One of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry is ensuring every stakeholder — from the staff to the executive team to patients and their families — has access to the latest information at any given moment.
Healthcare companies have to communicate a lot of sensitive information and changes to clients in a way that builds trust, shows empathy, and reflects a high standard of care. These may include changes in federal, state, or local regulations, new medical procedures offered at certain locations, physician departures, and individual updates like care plan details, explanations of benefits or claims status, or medical bills.
In the face of these changes, which can cause significant confusion for industry professionals and consumers alike, good customer care starts with strong, efficient internal communication tools. These tools ensure everyone from the front desk to the CEO is fully informed and able to communicate the latest message internally and externally.
A Through-Channel Marketing Automation Platform Keeps Everyone Up to Date
A through-channel marketing automation platform (TCMA) could be the solution multi-location healthcare brands are looking for. These solutions are designed to centralize brands’ distributed marketing and communication efforts, every agent and brand representative to quickly access up-to-date messaging and approved collateral and communication resources twenty-four-seven.
What’s more, the right TCMA platform offers brand management capabilities that make distributing that information to clients easy, eliminating the need for local clinic managers or other reps to spend their limited time creating new collateral that may or may not precisely reflect the brand image and messaging.
Let’s take a look at these two key capabilities of a TCMA platform for healthcare communication and marketing:
Centralized Internal Communication
Healthcare systems need a foolproof way to keep their employees up to date on the latest news and changes so that they can keep patients and customers up to date, as well. The most effective way to do so is to create a centralized, accessible-from-anywhere hub for all internal communications and updates.
This “command center” will make critical information and updates available to employees 24/7, whether they’re on site, at home, or en route, providing them with the details they need to know—and any assets they’ll need in order to quickly and accurately pass the message on to patients and the community. And in times of crisis, when the updates are coming in fast and furious, a specific “area” of the hub can contain all crisis-related communications, content, and assets ensuring they are not lost in the everyday shuffle.
The result of keeping all this information front and center? A seamless patient experience. We know patients expect personalized, consistent, multichannel communication from the healthcare organizations they use. But internal teams can only provide that clarity and stability if they have the access they need, first. Once they do, they can customize and localize the preapproved messaging, print or order brochures, flyers, and signage, and create social media updates to pass what they know on to their communities.
Brand Management
Patients’ communication-related expectations can only be fulfilled if the messaging coming out of their trusted healthcare organizations is consistent, in both tone and look. Consistent branding is key to building trust with customers, and this is especially true in an industry like healthcare, where patients are vulnerable and their anxieties may be running high. Scattershot communications won’t help build their confidence in a provider (no matter how aligned internal teams are), but consistency and familiarity will.
A through-channel marketing automation platform will help multilocation healthcare companies achieve this goal, with brand management capabilities designed to ensure even the most far-flung representatives can easily create and distribute collateral that reflects approved messaging and meets design and production quality standards. This is done through modular content, automated approval workflows, in-platform print ordering, and more.
OTP One: The TCMA Platform of Choice for Healthcare Marketers
At OneTouchPoint, we recognize the challenges healthcare companies face in keeping both internal teams and external audiences up to date with the latest information they need to protect their health. Our OTP One platform is a powerful internal tool to keep employees and leaders up to date as they adapt to changes in the healthcare industry. Keeping departments, clinic locations, physician liaisons, and other internal stakeholders up to speed on changes — and providing them access to the latest approved messaging —ensures that on-the-ground staff can keep patients and their families fully in the know.
Learn more about how OTP One serves as a hub to support brand management, marketing and communication. Then, when you’re ready, contact us to learn how OTP One can support your healthcare organization.