Epic, Salesforce, and Cheers, oh my! How to turn chaos into strategy, increased revenue, and improved outcomes.

As a marketer in healthcare, you're in this business to make life easier for patients and members. One of the most impactful tools at your disposal is messaging and engagement platforms. Sending the right patient the right message at the right time can not only make healthcare easier, but can actually improve the health of patients and even save lives!

However, if you work in a large health system, something you're surely trying to wrangle is the chaotic spread of messaging and engagement systems across the organization. One health system we worked with had over 30 different platforms managed by almost as many business groups sending email, SMS, and voicemail messages to patients and members. What a nightmare! The duplication, silos, misaligned strategy, and lack of governance resulted in a loss of trust, poor experience, and significant increase in risk.

Key Takeaway

Choosing between Epic Cheers, Salesforce, and other healthcare engagement platforms should start with strategy and data—not technology. Define how you want to engage patients, understand the data required to support those experiences, and then select the platform best suited to each use case.

Strategy First

Strategy always has to lead any technology decision. What is your marketing, engagement, and communication strategy? Who are your customers? What do you want them to do?

An example of a proven engagement strategy for a provider health system is a three-fold approach – Engage, Nudge, Transact.

Engage

Help keep the company top of mind for patients, prospects, and potential customers with engaging, interesting, and helpful content. Describe your services in interesting and engaging ways. When they have a need, they'll think of your system and remember positive feelings they had when interacting with your brand.

Nudge

Influence patients, prospects, and potential customers to take relevant action with your system. Patients who are due preventive services or screenings, who completed one service and would be great candidates for another, or who fit the criteria of the persona who most likely needs care are all perfect candidates for an email or SMS nudge.

Transact

Help patients and members complete their care journey seamlessly with reminders, notifications, and required information.

Approaching your engagement program with a clear, intentional strategy will result in success, while an unclear strategy will hamstring results.

Data Second

If you're like most health systems, you're lucky if your engagement team can send out 1-2 generic email newsletters per month. Why is this the case? It's not for the lack of tools, nor the lack of imagination and talent of marketing teams. What holds marketing teams back from a robust engagement strategy is a lack of available data.

What data is needed to execute your strategy? Where is your data? Can your engagement team easily put together a targeted audience for a single send or drip journey campaign?

Data Needed for Healthcare Patient Engagement

Below are the most common data points used for engagement strategy:

Clinical Data – appointments, referrals, age, gender, providers, diagnosis, prescriptions, and conditions

Financial Data – address, insurance, patient balance, payment plans, and income

Social Determinants of Health – care gaps, registries, marital status, education, household information, and ZIP code

Lead Capture – customer engagement with webforms, health risk assessments, class and event sign-ups, and other capture methods.

Healthcare Data Availability

Does your health system use multiple EMRs and financial systems? Are there duplicates, out-of-date elements, or data integrity issues? Do you have support from an internal IT team to prepare data for use by marketing and engagement?

These are critical questions when considering how to execute your engagement strategy. Depending on these factors, you may need additional technology or support in order to be ready for engagement automation.

Picking the Right Technology Platform

Should you use Epic Cheers, Salesforce, or another engagement platform? This should be the last question you worry about! But once you have a strategy and your data is in place, it's time to execute. At this phase, it's time to pick the right tool for the right job!

Engage: Epic Cheers vs. Salesforce

First off, if you are sending 1-2 generic newsletters to every contact in your database each month, then you don't need any fancy engagement platforms. Save the money and use Mailchimp or Constant Contact! But you can do so much more than that. Create engaging, personalized content that is relevant to patients.

Epic Cheers – Great news! You can now execute a significant amount of custom engagement audiences through an appropriately configured implementation of Epic Cheers.

Salesforce – If your data is messy, in multiple places, or integrated with multiple platforms or parties, you likely need the full data processing power offered by Salesforce. Modern tools like Salesforce Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Next can handle even the most complex scenarios and integrations.

Nudge: Lead Capture and Prospect Nurturing

There are a variety of ways to collect interest from potential prospects – via webforms, health risk assessments, class registration, and more.

Epic Cheers – Epic now offers simple webform lead capture tools that can be easily deployed on your website. Collect lead signups for special-topic content such as weight loss, cancer programs, or other unique services, and automatically enroll the lead in an educational journey.

Salesforce – Sometimes scenarios get complicated. You may be collecting leads from a partner platform, aggregating them with data from another system and your CRM. In cases like this, you will likely find the power and customization offered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud to be the best solution.

Transact: Clinical, Transactional, or Financial Engagement

Clinical, transactional, or financial engagement is geared toward active and current patients.

If you have Epic tools, such as Cheers, Hello World, MyChart, or Campaigns, then this is the place to start. Remember that Epic already houses all the clinical data. It's clean, reliable, and ready to go.

Epic Suite – Leverage Epic's pre-built reminders, referral campaigns, population health, and other common engagement tactics. For other needs, Cheers, Campaigns, and MyChart allow for custom-designed experiences.

Salesforce – As with the other examples, governing and managing complex data sources and integrating multiple tools and platforms will require the robust features available from Salesforce.

Getting the Right Support

You have a strategy, you have the technology, now what? Getting started is the hardest part and it all starts with data. Whether you use Epic, Salesforce, or something else, you need a technical resource to set up your engagement database.

This involves ensuring the technical setup of your tool is correct, auditing and correcting the quality of your data, creating integrations between multiple systems, and creating the audience lists your team will ultimately send to. There is no shortcut here – you must have technical help.

Doret Consulting engineers and data scientists are experts in the initial setup, or cleanup, of engagement automation data. We get in your system, clean house, and get you on the fast track to success.

In addition, our marketers, project managers, and content experts are also available to help clients execute their engagement calendar. For many of our clients, we train their internal staff so that they can be successful at managing the program going forward.

So if you're a healthcare marketer paying for multiple engagement platforms that you're barely using because your data is a mess or you don't know where to start, give us a call and we'll help you get started!