Promoting healthcare products is always a challenge, and as the market changes and grows, several areas need to be addressed. The top issue concerns making patient engagement strategies a priority for healthcare companies. With a higher emphasis on value-based care, there is no agreed upon vision of what patient engagement looks like. However the patient engagement market is expected to reach $13 billion by 2019 as patients with the lowest engagement generate around 20 percent more health costs.
Despite an growing emphasis on between-visit and post-discharge communications, most healthcare providers are doing the bare minimum. There are opportunities for tech vendors to market innovative products such as mobile apps, cloud-based care plans, and remote-monitoring tools. These products can interact with electronic medical records and patient-provided data stored alongside clinical notes and lab values to serve as a “single source of truth” on a patient across multiple care settings.
Owned media is another overlooked area that will be receiving more attention in the coming year. As Google increases its cost-per-click advertising rates, healthcare and medtech marketers are looking towards owned media, conferences, video channels, blogs, and webinar series, they control. Owned media, while not cheap, is considered a powerful way to establish industry-wide thought leadership. Unlike online advertising, the costs remain constant.
Another trend is not exactly new: embracing social media. However, studies show 70 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no social media presence at all and less than 2 percent are active on Twitter. Social media creates a strong competitive advantage and helps medtech innovators established a distinct voice, making them more accessible to consumers, investors, and journalists. The app Buffer enables marketers to compose tweets for executives but gives the CEO a final say in the postings. Savvy marketers are taking advantage of Buffer and other apps to stay on top of a tumultuous and ever-changing industry driven by the Affordable Care Act and new technologies.
From the Healthcare Marketing Trenches
