Enabled with AI, a CMS can help healthcare organizations in a number of ways, including by:
Breaking down data silos
A next-generation CMS often leverages built-in integrations and APIs to transfer important consumer data from one system to another. By ingesting data from a variety of sources and storing it in one central location within your CMS, IT, and marketing teams can break down information silos. This makes it easier for your internal teams to access and analyze data, which can lead to better decision-making.
To do this yourself, execute on a data mapping exercise with your various IT, Marketing, and Strategy stakeholders. Your team will be able to follow the flow of data and understand where your silos might exist today – and how to break them down for the future.
Improving visibility into consumers and patient interactions
Rather than relying on a variety of individual analytics platforms – each of which displays different data from different parts of the customer experience – your CMS should integrate with analytics tools to help collect data from all of your customer touchpoints. This includes data from websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and more.
Then, the data can be analyzed to create a singular dashboard for healthcare organizations to easily analyze customer behavior. This will give your team visibility into the true customer journey, and where it might fracture. You can use these learnings to make data-informed decisions and optimize the patient experience.
Here's a real-world example: When LasikPlus reviewed their first-party data from their website's search experience, they realized that consumers were asking questions that had not been addressed on their website. Since they began analyzing search queries in 2020, LasikPlus has answered more than 8,500 queries. The brand's click-through rate for site search results is now greater than 25% — indicating that more than a quarter of all site searches performed on the LasikPlus website led patients to useful information.
Reducing time to insight
Many of the rote, time-consuming tasks involved in data analysis can be automated, such as data cleansing and data preparation. From there, marketing teams can leverage smart analytics tools like Tableau, PowerBI, or Google Data Studio. These dashboards enable your team to find insights from the data faster and more efficiently.
Your CMS should empower your team to make data-informed decisions. A CMS that allows your team to track, cluster, and analyze site search queries can help you understand how or when to invest in new service lines. Or, you can leverage sentiment analysis within your websites' reviews to help your organization calculate the lifetime value of a patient.
With the right technology integrated with the right CMS, your team can spend less time preparing and analyzing data, and instead focus on strategies and solutions.
Creating actionable, unified profiles
Your healthcare organization can create actionable, unified profiles of your consumers based on their interactions on your owned channels. Ideally, all of your owned channels – and first-party data – are managed from your CMS. This information can then be used to personalize consumer experiences and deliver more relevant marketing messages.
Analyzing search intent is a classic use case. For example, since the COVID-19 pandemic, we've started to see a progression of search data from "coronavirus" queries, to "covid19" queries, and finally, to "covid vaccine" queries over time. The data makes it clear that consumers have not only become more educated about the virus, but also are signaling to the health systems that they are seeking more information about prevention.
Making optimal communications choices
When your CMS integrates well with your customer relationship management system, or CRM, it can help your healthcare organizations make optimal communications choices by understanding how your patients prefer to interact with you.
For example, if a patient notes during their inquiry that they prefer to communicate via email rather than phone, your business will know to send them email marketing messages. This is important because some demographics, like Gen Z consumers, prefer digital experiences, and will change providers based on whether there are digital engagement options available.
In this case, a next-generation CMS takes on a new meaning: it's truly built for the next generation of healthcare consumers.
Ensuring governance, security, and privacy
It is important that your CMS is compliant with governance, security, and privacy due to the restrictive and important HIPAA laws that need to be followed. What is standard for other industries may not be secure enough for healthcare systems.
Choosing a new platform means ensuring the platform has the appropriate security and access controls, and will follow HIPAA regulations. This is especially important to ensure data leaks – and the resulting legal liability risks – are minimized.
Reducing costs
By reducing the time it takes to gather important data, your team is able to collate information more quickly. Armed with these insights, your team spends less time on problem analysis, and more time creating high-impact solutions.
With an AI-enabled CMS that breaks down data silos, your customers and their needs become clear. This is empowering information: with these insights, your healthcare organization can improve the patient experience. And by fixing any fractures in their journey, you can decrease patient attrition and encourage customer loyalty – ultimately, impacting your bottom line with cost-savings and increased revenue.
