Originally published for HIStalk Readers Write.
I got a MyChart notification last week telling me I had “a new test result for one of [my] proxies.” I love MyChart, but that message is completely unhinged, maybe even dystopian.
“Honey,” I said to my wife, “our proxy’s labs came back normal.”
“Huh?” she replied.
Listen: I’m 100% positive that nobody in marketing wrote this MyChart notification. I’m not sure anybody in IT thought about who was going to read it. It arrived on my phone like a Skynet API delivering a payload of clinical-legal jargon that nobody asked for. Even as a MyChart-certified, ex-lawyer, programmer parent, I was confused about what this meant for my son. (Press X to JSON).
The challenge is that voice and brand are not top of mind for IT. Too frequently, we have been “shadow marketers” who configure patient-facing experiences and write copy without giving marketing a seat at the table. Marketing is accountable for brand, voice, and how patients feel about these moments.
IT friends, we are mucking things up. That is hurting the patient’s experience.
Part of the issue here is that the two teams speak different languages. To IT, “patient experience” means the portal and app, while “campaign” means sending targeted messages to segments of patients.
Meanwhile, Marketing is thinking about the TV spot someone half-watched while making dinner, the roadside billboard, the 5K that you sponsored, the in-person outreach events, and social media ads. And a “campaign” to marketing means six weeks of coordinated chaos with someone demanding ROI attribution and other marketing intelligence before the dust settles.
That’s the area, more so than drafting Kafkaesque MyChart copy, where we in IT can help.
Most healthcare marketing teams struggle to connect much of their spend to actual financial and patient outcomes. This was true before we started living in a world where Google AI is rapidly dismantling traditional marketing channels and turning your website into MapQuest. (Not to mention the eternal problem of attributing a new patient* to a billboard or sponsored 5K.) Bottom line: It is harder than ever for Marketing to know exactly where to spend its money.
That’s where IT comes in. While Marketing can help IT create impactful copy and patient-facing experiences, IT is sitting on a gold mine of data that any marketing team would pay an arm and a leg to have. And once we speak the same language and work together, that treasure can belong to all of us.
Imagine it! The EHR. The call center tool. The CRM. The event management app. Whatever else got bought, inherited, bolted on, or emailed over from a vendor at some point in the last decade. These are just a portion of the vast collection of bric-a-brac that is filling the junk drawer of your organization’s data.
IT is the only team that can see all of it and stitch it together into something that tells your chief marketing officer something truly useful, like whether to cut the morning-drive radio buy or double it.
Once IT understands what matters to marketers, we can help them connect the data dots between the trusty EHR, traditional marketing channels, and actual results. That way, they can make informed decisions about what works, what doesn’t, and how to write MyChart notifications that don’t sound like they were written by a serial killer.
Speaking of which, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pick up one of my proxies.
* Be prepared to spend a few weeks defining what it means in the data for a patient to be “new” for marketing purposes.
For a more in-depth look at how to overcome the barriers that get in the way of collaboration between health IT and marketing teams, check out our on-demand webinar, available here:
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