Growing numbers of healthcare organizations are turning to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to consolidate and leverage patient data (or electronic protected health information (ePHI) from electronic health record (EHR) systems, RCM platforms, CRM systems, websites, communications channels, and other various sources. 

CDPs enable healthcare providers, payers, and retailers to better understand each patient’s needs, health conditions, treatment schedules, ongoing care, and so on, enabling them to take the right actions, at the right time to improve engagement. This results in more patient participation, enhanced coordination with providers and companies, and, ultimately, improved patient outcomes.

Why Should You Integrate CDPs and Email?

Integrating the functionality of a CDP with a HIPAA compliant email platform, such as LuxSci, empowers you to put your data into action. This includes enabling you to better target your various segments using real-time communications data – such as email opens, clicks and conversions – as well as using PHI in secure messages for greater personalization – all while operating within the bounds of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations. 

With this in mind, this post discusses the benefits of integrating your organization’s CDP solution with a HIPAA compliant email solution. We’ll explore the main benefits and how to integrate the two solutions, as well as several effective strategies for leveraging the valuable PHI stored within your CPD to increase patient and customer engagement.

Benefits of Integrating a CDP with HIPAA Compliant Email

Let’s begin by looking at the main advantages of pairing your CDP with a HIPAA compliant email platform.

Increased Protection of Customer Data

Above all, HIPAA compliant email platforms are specifically designed with the stringent data privacy and security requirements of the healthcare industry in mind. As a result, they contain a range of data security features, including encryption, access control, user authentication, and audit logging, that both better safeguard ePHI from unauthorized access and ensure HIPAA compliance. In short, HIPAA compliant email helps ensure that when valuable and sensitive CDP information is put into use, i.e. using it in patient emails and communications, it’s protected and safe both in transit and at rest.

Avoid the Consequences of HIPAA Violations

By opting for an email provider that meets the security requirements for HIPAA compliance – and better yet, HITRUST certification – your company can better mitigate the risk of data breaches, and the compliance violations that accompany them. The consequences of HIPAA compliance violations include: 

• Financial penalties: this includes regulatory fines, legal fees and compensation to affected parties, and state-level fines (in certain cases). In the event that compliance officers can prove willful neglect, your company may even face criminal charges, incurring further damage.  
• Operational disruptions: suffering a security breach requires healthcare organizations to spend time on containment and notifying and reassuring affected parties, as well as taking subsequent mitigation efforts – all of which take time away from running the day-to-day business.
• Reputational damage: displaying an inability to safeguard sensitive data will cause patients and customers to lose trust in your organization and move to other providers or suppliers.

Enhanced Personalization in Engagement Efforts

With ongoing uncertainty around HIPAA regulations, healthcare companies are often reluctant to include PHI in their email communications and campaigns, missing opportunities to fully leverage your CDP to create more effective, more relevant messages, targeting highly segmented audiences. Safe in the knowledge that customer data derived from your CDP will be secured by your HIPAA compliant email provider or HIPAA compliant marketing solution, you can confidently include PHI in communications to craft more personalized – and potent – engagement opportunities.  

The data aggregated by CDPs can be used to divide, or segment, customers into smaller groups with particular commonalities, such as a health condition like diabetes, or users of a particular type of medical equipment. Healthcare marketers can use the shared needs and problems of each patient or customer segment to drive more effective and targeted campaigns that deliver more opens, clicks, and conversions.

Strategies for Leveraging Customer Data Through CDP and Email Integration

Having a better understanding of the benefits of CDP integration with your email communications, let’s move on to a few of the most effective ways to leverage your customer data through a HIPAA compliant, secure email services provider (ESP).

Segmenting Customers by Health Condition or Risk Profile

The first strategy, as alluded to above, is to use the health-oriented data stored in your CDP to group customers into segments that you can target with highly personalized messaging – using PHI to your advantage. Segmentation could be based on health conditions, such as demographics, location, or by a patient’s lifestyle risk factors, e.g., smokers. 

Having defined your segments, you can create personalized email campaigns for each, which are far more likely to drive engagement and actions versus messages designed to appeal to everyone or with limited information. Better still, you can create different email campaigns to fulfill different purposes with automated workflows based on how your patients respond, giving you a range of opportunities to reach out and connect. Using intelligence from your CDP, you can design your email campaigns to:

• Educate: send patients and customers educational materials designed to increase their understanding of their state of health and the options available to them for creating the most favorable outcomes. 
• Offer adherence advice: include information on how to best adhere to a prescribed care or treatment plan, resources on overcoming common challenges, where to go for support, etc. 
• Provide preventive care tips: help patients who fit a particular risk profile, such as diabetes or heart disease, make better lifestyle choices, with the ultimate aim of avoiding the disease they’re at risk of. 

Lifecycle-Based Messaging

This is a variation on the above strategy that segments patients and customers based on how far along they are in their treatment lifecycle, for instance: 

• Onboarding: messaging that introduces your services, explains how to access care, and covers other preliminary details; this stage is essential for setting expectations and establishing trust with your patients and customers.
• Active Treatments: regular check-ins, medication reminders, preparation guides, and educational resources based on their condition or treatment plan; this messaging is designed to support adherence and improve healthcare outcomes.
• Follow-Up and Recovery: personalized care instructions, satisfaction surveys, or information about next steps; this shows ongoing support and maintains consistent communication when a patient may be feeling most vulnerable. 
• Preventive and Long-Term Care: triggering routine screening reminders, vaccine alerts, or wellness tips based on age, history, and risk factors; an integrated CDP and email system can track when patients are due for services and automate communication accordingly.
• Re-engagement: sending patients who have been inactive for a while tailored prompts, e.g., “We haven’t seen you in a while…”; this encourages proactivity and helps highlight new services that may be of interest.

Behavior-Triggered Messaging

Integrating your CDP with a HIPAA compliant email platform enables you to automate email delivery and workflows based on a customer’s behavior and engagement patterns. This type of email is enabled by the CDP’s ability to monitor events and behaviors across multiple activities and locations, enabling you to create email campaign strategies and workflows accordingly. This approach allows for a range of timely and relevant engagement opportunities, including: 

• Missed appointments: sending a message if a patient misses an appointment that encourages them to reschedule and assists them in how to do so. 
• Periodic checkup reminders: similarly, if a patient is supposed to have regular checkups, follow-up appointments, a recommended health screening, etc., this data can be passed from the CDP to the email client to schedule automated emails that drive up appointment bookings.  
• Unfilled prescriptions: if a patient hasn’t picked up their prescribed medication, you can automatically trigger an email reminder and automated workflow to get the prescription filled; this information can also be fed back to their healthcare providers if repeated reminders see the prescription remain unfilled. 
• Patient portal inactivity: if a user hasn’t logged into a portal for a predefined time frame, this can prompt a re-engagement email encouraging them to check messages in their portal, view test results, etc. 
• Form completion: after inputting data into a web form, an integrated CDP can help facilitate the delivery of a tailored email that offers guidance on next steps or the most relevant products or services based on given answers.

Implement Feedback Loops for Optimized Engagement

Finally, a key benefit of integrating a CDP with a HIPAA compliant email platform is that it enables you to close the loop between engagement and results. By feeding campaign performance data, such as email opens, clicks, conversions, and other key metrics, back into your CDP, you can continuously refine your email outreach strategies to enhance engagement, while developing a more complete data profile of patients and customers.

Put Your CDP into Action with LuxSci Secure Email

Integrating HIPAA compliant communications solutions like LuxSci with your healthcare organization’s CDP empowers you to securely harness your customer data in email communications for consistent, timely, and relevant engagement – for better health outcomes and better business. 

To learn more about LuxSci’s suite of secure HIPAA compliant communication solutions and how we seamlessly integrate with leading CDP solutions to improve engagement, contact us today!

In healthcare marketing, effective engagement is crucial. It’s imperative that healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers know how to connect with their patients and customers, keeping them aware of all aspects of their healthcare journey – and empowering them to participate as much as possible. 

This is where segmentation comes in. 

Instead of sending out healthcare marketing email communications that appeal to as many people as possible, segmentation enables healthcare companies to appeal to specific individuals or groups. It opens the doors for scenarios in which patients and customers see a message in their inbox and think, ‘this message is for me’. 

With that goal in mind, this post explores use cases and best practices in segmentation, why it’s so important for healthcare companies, and different ways that marketers can segment their audiences for optimal patient and customer engagement.

What is Segmentation?

Segmentation is the process of dividing your contact list, or audience, into smaller groups based on shared data, including protected health information (ePHI) characteristics. This could include demographics (age, gender, geographic location, etc.), medical conditions, risk factors, behaviors, and so on. 

Why Segmentation is Essential in Healthcare Email Marketing

For healthcare organizations, segmentation is a highly effective, and essential, strategy for sending patients and customers personalized email messaging. Personalized emails are more relevant to the recipient, which greatly increases the chance of them capturing their attention and subsequent engagement. 

This allows healthcare companies to successfully achieve the objective of their email campaigns, whether that’s reducing the number of appointment no-shows, increasing adherence to care plans, securing payments, or boosting sign-ups or sales. More importantly, patients and customers are more involved in their healthcare journey, staying on top of upcoming appointments, receiving applicable advice and recommendations, and becoming aware of products and services that may prove beneficial to their health, improving overall outcomes. 

Additionally, dividing audiences into distinct groups gives healthcare organizations invaluable insights into the behaviour and needs of different segments at different stages of the healthcare journey. 

For instance, an email campaign targeting a particular segment may reveal that they’re more likely to miss appointments than other groups. Similarly, segmentation may highlight that a certain high-risk group neglects to book recommended health screenings. Such insights enable healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers to improve their email engagement strategies, to drive more desirable outcomes and, ultimately more satisfied, loyal, and, above all, healthier patients and customers. 

How Can Segmentation Aid HIPAA Compliance?

Another considerable benefit of segmentation for healthcare organizations is that it supports their HIPAA compliance efforts. Because segmentation necessitates setting precise rules that control which individuals receive particular emails, it greatly mitigates the risk of accidentally sending sensitive patient data to the wrong person. 

Let’s say, for instance, that you want to conduct an email campaign targeting expectant mothers. By creating a segment comprised of pregnant patients or customers using the appropriate data field, you ensure that sensitive, pregnancy-related information is only sent to relevant parties. By reducing the likelihood of disclosing PHI to the wrong individuals, segmentation not only helps maintain regulatory compliance, but also preserves patient trust and confidence in your organization.

Different Ways to Segment Your Audience 

Demographic Segmentation

This involves grouping individuals by shared demographic attributes such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Ethnicity
• Education Level
• Employment Status
• Marital Status
• Family Status
• Socioeconomic Status (Income)
• Spoken Languages / Preferred Language
• Income
• Insurance Coverage Type
• Religious or Cultural Affiliations

Demographic information is a very powerful way to segment audiences to send them valuable, highly relevant information, for example:

• Sending mammogram or prostate screening recommendations to women or men over a certain age. 
• Sending health alerts to people in a certain region or ZIP code in response to the emergence of a disease in their area (e.g., flu, a new COVID strain). 
• Making educational material easy to understand and informative. 

Clinical Segmentation

Here, individuals are grouped according to medical criteria, such as:

• Health conditions
• Prescribed medications
• Treatment plans
• Recent surgeries or medical procedures 
• Recent lab test results
• Hospitalization history
• Vaccination status

This enables healthcare organizations to craft a wide range of specific communications that hone in on particular patients and customers, including:

• Disease management and preventative care advice for people suffering from certain conditions, e.g, how diabetic patients can best monitor and manage their blood sugar.
• Recovery guidance for post-operative patients. 
• Feedback requests for individuals on particular treatment plans, in an effort to optimize them. 

Healthcare Journey Stage Segmentation

This divides individuals according to their position in their care journey within your organization. 

For healthcare providers, new patients should receive onboarding materials, explanations of services and how to make the most of them, and similar materials that help them feel welcome and informed. Existing patients, meanwhile, can be further segmented into active, overdue (inactive), or high-risk groups – all of which have different needs and ways in which they should be communicated with: 

• Active patients: appointment reminders, educational materials, event and service recommendations, satisfaction surveys, etc. 
• Overdue and inactive patients: appointment or payment reminders, re-engagement communications, etc. 
• At risk patients: more frequent communications, care coordination messages, or support service referrals

Behavioral Segmentation

This method of segmentation is based on how recipients interact with emails or services, including:

• How often they open emails.
• If they click through on links.
• If they use patient portals.
• If they complete forms.
• How often they attend scheduled appointments. 

This segmentation empowers healthcare organizations to tailor the content type, frequency, and calls-to-action based on real engagement insights, and also carry out automated workflows based on each individual’s interaction with an email.

Supercharge Your Segmentation with LuxSci

LuxSci’s empowers healthcare organizations to effectively segment their contact lists into distinct target audiences for greater engagement in the following ways:  

• LuxSci Secure Marketing features powerful hypersegmentation capabilities for granular targeting that increase opens, clicks and conversions for your healthcare marketing campaigns. 
• LuxSci Secure High Volume Email enables companies to execute campaigns encompassing hundreds of thousands or millions of emails, targeting specific groups and audiences. 
• Easy integration with EHR, CDP, and CRM systems to leverages deeper levels data for highly targeting, highly personalized email campaigns. 

Reach out today to learn how LuxSci can help you reach more patients and customers, drive more engagement and conversions, and improve overall outcomes.