Digital Transformation in Healthcare - 6 Reasons Why Healthcare Marketers Need To Embrace A Digital-First Approach
Digital transformation in healthcare is more than just moving to a digital landscape. Take the instance of the US Healthcare market; its digital health market is expected to reach 504.4 Billion USD in 2025 from 86.4 Billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 29.6%.
For CIOs in healthcare, a digital strategy has to include the seamless transformation of business operating models and critical processes. Ideally, it’s a sum total of – understanding patient needs, streamlining operations, and offering better user experience.
It is all about moving from volume to value.
For healthcare marketers, the radical shift can be overwhelming and is mainly about embracing the new technologies to deliver significant results. They need to make sure that the transformation is patient-centric before anything else, and for this, they need to come up with a robust healthcare marketing strategy.
In brief, the new-age healthcare transformation includes leveraging marketing channels both digitally and offline to target new and existing patients.
Having said that, here’s why healthcare marketers need to adapt to the digital-first environment:
Unforeseen Circumstances
The outbreak of COVID-19 exposed major chinks in the armour in the healthcare sector. The push to digital became a necessity rather than an afterthought to overcome the inefficiencies in the systems. It also led to the rise in innovative methods of offering care to patients. Think contactless care, telemedicine, robotics and so on.
Data-Driven Environment
Healthcare is going to be more data-driven than before and this comes as no surprise with big data and analytics taking the centre stage everywhere. This is going to bring down drastically, the number of faux pas in the patient records. Moreover, it is going to help in offering preventative care and tackle several medical emergencies.
Patients are More Active Than Before
80% of potential patients look online for health information about a specific medical problem or disease. Additionally, 90% of all healthcare journeys start online, and 60% of health-related searches start on a mobile device. In fact, consumers are now spending over 15 hours per week researching service providers from their smartphones. (Google Think Insights). Now, think of a situation, when there is no organic traffic to your healthcare business website. Sounds like a problem? You bet!
Without a mobile-responsive website, you can’t gain organic traffic, leading to the loss of potential customers. A responsive website is just an example of how you can leverage information and make sure that it gets to the right person, at the right time. That’s just a tip of the iceberg; you can come up with a dime a dozen healthcare digital marketing strategies that you can adopt.
Cloud Will Take Precedence
There’s no doubt about the fact that the healthcare industry is speeding with cloud adoption. With the worldwide healthcare cloud computing marketing slated to surpass $55 billion by 2025, it only makes sense that marketers tie their healthcare solution(s) with the cloud. This includes migrating – Electronic Health Records (EHRs), managing disaster recovery, scalability and so on. Mainly, the cloud makes it easy to enhance workflows and patient care by offering information on the fingertips. Marketers need to take this into consideration while offering their solutions to healthcare firms.
Change in Regulatory Compliances
Regulations in multiple countries got changed in response to the recent pandemic, which also opened up the avenues for using digital healthcare solutions. Let’s not forget the high-profile data breaches, cyber-attacks on hospital information systems and privacy violations, which increase the risks manifold. However, when healthcare marketers can create a well-developed and well-implemented plan, they can turn the same regulatory compliance requirements into a competitive advantage.
AI Will Take Centre Stage
AI is being used in healthcare at a breakneck speed. For instance, it is being used in the spheres of – disease prevention, patient monitoring, recognizing patterns, etc. By 2026, the value of AI in healthcare is going to mushroom to $150 billion. Think of chatbots, which have multiple uses. And let’s not forget the fact that with AI, the healthcare sector can see a reduction in the early drug discovery timeframes by about 4 years and lead to cost savings of up to 60%.
Summary
Going forward, digital transformation in the healthcare sector will help firms get ready for future growth and at the same time, offer a better user experience to both – patients and medical professionals. TransFunnel has many years of experience in providing digital-first solutions to customers. Make us your tech partner, as we provide consulting services to leverage your services/product with the apt digital strategy.
