Bright Lights, Big Data: Building a Platform for Optimized Healthcare Marketing

// By Marc Needham //

A fully integrated and transparent funnel allows you to focus your efforts where they’re going to really make a difference. 

When my kids first meet other kids their age, they perform a funny little ritual. There’s typically some introductory small talk 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.

One of my favorite parts of going to conferences is the random conversations with other healthcare marketers over dinner or wandering the exhibitor halls. As with little kids, our conversations often involve a little bit of drilling to find common interests. Unlike little kids, the topics we rattle off are typically healthcare marketing headaches. “Oh, your CRM vendor closed their doors, too?” or “Have you managed to get direct access to EMR data yet?”

So many long-term friendships blossom from those moments of shared pain.

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 is always plenty of pain to go around and lots to talk about.

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, I’ve seen lots of seemingly impossible problems vanish and other problems that seemed easily remedied prove to be more tenacious.

Here’s the story of how I found solutions to some of the problems that have vexed our industry for years.

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