Case Study: Drive More Patient Portal Signups and Usage

“Healthcare portals are huge,” says Caty Wolf, Manager of Marketing Communications at WellSpan Health, an integrated health system in central Pennsylvania. Wolf is responsible for CRM and marketing automation. She works with LionShare’s business intelligence and CRM platform, DIATA®. WellSpan is using marketing automation to acquire and activate consumers on its patient portal.

“[A portal is] just good business in terms of communicating with your patients. It gives them more options to be more involved in their care. And it can be a very important communication tool in terms of everything from compliance to clarifying physicians’ instructions,” Wolf notes. “But it’s a new concept to our patients, this idea that you can go on your computer and actually send your physician a note at 2 o’clock in the morning, and they actually will respond to you the next day. Most people have trained themselves to wait until 8 a.m. when the office opens and call. We are finding that it’s a habit that’s very hard to break, not only for our patients but also for our staff in general.”

How is Wolf cracking the code? She reports that, on the patient side of things, the first challenge is to get them to sign up, start using the portal, and discover what a convenience it is.

WellSpan recently launched a monthly acquisition program, “a very basic direct marketing-oriented campaign where once a month we would contact anyone on our file for which we had an email address if they were not already active with a portal account,” Wolf says. “Our winning subject line is ‘Important information about your medical records.’ We’ve done really well with that. The campaign brought in approximately a quarter of all new accounts for our portal last year.”

For more on Wolf’s best portal practices—including a drip campaign that successfully converted 5,000 online applicants in “limbo” status to active accounts (a conversion rate of 36 percent)—read our full article now: WellSpan Health Uses LionShare’s CRM and Marketing Automation Platform to Crack the Code on Portal Sign-ups.

Best regards,
Jane Weber Brubaker
Editor