During a February webinar sponsored by Freshpaint, Aaron Mauck, managing director for healthcare strategy at Endeavor, and Ray Mina, vice president for marketing at Freshpaint, discussed what payer organizations can do to stand up competitive, sophisticated digital marketing strategies without running afoul of regulations.
Three key takeaways were:
- Healthcare payers face mounting challenges. The big trend for payers in the years since Covid-19 has been a context of rising demand for care, which translates into rising costs and reimbursements. These increases are driven by multiple factors, including:
- Delays in discharges that require more effective coordination between levels of care.
- Greater patient complexity that requires improved care management.
- Unmet behavioral health needs that require expanded inpatient, outpatient and virtual services to identify and manage at-risk patients.
“Medicare Advantage and Medicaid products, as well as commercial insurance products, are going to see demand pressures that will require different approaches for insurers,” Mr. Mauck said. From a consumer perspective, this means a need for more personalized experiences.
The financial pressures that payers will face because of rising demand pressures are compounded by another challenge: declining public trust in health insurers, due in part to data breaches and HIPAA violations. After years of focusing their attention on policing providers, regulators are now increasing scrutiny of payers.
“If you’re involved in the insurance part of healthcare and are interfacing with consumers, this is an area you need to really dig into and make sure you understand where the data is flowing,” Mr. Mina said. From a consumer perspective, this reflects demands for more data privacy.
- Marketing can help payers address these challenges, but marketers face roadblocks. A major obstacle for payer marketers is the near-total separation of marketing from strategy. “Those two functions have to be broadly integrated within the payer space, within the provider space and really across the entire healthcare sector,” Mr. Mauck said.
In addition, digital marketing strategies — which the healthcare industry has finally embraced after years of low adoption — present risks from a data privacy perspective. The success of targeted digital strategies depends on collecting and partially de-identifying consumer data, which is precisely one of the avenues to HIPAA violations and cybersecurity incidents.
In a survey of healthcare payers that Freshpaint conducted jointly with Becker’s, one of the top challenges identified by marketers was dealing with consent management requirements. Consent management is an aspect of how companies handle data privacy for customers.
“Compliance and regulation teams are the ‘no’ people by nature, but if you’re a marketer, you’ve got to be the ‘yes’ people because the whole idea is to bring [potential customers/members] in,” Mr. Mauck said. “We have to find a way to thread that needle to foster growth.”
- What should marketers do amid these pressing concerns? Payer marketers find themselves in a tough spot. On the one hand, payers need to drive growth and stay competitive by improving member experiences, which depends on delivering highly targeted top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel marketing and conversion strategies.
On the other hand, regulators and internal legal and compliance teams are taking a hard stance on any activities that may jeopardize customer data privacy.
To thread that needle, a privacy-first approach that optimizes the use of third-party tracking technology and other tools, such that they don’t set off compliance alarms but also don’t annihilate company growth, can help. “Every organization has to decide for themselves where they want to stand on that spectrum,” Mr. Mauch said. “Our recommendation is to balance out growth goals with security and privacy goals because that’s the way towards having long-term sustainable growth.”
“You have to start with understanding the tooling that you’re using to stand up your digital marketing strategies [by doing] a full audit,” Mr. Mina added. An audit may include breaking the direct connection between tracking tools that harvest personal health information and whose vendors do not have a business associate agreement (BAA) with the payer’s data warehouse.
“The way you break that connection is you remove all of those native trackers and replace them with a tracker that signs a BAA, can safely collect information about consumers on your website, has a way to govern that data by making sure that no data is shared to downstream tools and gives your team the ability to choose the individual data points that you find are safe to share,” Mr. Mina said.
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