Every year, the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD) brings together healthcare strategists, marketing professionals, providers, and thought leaders for a few days of thoughtful discussion and informative programming. For Definitive Healthcare and our industry peers, it’s a prime opportunity to get a new perspective on the latest trends, challenges, and developments in healthcare.
This year’s SHSMD Connections Conference took place in Denver, Colorado, and offered sessions on a broad array of topics including marketing and digital engagement, public relations, strategic planning and business development, innovation, and career development.
We were there joining in the conversation—not only from our booth on the showroom floor, but also through a session on the benefits of assembling your own marketing ecosystem, co-hosted by Brian O’Connor, Definitive Healthcare’s vice president of consumer analytics.
Want an overview of the conversation you might have missed? Let’s take a look at the top takeaways of SHSMD Connections 2024.
Innovate smarter, not harder
Innovation is a buzzy word in healthcare, but for good reason. Building upon the progress of predecessors is how advancements are made across the industry, from patient care to operations to marketing strategy.
This year, SHSMD Connections attendees had their choice of sessions detailing when, how, and why to innovate. Across these sessions—including the keynotes “Unleash the Innovator Within” and “Get Beyond Calling it ‘AI’ and Explore How to Use Smart Technologies to Innovate”—a few key themes emerged:
Anyone can be an innovator
Whether you’re the chief executive of a medtech developer or a content writer at a staffing agency, you can use innovation as a strategy to overcome both the extraordinary and mundane challenges you face every day in your role. By embracing the power of curiosity, you can remain open to new possibilities and act on them as they arise, allowing you to find novel solutions that drive professional growth as well as organizational efficiency.
Innovation is easier with insights
Innovation is about improving the wheel rather than reinventing it—a process that’s easier when you have some data about how the wheel performs. In healthcare terms, that means getting actionable intelligence on whatever it is you’re looking to innovate. Want to revitalize a marketing campaign, optimize your workforce, or introduce a new product for a specific patient cohort? In addition to internal performance data, make sure you have the right insights on your target market, as well as the patients, providers, and competitors within it.
AI and predictive technology offer an edge
Raw data and traditional analytics are a great source of insights, but artificial intelligence and predictive technology can provide even more context around potential future conditions and enable more targeted innovation. These technologies have potential across many roles, with uses ranging from projecting future demand and demographic trends to plan for service line growth, to predicting patient healthcare utilization and care outcomes to allocate organizational resources.
Engagement is more than a marketing term
A good engagement strategy is no longer a nice-to-have for healthcare providers; it’s a necessity for staying ahead in an increasingly crowded and competitive market. Furthermore, these strategies need to go beyond typical patient/consumer engagement and activation.
The keynote session “Thriving Against the Odds: Using Super-Charged Engagement to Navigate the Path to Rural Hospital Sustainability” framed this concept in the context of the challenges facing rural hospitals. Combined with several other sessions, here’s what SHSMD 2024 had to say about engagement:
Engagement strengthens internal connections, too
Most healthcare marketers and strategists are focused on external engagement—that is, connecting with patients, consumers, and/or prospective partners. But internal engagement between leaders, employees, and stakeholders is just as important for fostering trust and communication in an organization. As with external engagement, teams and leaders should leverage the right mediums at the right time to maximize internal engagement, and gather data on past and ongoing efforts to inform future strategies.
Inclusive engagement is an imperative
Health equity is a chief concern among healthcare providers and patients alike in 2024. For organizations looking to establish trust with those patients or the providers who care for them, inclusive marketing is a business imperative.
“Inclusive Marketing for Health Care Brands” and “Humanizing Data to Affect Change” laid out several ways to develop more accurate consumer personas and make engagement efforts more inclusive. For instance, by leveraging demographic insights, you can better understand who makes up your service area and personalize your outreach.
In-house CRMs make engagement more agile
Assuming total control over your marketing tech ecosystem can seem daunting, but operating CRMs, email marketing platforms, analytics, and other tools in-house can have a host of major benefits.
In “Bringing Your CRM In-House,” co-hosts Brian O’Connor, Definitive Healthcare VP of consumer analytics, and Daniel Small, VP of digital services for Hartford HealthCare, explain how assembling your own marketing ecosystem can help you deploy campaigns faster, spend more efficiently, and more rapidly respond to opportunities.
Your story matters—the right data can help you tell it
SHSMD 2024 placed a strong emphasis on the value of storytelling, not only for brand building but also for policy advancement and caregiver advocacy.
The keynote address “Advancing Health Care Policy and Telling the Hospital Story” highlighted how providers can use storytelling to inform public policy discussions and influence community stakeholders and lawmakers.
Another session, “Celebrating Health Care Heroes,” presented a case study from Henry Ford Health demonstrating how the health system used an omni-channel strategy, multimedia communications, and real stories from front-line caregivers to combat unfounded narratives against healthcare workers that had led to violence.
Some of the most compelling stories center on real-world events, trends, and characters. Telling these stories—and sharing them across the most effective channels—is easier when you have access to the latest real-world data.
Definitive Healthcare products and solutions combine real-world data, analytical tools, and the expertise of our data specialists to provide healthcare commercial intelligence on the people, organizations, facilities, and technologies that define your market. Sign up for a demo today, and see how we can help you tell your organization’s story to the audience who needs to hear it.
You might also be interested in...
