"Why wouldn’t we build our own patient engagement solution in-house?”
It’s a question we hear often enough from hospital and health system marketers that we figured we should blog about it.
While you could, in theory, build a homegrown digital health tool for engaging patients, it makes more sense to choose a company that has been doing this successfully and proving its effectiveness and value for the past 15 years. Such as ... ahem ... one company I know.
Here are 5 good reasons why:
1. Behavior-changing health content is a complex and scientific topic.
About 60 percent of healthcare marketers create at least one piece of content each day. And that’s likely content that’s focused on attracting new business, not the kind of educational health content designed to improve patient outcomes.
For example, did you know that people need to hear something 7 times before they fully understand?
Our writers and editors thrive on that kind of research and knowlege about human nature, and they use it to create evidence-based content that gets patients to take action.
2. Technology is like a garden.
Our CTO Chris Turner likes to say, “Technology is like a garden. You can’t just build it and walk away. You have to weed it and maintain it.”
The point is that maintenance often falls off the radar when the next project takes focus. In-house patient engagement technology is just one more thing for your already overworked IT team to manage. And it’s simply not necessary when the technology available today is made to plug and play.
3. Automation saves you time.
While research, content creation and technology maintenance are serious drains on your time, technology that automates patient education saves you and your care team time.
With an advanced health engagement technology in your back pocket, you can automate your patient education to ensure your patients get the right information at the right time. In other words, you can set it and forget it.
4. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Modern health technology has come so far that there’s just no need to build something new when you can take advantage of the diverse capabilities of existing health IT solutions.
Further, health systems are trending toward consolidating their IT infrastructure, not making it more complex. Integrating an existing patient engagement solution into your current systems makes more financial sense than building something new.
5. You trust experts for a reason.
I'm a bad skier, and I’m OK with that. If someone were to ask me to teach them to ski, I would say, “I am the wrong person to do that.”
Some things are best left to those with specialized expertise in their field. They’ve honed their skills over many years, learning what works and what doesn't.
With all of the priorities you’re balancing, creating an effective engagement solution is one item you can confidently outsource.
