MedStar Health Supercharges Its Data and Analytics Capabilities
// By Jane Weber Brubaker //
Do your marketing dollars drive results for your organization? Without the right analytics tools, it’s hard to know — or prove.
Why travel by horse and buggy when you can drive a Tesla? That’s the metaphor three presenters at SHSMD Connections 2022 — the annual conference of the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development — used to explain how MedStar Health went from the dark ages of measurement to a souped-up analytics platform that enables insightful, actionable, and easy-to-understand reporting.
Ben Waxman, president of Tessellati, LLC
Ben Waxman, president of Tessellati, LLC, jokes that “as a consultant, if I can confuse you just a little bit, I might be able to convince you that I know more than you do.” But his mission, along with Karen Alcorn, vice president of public affairs and marketing at MedStar Health, Washington Region, is to do the opposite. “Karen and I have worked a lot on simplifying [reporting] so that across all the channels, all the campaigns, there’s a consistent way to communicate [results] internally to your audience.”
Before you can measure success, you have to define it and agree on what it means. Alcorn shares a story from her horse-and-buggy days: “Whenever someone said, ‘We ran a campaign and it was really successful,’ I was all ears. What did you do? What happened? How did you know it was successful? The response was typically, ‘The doctors loved it.’”
Today, MedStar Health’s Tesla-level reporting capabilities are the result of an ongoing four-year journey. “We went from fragmented data and sporadic, minimal analysis to having a robust data mart, regular dashboards and analysis, and statistical modeling,” says Sameer Kasargod, vice president of digital marketing at MedStar Health.
It didn’t happen overnight. Read on to learn how MedStar Health incrementally improved its ability to track and measure what matters most to the organization.
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