If the answer is “Sort of,” or “I think so,” you might not. In order to optimize and grow your healthcare services, really knowing your patients is critical.
The best way to ensure efficient referral patterns, as well as acquire new patients, is to create a profile of your existing patients then find more just like them.
It’s not as complicated as it sounds, once you have the right structure. Here are a few key steps to building your foundation.
Combine Datasets for a Sharper View
Viewing patients through a single lens is never enough. Instead, you can get a more accurate picture of them if you start with facility and patient encounter data from your own organization then take it further by layering on other datasets from an analytics partner, from financial to demographic to psychographic.
Understand Your Patients and Locate More
Once you have the right profiles, you can zero in on your markets to find the “look-alike” patients with the traits you want and make well-informed decisions about how those patients can support your facility, service line, and system growth.
Enhance Your Predictive Models
Patient profiles are an important input in predictive models. Integrating your unique patient profile into a model with other variables that influence location performance enhances your ability to assess whether a potential property is the right investment. Models can also help identify what services would be the best to offer in that property.
Precisely Target Your Marketing
Knowing and understanding the psychographic details of your patients and prospective patients — such as lifestyle choices, behaviors and media preferences — allows you to better craft effective messages that speak directly to a variety of patients simultaneously. This can lead to a more positive response rate to your marketing messages.
When you have the right patient profile, fuzzy images will snap into shape and that’s when you’ll know you’re on the path to higher patient knowledge.
Do you need help understanding who your patients really are? Get to know your patients with analytics.