“Exhibit Halls are a like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get” (possible line if Forrest Gump was a regular healthcare conference attendee).
The exhibit hall at the 2019 Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development conference (#SHSMD19) closed on Day 3, but not before yielding several more interesting treats.
YEXT – Answers not hyperlinks
The team at YEXT, was showing their new Answers product which provides actual information back after a website search instead of links to information.
On most websites, when you use the search feature, you get a list of blue hyperlinks as a response. You then have to click those links to be taken to a page that might have the answer to your question. Unfortunately many websites do a poor job at indexing their inner pages and more often than not, the search returns zero (or very few) relevant results.
YEXT’s Answers product solves this problem by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to an organization’s website and generates a comprehensive index. This index is then tied to the site’s search feature. Instead of showing a list of hyperlinks as a result, the user is not presented with the relevant information from the page itself.
For example, type in “cardiologist, New Jersey, Medicaid” and you will get a set of cardiologist profiles who practice in the state of New Jersey that accept Medicaid patients. Armed with YEXT’s Answers, visitors to healthcare websites will have a more Google-like search experience.
eVariant – Insight into Patient Journeys
At SHSMD19, eVariant unveiled, Patient Journey Analyzer, a new module for their Inisghts Solution which provides healthcare organization the ability to easy consolidate and quickly analyze their patient + marketing data.
With Patient Journey Analyzer, eVariant customers will not be able to “evaluate a patient’s care pathway, answering questions such as: where and how they entered the health system, the activities that are leading indicators to a specific procedure, and what points in the care journey equate to the most leakage.” By mixing data from their call center and other patient communication platforms, for example, an organization can gain insight into how to best reach particular patients. This knowledge can be used to further personalize messages and deliver them by the communication modality most likely to result in a response from the patient.
Care Sherpa – Is Operations Truly Ready?
By far, the most interesting company at SHSMD19 was Care Sherpa. According to company founder Jessica Walker: “Care Sherpa gives healthcare marketers the ability to do what they have never been able to do before – influence hospital operations”.
The company provides a suite of services that help healthcare organizations understand their capacity, capability and readiness for marketing campaigns. “There’s no point in mounting a campaign to attract more patients to your Orthopedic services if your call center can’t handle the increased volume or your online appointment scheduling module isn’t fully integrated with the orthopedic surgeon’s schedule.” said Walker. However, many organizations do not consider the operational impact of marketing campaigns until it’s too late. In these situations, what was supposed to be a net positive for the healthcare organization can quickly turn into a PR and operational nightmare.
By engaging with Care Sherpa, healthcare marketers can arm themselves with an operational assessment, based on evidence and data, that can be used as the basis for a honest discussion with internal stakeholders BEFORE launching marketing campaigns.
Day 3 – Takeaway
The SHSMD19 exhibit hall was full of interesting companies, products, services…and actual boxes of chocolate (yum!)
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