Enhancing Healthcare Experiences through a Strategic Content Supply Chain
Healthcare consumers are eager for relevant, personalized experiences. Consumer expectations continue to rise, with patients and members questioning why a visit to their PCP isn’t as frictionless as visiting a quick-service restaurant or popular hotel chain. Why aren’t there more feel-good loyalty programs and in-the-moment personalized recommendations in healthcare?
Payers and providers must find strategic ways to create experiences to impact patient outcomes and improve member satisfaction, all while meeting mandates for operational efficiencies and cost containment. But fueling these experiences requires key inputs most notably, data, assets, copy, and imagery that can be taxing for healthcare organizations to access, create, and orchestrate. In fact, 85% of marketers say that they are under pressure to create and deliver content more quickly than ever before.
Creating more content quicker is only one piece of the puzzle: Nine out of 10 executives feel that to meet consumer expectations, they need improved access to content assets, with 75% of these professionals also highlighting the need to improve the delivery of experiences across channels. This duality of adopting methods to create content at a faster pace while successfully managing large quantities of content from ideation to creation and eventually archiving is foundational to building a content supply chain.
The Opportunity in Healthcare
A content supply chain maximizes the value of most patient and member communications. Member education and coverage transparency can be personalized by preferred channel, with mediums such as video and imagery spurring consumer engagement. Wellness and care adherence programs can also become more dynamic, with improved copy and format to meet the health literacy of the consumer. And personalized communications can sync with Value Based Care initiatives and telehealth programming to meet goals and OKRs.
In addition to needing to create the right content for personalized communications and experiences, healthcare organizations must also adhere to stringent compliance, security and complex regulatory requirements. These challenges further necessitate the shift to a more automated content engine, and present opportunities for healthcare organizations to stand apart from the status quo.
Compliance: A content supply chain can improve the automation and adherence of regulations. This includes automating processes and incorporating real-time audit trails and workflows.
Efficiencies: Migrating towards a content supply chain can improve demand planning, which is so important during critical sales cycles in the payer space, such as open enrollment. Proofing and routing to get approvals more quickly for critical communications can also improve the patient/member experience and allow teams to meet regulatory requirements quicker. Clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and deliverables also result in improved organization and collaboration, and a reduction in errors and time to production all while bringing costs out of the organization.
Engagement: With increased relevance externally and improved collaboration internally, both consumer and employee engagement will improve. Content supply chains work to powerfully break down siloes internally that remove ambiguity and place the emphasis on the consumer.
Optimization: With restrictive budgets and the need to report on success, healthcare organizations require better mechanisms to analyze outcomes. Content supply chains “bake in” performance measurement through tagging and metadata, ensuring teams can test, learn, and quickly pivot.
When it comes to personalized content and content management, Healthcare is truly a greenfield opportunity. Most if not all payers and providers are struggling to create and manage such large quantities of complex content. If your organization can be the first to adopt a supply chain program and successfully realize the benefits, the subsequent improved customer experiences will generate customer loyalty, putting you ahead of the curve.
Elements of a Content Supply Chain
Establishing a content supply chain begins with developing the end-to-end process of ideation, creation, management distribution, optimization, and archiving (end of life) for assets such as content and imagery, across all channels. Done well, a content supply chain will promote efficiencies around all jobs to be done.
Ideation & Prioritization: A content supply chain begins with intaking requests from across the organization and prioritizing against critical business metrics. Content dashboards and other assets can be created to align stakeholders, expedite sign off, and quickly move teams towards creation. This process creates visibility for what the organization is committing to and enables teams to plan for resourcing and capacity requirements.
Content Creation: During content creation, individuals and teams are researching, writing, designing, and producing content. Within healthcare organizations, authors of content will likely be diverse. Physicians, nurses, healthcare marketers, and designers/multimedia professionals all play a role in content. Therefore, it’s important to plan for the diverse authorship of content within the healthcare industry, ensuring teams that are often allocated to patient care or additional responsibilities have the time and capacity to deliver to plan.
Review & Approval: Prior to distribution, compliance review (according to all health regulations) as well as stakeholder review (accuracy from clinicians, product, marketing, etc.) is conducted. Review and approval phases should be automated via a workflow solution to best ensure compliance.
Management & Distribution: Once content, assets, and multimedia have been created and approved, assets are then stored, tagged, and ready for distribution. Typical storage locations include a content management system (CMS) or digital asset management (DAM) platform. Experts in content storage & management apply structured tagging (metadata such as asset type, category, campaign, etc.) to organize content and provide analytics opportunities to better understand the performance of the asset. Finally, assets are ready to be shared internally and externally, optimized for channels across the consumer space.
Monitoring & Optimization: As content is released, analysts should be measuring how patients, members, or prospects are engaging with the content, determining if the content is achieving intended outcomes such as improving awareness, educating a patient segment, or resulting in care objectives. High-performing content can then be optimized by channel, while other content can be revised based on observations for larger impact.
Archiving: Archiving occurs at the end of the content cycle, when content is either no longer relevant, is unlicensed, or must be retired due to data/retention policies. Some organizations store archived content within a separate location, allowing legal accessibility for any audit purposes.
Ultimately, the phases of a content supply chain allow healthcare organizations to deliver relevant, timely content while meeting the rigorous compliance and regulatory standards of the industry.
Technology, Processes, & Change Management
As mentioned above, a content supply chain process is heavily reliant on the right technology and processes coming together to form a program. There are several approaches to begin building a content supply chain, including adopting strategic technology solutions that specialize in content supply chain efficiencies such as Adobe. Regardless of the vendor solution, a successful content supply chain will require:
Workflow Solution: Project management and collaboration tools (such as Workfront, Asana, Trello, and many others) are essential to manage timelines, tasks, and approvals. A content supply chain functions optimally when all aspects of the content lifecycle are visible and monitored, with clearly assigned responsibilities and jobs to be done.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) Solution: The ability to centrally store and retrieve assets is also essential to a successful content supply chain. Solutions like Adobe (AEM) or Widen (among others) offer comprehensive asset management capabilities like tagging, versioning, storage, and retrieval.
Channel Distribution / Content Management System (CMS): Lastly, organizations must be able to publish content through many channels. Content Management Systems (such as AEM, Drupal, Sitecore, and others) are optimized for digital content delivery. Additionally, healthcare organizations will also need to ensure content is accessible through orchestration platforms, EHR messaging systems, and other critical consumer touch points.
Creative: Visual creative programs (Adobe Creative Cloud, Canva, Figma, etc.) will be important for designers to develop and edit visual assets.
Data Analysis: Content performance is an essential part of understanding the success of your efforts. Analyzing digital content utilizing solutions like Adobe or Google Analytics is one way to understand performance. Enterprise visualization platforms such as Tableau, PowerBI, and Looker may also be utilized if connected to your DAM and other channel management / data warehouse solutions.
Future Considerations & Generative AI
Generating, maintaining, and distributing content is a heavily manual process. However, AI and Generative AI is making waves in content creation, optimization, and automation. Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT, and Jasper AI are pioneers in generating summaries and tailored assets based on inputs and requirements. Automated workflows will continue to incorporate AI capabilities for efficiencies. And SEO and personalization tools will analyze user behavior and preferences to dynamically modify content for the end-user.
An overwhelming majority of respondents to a recent IBM survey (89%) believe that “generative AI will free up creative and marketing teams from mundane tasks so they can focus on more important, value-add activities”. And nearly two-thirds (63%) strongly agree that generative AI will help to vastly scale the creation and delivery of personalized content.
Selecting technologies and vendors that are investing in AI and Generative AI capabilities is a great way to ensure content supply chain teams have access to innovation solutions moving forward and in the future.
Challenges & Log Jams
Drafting a process and implementing a technology solution will not be enough to realize value from your content supply chain. Healthcare organizations must also find ways to expedite change, incorporate legal and the human element where necessary, and place emphasis on integrating and modernizing legacy core systems.
Change Management: According to the same IBM study, over 49% of organizations identified orchestrating change management for the adoption of new tools, processes and roles as the most difficult barrier to overcome when adopting a content supply chain. Investing in change management, including training, education, operating models, and ways of working is essential for siloed healthcare organizations.
Legal Constraints: While automation is a beautiful thing, automation (inclusive of AI) can also bring risks to payers and providers. Legal review and human checkpoints must be incorporated early and often to make sure content supply chains are meeting regulatory considerations and other legal concerns.
Integration: Healthcare organizations are notorious for operating on legacy systems which often do not enable core functionality or features for real-time data swapping and integration. Additionally, deploying dynamic content is dependent on having access to modernized CRMs, DAMs, and other platforms. Don’t wait to build out a unified integration plan to ensure content can be used efficiently throughout all available channels, not just email.
Getting Started
Regardless of the size of your organization, we recommend that healthcare organizations first think big and then select key opportunities for agile improvements that will propel the content supply chain forward.
Engaging first as a program begins with telling the narrative of the north star vision for the customer experience, highlighting where content (assets, imagery, copy) plays a critical role in improving both the consumer and the employee experience. It’s important to gain buy-in up front; making sure that all teams have identified pain points that will be solved for in this new world. Consider prioritizing data and technology foundations as part of this vision, showcasing how each tool plays its part.
Once buy-in is achieved, it’s time to realize value. Often, we find that a stepwise program where teams start to address focused issues using an agile methodology to be successful. This will allow you to improve critical gaps and pain points today while building a foundation that will scale.
Ultimately, adopting a content supply chain should enable you to realize tangible, measurable results and showcase rapid value and ROI. If your organization isn’t seeing a return in investing in a content supply chain, seek out a proven partner that can help to pinpoint the opportunity and expedite the transformation.
