CRM and Marketing Automation: A Tale of Two Strategies

Trinity Health plans to make all of its 87 hospitals accountable care organizations. As the system shifts from fee-for-service to fee-for-value and moves aggressively toward population health, marketing automation will be a key part of the strategy.

“We’re going to pilot a marketing automation system at Saint Alphonsus,” said Sheree Esser, Trinity Health’s CRM Manager as she was boarding her plane in Boise, Idaho. “We want to do email because it’s much cheaper than direct mail.”

The goal is to keep consumers healthier and reduce healthcare costs by getting them to take a preventive action, such as scheduling a mammogram or coming in for a diabetes test. “The idea is to be a little bit more targeted in our messages, to make them meaningful to folks, to keep them well, and to keep our costs down,” says Esser.

CHRISTUS Health has been successfully using CRM to improve its payer mix, using the predictive modeling capabilities of its CRM solution from Influence Health (formerly MEDSEEK) to target individuals with commercial insurance. “We’re typically around 24%, and when we look at our respondents for commercial insurance out of our CRM system, we’re in the low 40s,” says Kellie Spellman, Director of CRM.

These two large nonprofit systems are using CRM for very different purposes, each with impressive results. To learn more about how CRM is giving marketers a larger strategic role in healthcare organizations, read our latest article, Trinity Health and CHRISTUS Health Drive ROI with CRM.

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Jane Weber Brubaker
Editor