Understanding and Execution Key to Mastering Patient Engagement

Effectively engaging with patient populations requires properly identifying the characteristics of those you aim to reach, then tailoring content in order to meet consumers where they are. Successfully doing so necessitates a marriage of data and execution that can effectively transform the marketing and digital engagement strategies of health care organizations.

During a session presented at the SHSMD Connections Conference in October 2024, experts in the field addressed how the team at OhioHealth—working in partnership with Parallel Path, a health and wellness marketing agency—developed and implemented such a strategy.

Know Your Consumers

In order to learn more about individuals’ wants and needs, Parallel Path engaged a third-party research firm to conduct an audit of health and wellness consumers in the United States.

“We were really trying to figure out three things: how do consumers think about brands in the health and wellness space; what do consumers want in a brand relationship; and how consumers feel about their own personal health and wellness,” says John Kadlic, CEO of Parallel Path.

After collecting data from 1,859 respondents, four consumer segments became clear, each consisting of roughly 25% of the surveyed population.

“When we went out and fielded our study, we did not have a preconceived notion that we were going to find four segments or eight segments or two segments—the data basically showed itself,” Kadlic recalls.

These segments—Self-Focused, Mission-Focused, Solution-Focused, and Dismissives—varied greatly in the types of connection they seek from brands, how they ideally would engage with brands, and what role these brands, both health care and otherwise, play in their lives.

“For us, consumer motivations really rose up in the study to be the most important thing regarding how to reach consumers on their own terms,” Kadlic notes.

Self-Focused individuals were defined as consumers who expect brands to pay attention to them, and to know them at a deep level. These individuals care about personalization, which showcases an understanding of who they are and what they are seeking.

Those in the Mission-Focused category are purpose-oriented consumers, who want brands to have a compelling mission that they can buy into and engage with themselves.

“Most importantly, Mission-Focused people want to contribute and participate alongside you, so it’s not just that you’re doing something special,” Kadlic explains. “You need to bring them into the fold.”

People who fall into the Solution-Focused segment prioritize efficiency and want brands to succeed in making their lives easier and better, according to Kadlic.

“They are going to probably be the most vocal advocates [of your brand] if you can get them on your side,” he says.

Finally, the Dismissives category is composed of independent thinkers who are largely disinterested in the concept of brand relationships. Although they still are purchasers of products and services, they are innately skeptical and value authenticity.

Generation Gaps

All four segments were represented across demographic breakdowns: The Self-Focused consumers are more likely to be Gen Z or millennials, while Dismissives are significantly more likely to be older, either Baby Boomers or from the Silent Generation.

At OhioHealth, a health care system headquartered in Columbus, Ohio consisting of 16 fully owned member hospitals and multiple outpatient and ambulatory facilities, leveraging these insights allowed for new and improved ways to engage with consumers.

“When we looked at the core OhioHealth customer, we noticed that our most digitally engaged customers happened to be millennials,” notes Katy Dalton Rigsby, system vice president, marketing and communications, OhioHealth. “Millennials are also the largest portion of our workforce, so that insight for us told us that they are not only driving our business as a core, digitally engaged customer, they also become wonderful brand advocates for us.”

Understanding these and other motivations allows for addressing behavior patterns and tying them in to specific steps in an organization’s “Journey Map.”

“We really wanted to hone in on the opportunity to take insights from the study and tie them back into the moments that matter in our customer journey,” Rigsby says.

What Do Health and Wellness Consumers Want?

When queried during the survey as to feelings regarding health and wellness brands, 56% of consumers reported they hold these companies to a higher standard, and believe they have a heightened responsibility to connect with their customers and community.

“If you isolate those in hospitals and health systems, that number would probably be significantly more substantial,” Kadlic explains.

This reinforces the importance that hospitals and health systems offer world-class customer experiences and are transparent about how they communicate with their consumers, he adds.

“There’s not a lot of room for error if you are a health and wellness brand,” Kadlic notes.

The multichannel, tech- and social media–based reality of contemporary branding results in additional challenges.

“There are conversations about everyone going to Dr. Google, but these days it’s Dr. TikTok and it’s Dr. ChatGPT, and people are looking for perspectives from multiple sources,” Kadlic says. “So, if your content is good, you have a good shareability factor and you’re doing the right thing for your consumers, that is going to be beneficial because there are more and more channels that people are canvasing before they make a decision.”

OhioHealth sees roughly 300,000 unique website visitors and 33,000 scheduling leads per month. For Rigsby and her colleagues, refining the system’s online presence included developing an efficient online appointment booking functionality, consolidating appointment reminders, and scheduling updates in order to reduce the number of messages sent to patients, and reaching consumers in the ways they most preferred (e.g., SMS text messages).

Such focus on making all important information quickly and easily available to consumers resulted in OhioHealth’s satisfaction rating for its “Find a Doc” increasing from 3.08 to 4.8 out of 5 stars. Additionally, scheduling conversions rose by more than 5%.

“This is another example of understanding the customer segments,” Rigsby says. “The Solution and Self-Focused segments want us to engage with them; they often just need a little nudge.”

The fact that consumers—particularly those in the Self-Focused segment—tend to choose brands and products that they believe reflect themselves also led to the development of a series of deeply human, emotive advertising and social media campaigns. Overall, the efforts involved in researching these patient segments, and determining how to best develop offerings that engage each segment in ways that efficiently target their unique needs, has resulted in impressive returns for OhioHealth and may provide a road map for other organizations looking to optimize data in order to deepen relationships with their core consumers.

“Our goal is that people can see themselves in these messages, and it will allow them to feel hopeful,” Rigsby explains.