Get the Most Out of Data Science Insights for Your Healthcare Marketing

Data-driven marketing is the holy grail in today’s environment of accountability. To get there, many organizations are investing in data scientists. Phoenix Children’s Hospital is one of them.

In our new article, Jared Johnson shares his experience from Year One of having a data scientist on-board. Until very recently, Johnson was manager of marketing technology and analytics at Phoenix Children’s. He’s also a member of the eHealthcare Strategy & Trends Editorial Advisory Board. Here’s an excerpt of the new article:

Many hospitals and health systems are adding data scientists and analysts to their marketing and communications teams. Learning how to incorporate data science and get the most of the insights it provides is an ongoing process for most marketers.

Our team at Phoenix Children’s Hospital recently passed our first year with a full-time marketing analytics specialist. There is always a lot to learn as you go, but here are some of the key points that have helped us take best advantage of this role.

1. A data scientist can provide more data than you could ever imagine. The volume of what suddenly becomes available at your fingertips is impressive. In one of our first meetings with our analytics specialist on-board, we started listing all the data points that we could compile. It started with basics — email open rates, click-through rates, Facebook engagement rates, website unique visits.

We soon filled that whiteboard from top to bottom with additional data points: patient volumes, event registrations, sentiment analysis, video views — you name it. Our list grew to hundreds, which could have become hundreds of thousands by the time we started cross-tabulating.

The flood of data is fantastic, but it can feel overwhelming. We took care to keep team members from feeling like they were drowning in it.

2. Data can take a lot of time to prepare. Think of it as a holiday feast. All the time spent prepping and cooking the meal is much greater than the time you spend at the table sinking your teeth into it.

Reports such as this one reported in Forbes in 2016 regularly state that data scientists spend most of their time preparing or massaging data rather than mining or modeling it, and data preparation can be the least enjoyable part of their work.

Read more now: Healthcare Marketing Analytics: 6 Things We Learned with Our New Data Scientist

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President