C19 patients aren’t getting the required treatment because health personnel seek it as a risk. This resulted in, healthcare costs going up and availability reducing.
To mitigate such issues, hospital layouts may need to be altered (as shown in the diagram below). The altered layout improves hospital capacity and availability of health care personnel. It also reduces the need for the arduous C19 protection procedures. Such procedures reduce the patient treatment capacity and puts a toll on hospital management.
Over a period, the number of recovered C19 persons are going to increase significantly. We need to start tapping into their services to reduce the burden on the system. The hospitals need to be divided into 3 zones. The hospital zoning illustration shown below explains how this could be done. In the diagram, patients are shown in green and health care personnel are in light red.
**Assumption: Infected and recovered C19 patients are immune to the disease. This is not clearly established
Better enforcement of social factors
The other reason for high number of infections in countries like India is a glaring disregard in following C19 rules in public places and the laxity in enforcement. Enforcement covers 2 parts, tracking incidents of violation and penalising the behaviour. Government should use modern mechanisms like crowd sourcing to track incidents and ride on the growing public fear to ensure penalty enforcement succeeds. The C19 pandemic has exposed governance limitations in not just following C19 rules, but also in other areas of public safety like road travel, sanitation, dietary habits, etc.
Maximise economic growth
The earlier lockdown has strained the economy. Adequate measures need to be taken to get the economy back on track. Some of the areas that need to be addressed are:
One needs to evaluate the development needs of the country in different categories like growth impetus factors (e.g. building roads, electricity capacity increase), social factors (e.g. waste water treatment plants, health care capacity), and environmental factors (e.g. solar energy generation, EV charging stations). Governments need to accelerate funding in such projects so that that large numbers of unemployed people are hired and trained. Besides giving an immediate boost to the ailing economy such projects have a future payback. The governments should not get bogged down by the huge fiscal deficit such measures can create. Such a mechanism to get money out in the economy is far than better measures like QE (Quantitative Easing) or free money transfer into people’s bank accounts
Certain items like smartphone, internet, masks, etc. have become critical (for work, education, critical government announcements). It’s essential to subsidise or reduce taxes so that these items are affordable and accessible to everyone without a financial impact
The government shouldn’t put too many C19 related controls on service offerings (e.g. shops, schools, restaurants, cabs). Putting many controls increases the cost of the service which neither the seller not buyer is willing or able to pay. Where controls are put, the Govt should bear the costs or reduce taxes or figure out a mechanism so that the cost can be absorbed.
An event like the C19 pandemic is a great opportunity to rationalise development imbalances in the country. Government funding should be channelized more to under-developed regions. This drives growth in regions that need it most. It also prevents excess migration that has resulted in uncontrolled and bad urbanisation that has made C19 management hard (guidelines like social distance are impossible to follow)
Post-C19 lockdown, the business environment (need for sanitizers, masks, home furniture) has changed. To make people employable in new flourishing businesses there could be a need to re-skill people. Such an initiative can be taken up by the public/private sector
The number of C19 infected asymptomatic patients is going to keep increasing. Building an economy around them (existing, recovered C19 patients) may not be a far-fetched idea. E.g. jobs for C19 infected daily wage earners, C19 infected taxi drivers to transport C19 patients, etc.
In the last 100 years, mankind has conquered the destructive aspects of many a disease and natural mishap (hurricanes, floods, etc.). Human lives lost in such events has dramatically dropped over the years and our preparedness has never been this good. Nature seems to have caught up with mankind’s big strides in science and technology. C19 has been hard to reign in with no breakthrough yet. The C19 pandemic is here to stay for the near future. The more we accept this reality and change ourselves to live with it amidst us, the faster we can return to a new normal. A quote from Edward Jenner (inventor of Small Pox) seems apt in the situation – “The deviation of man from the state in which he was originally placed by nature seems to have proved to him a prolific source of diseases”.
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Future of Healthcare
Article | January 28, 2022
As consumers, we crave convenience and simplicity, and across an array of industries, technology has made it increasingly easy to search for and purchase products and services. From getting a pizza delivered to buying a car online, the process often involves entering a few pieces of information, hitting send, and waiting for a confirmation email.
A Changing Landscape
Unsurprisingly, people want this same level of convenience and simplicitywhen they're seeking care. This change in consumer demand for convenience is further compounded by fundamental shifts in the healthcare ecosystem. Among these shifts are cost-sharing models that have increased patient out-of-pocket expenses, healthcare systems that are increasingly shifting toward delivering value-based care, and innovations in digital health solutions.
While patients want to play an active role in managing their well-being, that is often easier said than done in a system that uses a combination of manual processes and non-integrated point solutions to try and meet consumer demand. Disparate and burdensome methods of managing patient engagement often lead to inefficiencies within provider organizations, resulting in missed appointments, increased registration and eligibility-based denials, incomplete payments, higher collections and write-offs, and low patient satisfaction.
Consumer Dissatisfaction
Healthcare consumers today feel like they're fighting an uphill battle. According to Change Healthcare's 2020 Harris Poll Consumer Experience Index, 67% of respondents agreed that it “feels like every step of the healthcare process is a chore.” A similar percentage, 62%, agreed that “the healthcare system feels like it is set up to be confusing.”
Furthermore, if consumers don’t receive the level of convenience and digitization they want from their current provider, they’re more than willing to seek it out elsewhere. In a recent Black Book survey, 80% of respondents indicated they would be willing to change providers for more convenience even if they were receiving good care from their current provider. An even higher percentage of patients,90%, do not think they have to continue seeing a provider if that provider does not “deliver an overall satisfactory digital experience.”
A Patient-Centric Approach
Improving the patient experiencestarts with humanizing revenue cycle management(RCM) —the administrative process that takes the patient from registration and appointment scheduling to the final payment of a balance. Simply making administrative touchpoints self-service and easy to understand throughout the patient’s financial journey can help humanize revenue cycle management for providers.
How is that possible? By thinking about the patients’ side of the administrative process and leveraging innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. The more that providers’ staffs are able to automate repetitive tasks, the more time they're able to spend helping provide a seamless patient engagement journey that is focused on a patient’s specific needs. In other words, reducing human intervention throughout our technologies allows providers to infuse more human interaction with each patient as they navigate their healthcare journey.
According to Change Healthcare’s 2020 Harris Poll Consumer Experience Index, what patients really want is a retail-like shopping experience with modern, streamlined communication, as thevast majority (81%) agreed that “shopping for healthcare should be as easy as shopping for other common services” via a streamlined access point online. A clear majority (71%) also said they want their health insurance and healthcare providers (68%) to communicate with them using more-modern platforms.
Simplified Scheduling and Payment
The entire clinical-care journey is focused on the specific needs of the patient rather than the provider, so why shouldn’t the patient’s financial journey be handled the exact same way? From a patient-satisfaction perspective, patients are not separating their clinical journey from their financial journey, so providers should start viewing it the same way.
It should be easy to schedule an appointment and modify that appointment if needed. Patients should have to (securely) provide their personal and insurance information only once (digitally and in advance), then be squared away when they show up for their appointment with their provider. In addition, because of COVID-19 and the heightened awareness surrounding personal interaction, it’s important to provide patients with no-contact check-in and waiting room options.
By humanizing RCM, providers can achieve a cohesive end-to-end journey that allows patients to quickly and easily get the care they need complete with clear communication, price transparency , and a provider who truly takes the time to understand their unique situations. By putting the patient back at the center of their care journey, providers can improve care outcomes while also driving maximized business outcomes for their organizations.
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