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Patient Engagement: Why Email is an Essential Channel

Thursday, June 22nd, 2023

In today’s increasingly digital world, email is often overlooked as a channel for patient engagement. Email may not appear to be as innovative or exciting as texting, social media, or mobile applications. Nevertheless, email is a powerful tool that remains widely popular and accessible to most of the population, making it an essential channel for patient engagement.

Email Adoption Rates

Because of its ubiquity, email should be prioritized as part of your patient engagement efforts. 92% of Americans have email accounts, and 49% check them multiple times daily. Compared to 80% who text, 72% are social media users, and 85% have a smartphone, email has one of the highest adoption rates among digital technologies. Even among older populations and disadvantaged communities, email has been widely adopted.

Best of all, email can be secured to meet HIPAA requirements and protect patient privacy, all while providing a patient-centered experience.

Patient Preferences

Communicating according to patient preferences is one of the most important ways to improve engagement. Many people prefer email communication because it’s less intrusive to their daily lives. The pandemic rapidly accelerated the demand for digital services, and healthcare was not exempt from these shifting preferences. A survey conducted by Redpoint Global found that 80% of patients said that they prefer to use digital channels to communicate with healthcare providers at least some of the time.

In today’s digital society, failing to communicate according to preferences can have significant consequences. Accenture found that 34% of people said they would switch medical providers or be less likely to access care in the future because of a poor experience.

Securing data to comply with HIPAA regulations and obtaining patient consent for marketing communications is essential to engaging patients with personalized emails. Email communications are easy to opt-in and out of- giving patients complete control over how their healthcare data is used.

The Advantages of Email for Patient Engagement

Email has several advantages, but the two most important include the ability to personalize and scale communications. Patients don’t want to receive the same generic newsletters or messaging. They expect their healthcare providers to provide information that is relevant to their health journey at the right time. The power of email lies in its ability to be customized and personalized at scale. Email APIs can pull data from your CDP, EHR, or CRM into dynamic templates. Messages can be triggered and personalized based on pre-determined actions or criteria. Organizations can create fully automated email workflows to streamline operations and meet patient needs.

By using dynamic personalization and automation, your staff can spend less time with their fingers on keyboards and more time assisting patients. Trigger-based email flows can remind patients of appointments, collect insurance information, ensure proper medication adherence, and send other relevant healthcare communications. This frees up time for staff to focus on other tasks and relieves some administrative overhead.

The Results: Improved Patient Engagement

Email is one of the most effective channels for driving customer behavior. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $36. Email can also provide near-instant performance analytics, so it’s possible to tell what messages are resonating and which are not. In addition, A/B testing makes it simple to test components of your message on a small scale and then send out the winning formats. Trying out different email subject lines, calls to action, imagery, and other messaging is easy. Because of these features, personalized email messaging can provide better conversion rates, patient engagement, and return on investment than other digital channels.

Conclusion

Email is a powerful channel that can benefit your medical practice. It is often preferred for one-to-one communication and can also be an effective marketing channel. Learn more about how to address clinical communication challenges with secure email technology by contacting LuxSci today.

Tags: email automation, email engagement, email marketing, hipaa compliance, patient communication, patient engagement, patient experience, patient preferences, patient retention, patient satisfaction, personalization
Posted in HIPAA Marketing
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Identity-Driven Engagement: The Next Generation of Patient Engagement

Wednesday, April 26th, 2023

A new tech buzzword has come to the healthcare industry: identity-driven engagement. This article explains what precisely identity-driven engagement is and how it applies to the healthcare industry’s patient engagement goals.

What is Identity-Driven Engagement?

Identity-driven engagement is not a new concept. It has been used outside the healthcare industry for many years to describe how marketers personalize consumer experiences to build community and achieve better results. It relies on using customer or patient data to create relevant communications that speak to individuals where they are in their journeys.

Successful identity-driven marketing efforts require accurate and up-to-date data sources, as consumer needs and preferences can rapidly change. In some ways, the healthcare industry is at an advantage compared to retail and other B2C companies because of the data they have about their patients. However, electronic health records only tell part of the story. In order to execute patient engagement efforts, a customer data platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system is often required to capture behavior occurring outside of the medical practice. Signals from other digital channels like social media activity, your website, and digital advertising can provide helpful information about what any patient wants at any particular moment.

Using identity-driven engagement techniques allows marketers to incorporate this data to create highly relevant messaging. You can expect better ROI from your marketing efforts by demonstrating that you know your users and their communities.

How to Incorporate Identity Into Your Patient Engagement Strategy

It can take time to set up the right systems to collect data before rolling out identity-driven engagement on a large scale. It’s best to start small by identifying one community in your patient population that isn’t engaging with your health system as expected.

For example, let’s say that in your community, 15% of people speak Spanish as their primary language. Yet, your patient population only contains 2% of this audience. How can you reach more of these people and educate them about your services? By adopting tenets of identity-driven engagement, you can create better messaging and content that speaks to their unique needs. Of course, using Spanish in these messages is vital. But the content should be more than just translations of the other messages you use for your English-speaking patients. This audience has unique needs regarding health concerns, insurance providers, and technology preferences. It’s up to you to learn about these needs and address them with unique messaging that is consistent across all platforms and locations.

Email and Identity-Driven Engagement

Email can be an excellent way to execute identity-driven engagement because it allows for trigger-based activity, audience segmentation, and personalization at scale.

First, emails can be triggered based on new patient activity to provide relevant and timely information. For example, when a patient visits the scheduling page on the website but exits without making an appointment, you can send them a follow-up email with links to complete the process. Suppose you know that the patient was viewing pages on dermatology. In that case, you can include helpful links to dermatologist profiles, related reviews, and other information that may be relevant as they decide where and when they want to visit.

Another core aspect of identity-driven engagement is audience segmentation. Every patient is unique, and it’s important to group patients with similar characteristics to deliver the most relevant messages. Including male patients in an email regarding breast cancer awareness month and the importance of receiving annual screenings doesn’t make sense. By sending the message only to relevant patients, it improves engagement and builds brand trust.

Furthermore, it’s possible to personalize the messages to improve their relevance without adding additional work. The same appointment scheduling reminder can be customized according to what you know about the patient. Do they prefer to talk to someone? Include the phone number prominently. Have they historically preferred morning time slots? Include a few available dates and times that are similar to their previous appointments. Making minor tweaks to the message contents can improve response rates and help your organization meet its goals.

Tags: audience segmentation, cdp, crm, customization, email marketing, email personalization, identity driven engagement, patient engagement, personalization, sdoh, segmentation, triggers
Posted in HIPAA Marketing
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How to Personalize Email Campaigns Using Custom Fields

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023

Personalizing your email content is essential to provide an excellent patient experience. With LuxSci’s Secure Marketing platform, you can use the custom fields feature to make it easier to segment your contacts and personalize content at scale.

What Are Custom Fields?

Custom fields store additional data about your contacts. Traditional custom field data includes information like the first and last name of the email recipient, dates, and location information like city, state, or zip code.

You can use custom fields to capture and include any data you can think of, including information about health conditions, doctor names, insurance information, gender identity, and so much more.

A quick reminder on HIPAA compliance- if you use an email marketing platform to store and send patient health data, ensure it meets compliance requirements. Read more about what you need to look out for when choosing a vendor: Infographic: Most Email Software Cannot Use PHI.

Ways to Use Custom Fields to Personalize Emails

With LuxSci’s fully compliant email marketing solution, you can use custom fields to include any data you’d like, including protected health information. To personalize email content using custom fields, first, you must upload that data to the platform and link it to a specific email address. This is easy to do when uploading a contact list. First, create the custom field. Then, when uploading your list of email addresses, include a column that contains the custom field data. In the example below, both the First Name and Last Name columns represent custom fields.

Next, create your email content. You can insert additional field data by using Dynamic Fields. Dynamic fields appear as %%field_name%% in the content creator. For example, say you want to insert a patient’s name into the body of the email. First, you would have uploaded the patient’s name as a custom field when you uploaded their email address. Then when creating the email copy, you would insert the “name” additional field, which would look like “%%first_name%%.” When the email is sent to the recipient, “%%first_name%%” is replaced by the patient’s name associated with that email address. In their inbox, %%first_name%% appears as “Joanna” or whoever the recipient is. This allows you to create one base message that can be personalized and sent to thousands of recipients.

5 Ways to Use Custom Fields to Personalize Healthcare Emails

Healthcare marketers can use first-party data to create communications that cater to an individual’s interests and preferences. In the healthcare industry, first-party data goes way beyond digital interactions. Information about health statuses, diagnoses, and recent patient visits can all be incorporated into marketing campaigns to guide patients on their journey to better health. Here are a few ideas for ways that you can use custom fields to personalize email messages.

1) Appointment Dates and Times

By associating each email contact with an upcoming appointment date and time, you can insert that data into the body of the email to send multiple reminders at once, confirm appointments, and reduce no-show rates. This is a workflow that can be automated and triggered to send one week before an upcoming appointment, with little additional work needed from the marketing team.

2) Doctor or Provider Name

You may want to include the individual’s provider name in an email message for many reasons. It can be helpful to ask for reviews and feedback, remind patients who their provider is, and build trust and connection with patients and their healthcare provider.

3) Locations

Including the address or office location can help remind patients of where their appointment will be held, especially for large hospital systems or for new patients. Making it as easy as possible to access healthcare services improves the patient experience.

4) Events and Educational Programming

One way to help patients on their healthcare journey is to provide program recommendations based on past behavior or diagnoses. For example, sending resources to diabetes patients based on recent test results can help patients take the right steps to improve their health.

5) Precision Nudging to Improve Health Outcomes

Precision nudging is a preemptive and proactive approach to patient communication that prompts action to overcome patient-specific barriers to action at the right time and place for scalable, sustained behavior change. Messages that drive behavior change include reminding patients to refill a specific prescription, reminders to schedule screenings and follow-up appointments, or pre and post-op instructions.

For some additional ideas on how to use PHI to personalize campaigns, check out some of our other blogs including: Personalize Healthcare Communications to Improve the Patient Experience.

Why Personalize Email Campaigns?

Using personalization techniques is an excellent way to improve engagement, provide a better patient experience, and receive a better ROI on email marketing. Patients expect a personalized healthcare experience, and customizing communications is one of the first steps you can take. Organizations not providing a personalized experience are at risk of declining patient satisfaction, retention, and reimbursement. A 2021 McKinsey survey of more than 3,000 US healthcare consumers found that satisfied patients are 28 percent less likely to switch providers.

To learn more about how to customize email campaigns using custom fields, schedule a demo of LuxSci’s Secure Marketing platform today.

Tags: appointment reminders, email personalization, patient engagement, patient retention, personalization
Posted in HIPAA Marketing, LuxSci Library: HIPAA
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The Benefits of Using PHI in Patient Communications

Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

Some healthcare organizations do not allow PHI to be sent outside the patient’s health record. However, by allowing your marketing and administrative teams to use PHI in patient communication, you can streamline operations, improve the patient experience, and increase revenue.

Although the healthcare industry is traditionally slow to adopt new technologies, the past few years have rapidly accelerated the shift to digital communications. The reasons for these shifts are varied and will be explored in detail below. No matter the reason, one thing is certain- organizations adapting to the modern digital age are thriving, while those resisting change are falling behind in meeting patient expectations.

Changing Technology Preferences

Rapid technological innovation has made it possible to communicate securely at scale. As broadband access has increased, people are incorporating it into their daily lives. In 2022, 92% of Americans reported using email, and 49% checked it every few hours. Many people now prefer to receive business communications via email because it is asynchronous and can be engaged with when it fits into their schedules.

Healthcare organizations that utilize email for external communication are experiencing better response rates and fewer patient no-shows. Email already fits into the daily lives of many patients and doesn’t require them to take extra steps to receive information about their healthcare journey.

The Rise of Healthcare Consumerism

Healthcare consumerism refers to patients’ personal choices and responsibility in paying for and managing their health. Patients are no longer stuck with one provider or practice. They have more choices than ever and will shop around for new providers if unsatisfied with their experience.

If healthcare providers are not delivering a digital experience that meets patient expectations, they could risk losing patients and revenue.

In addition, as younger generations are taking control of their healthcare, they are used to digital-first experiences that are personalized to their needs. If organizations are unwilling to invest into personalized digital patient experiences, they will not adequately serve the next generation of healthcare consumers.

Staffing Challenges

The healthcare industry is not immune to recent staffing challenges. Staffing shortages have left fewer employees available to do more tasks, including patient care. Introducing digital technology into your patient communication strategy can help automate and streamline common communication workflows like:

Appointment reminders
Pre- and post-procedure instructions
Health education messages
Vaccine reminders
Medication adherence reminders
Billing

Automating common workflows frees up time for staff to focus on urgent patient needs and improves the patient experience.

How to Safely Use PHI in Patient Communications

Patients are already communicating with their healthcare providers one-on-one via email. The question is, how can you protect this data while communicating at scale for marketing and educational purposes? There are tools (like LuxSci’s Secure Marketing and Secure High Volume Email solutions) that are designed to support the unique security needs of the healthcare industry while providing the personalized digital experience that patients desire.

Protecting PHI in Patient Communications

PHI needs to be protected in emails with advanced encryption technology. TLS encryption should be used as often as possible because it provides a user experience like regular email without requiring a portal login. For marketing and patient education emails, TLS is sufficient to protect data and allows patients to readily engage with the email content. By properly vetting and choosing the right vendors, marketing and administrative teams can communicate with patients via email without violating HIPAA.

Personalization at Scale

The power of PHI is undeniable. When healthcare marketers can harness healthcare data to create ultra-personalized campaigns, it increases their relevance and the likelihood that the content will be engaged with, delivering a better ROI. Our solutions integrate via API to securely personalize messages and trigger emails when specific conditions are met. This allows marketers to send relevant messages at the right time when it is relevant to the patient’s healthcare journey.

Modern technology is needed to serve today’s patients. Meeting patients where they are with the information they need on the channels they prefer is vital to improving healthcare outcomes for the most vulnerable populations. Using PHI in patient communications gives your organization a comparative advantage by providing a better patient experience.

Tags: automation, email encryption, patient communication, patient experience, personalization, phi, secure email, secure marketing, tls encryption
Posted in Email, HIPAA Marketing
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Rules for Using PHI in Patient Engagement

Friday, November 11th, 2022

As you know by now, we believe strongly in the benefits of using protected health information (PHI) to create highly targeted and personalized email campaigns. However, before you dive in and kick off your campaigns, you must be aware of the complex compliance requirements governing healthcare organizations’ marketing communications.

Reminder: What is PHI?

PHI, or protected health information, is “individually identifiable protected health information.” Protected health information refers specifically to three classes of data:

An individual’s past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition.
The past, present, or future provisioning of health care to an individual.
The past, present, or future payment-related information for the provisioning of health care to an individual.

For protected health information to be “individually identifiable,” the data can be linked to a specific individual (even if this is very indirect). There are 18 types of identifiers for an individual. Any one of these identifiers, combined with “protected health information,” would constitute PHI.

It’s often more complicated than it looks. For example, if you are running email campaigns, an email address is an individual identifier because it can be connected to a specific individual. That, combined with the email content, which often refers to the name of the provider, information about their health conditions, insurance coverage, or upcoming appointments, means that most communications from a healthcare practice could qualify as PHI.

HIPAA Rules for Using PHI in Patient Engagement

HIPAA regulates patient privacy. Healthcare organizations and their associates must obtain consent and implement technical safeguards before starting marketing campaigns.

HIPAA Privacy Rule

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, you must acquire consent to send marketing communications under the HIPAA Privacy Rule. It reads, “With limited exceptions, the Rule requires an individual’s written authorization before a use or disclosure of his or her protected health information can be made for marketing.”

The Privacy Rule defines “marketing” as “a communication about a product or service that encourages recipients of the communication to purchase or use the product or service.” This also applies to many patient engagement communications.

Generally, if the communication is “marketing,” then the communication can only occur if the covered entity obtains an individual’s authorization. Organizations must keep track of who has consented to receive marketing communications and allow them to opt-out at any time. We further discuss the nuances of patient consent for marketing communications here.

HIPAA Security Rule

All covered entities and their Business Associates are subject to the HIPAA Security Rule. If you are working with a vendor (like a marketing consultant, email marketing platform, or ad agency) that will have access to PHI, you need to enforce a Business Associate Agreement.

The HIPAA Security Rule categorizes the necessary safeguards into three categories: Physical, Administrative, and Technical Safeguards. More details about the requirements for each can be found here. Any vendor you choose to work with must follow these regulations. Some basic requirements include the following:

Physically protecting data and where it is stored,
Training staff on handling PHI, and
Setting up technology to protect PHI properly.

Assuming your patient engagement campaigns are primarily occurring via email, at a minimum, you must ensure that the email marketing vendor will:

Protect data at rest and
Protect data in transmission.

This means utilizing encryption to ensure that PHI cannot be eavesdropped on. Many popular email marketing vendors do not encrypt PHI in transmission. It’s extremely important to choose a provider who can protect PHI following HIPAA regulations.

The Benefits of Using PHI for Patient Engagement

Once you have established the proper policies and procedures, signed a BAA, and put any technical requirements in place, you can start segmenting and personalizing emails using PHI. Here are some segmentation and personalization ideas to get started.

By applying these techniques and using PHI in your patient engagement strategy, you can:

Design targeted patient journeys
Deliver better patient outcomes
Improve ROI and reduce costs

Tags: business associate agreement, email marketing, ePHI, hipaa compliance, hipaa privacy rule, hipaa security rule, patient engagement, personalization, phi, quasi compliance, segmentation
Posted in HIPAA Marketing
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