AI Applied to Healthcare Marketing

DeepIntent's CEO and co-founder Chris Paquette came in with a background in healthcare, having worked as a data scientist for Memorial Sloan Kettering, using AI to find patterns predictive of patient outcomes. Prior to that he worked at a search company. DeepIntent's approach, is built on a combination of the two fields, as he explained in an interview.
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Finding the Audiences for Healthcare Marketing

The shifting role of healthcare marketers

Technology is changing the game for all businesses, and marketers are also finding new ways in which to do their jobs more effectively. Now healthcare marketers are discovering the ways in which they can use technology to identify and engage their target market.

In order to identify the priorities for healthcare marketers in the upcoming year, Affect, a public relations and social media agency specializing in technology, healthcare and professional services, spoke with a panel of senior healthcare executives from organizations like, Illumina, MDxHealth, Pfizer and Phoenix Children's Hospital. Based on those discussions, it published a guide to navigating major trends in healthcare marketing in 2018 with a look at five key areas:

1. Advanced social media use to increase awareness  and loyalty
2. Highly customized content plus promotion
3. Creative media relations
4. Emerging tech campaigns
5. Business-oriented metrics

I spoke with Melissa Baratta, SVP and healthcare practice lead at Affect, about the state of healthcare marketing in today's environment. She said that because of the increasingly important role technology is playing marketing, “the role of marketers for healthcare is shifting.”

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Healthcare Tech Marketing

Telling Effective Stories About Healthcare Tech

New technologies are transforming operations in all industries, including healthcare. But we tend not to hear very much about it from healthcare brands. Melissa Baratta, Senior VP and healthcare practice lead at marketing, social media, and PR firm Affect spoke with DMN tech about innovations in that space and why they should be featured in marketing efforts.

The question is: What accounts for the hesitation to discuss emerging tech applications in healthcare? Barratta believes organizations may be concerned about how to make it fit with their brand image, and with fears that automation will displace human doctors. She referred to a journal article that suggested that radiologists and pathologist will be out of a job in the next five years when AI takes over. “A lot of media picked up on that,” and that may have made some wary of appearing “to promote tech that would eliminate jobs or raise concerns about trust.”

However, Baratta believes that these concerns should not hold brands back from investing in tech and using it for better patient outcomes. The way to go about it is to  “create educational stories, with perspective, that acknowledge challenges” while exploring how the tech “will help patients and help doctors” That includes applying AI to getting a handle on “data overload” and “more effectively mine data,” so that doctors are making better informed decisions for their patients.

The advantage for the brands that discuss their uses of emerging technologies now, she said, is that they “position themselves as thought leaders and innovaters.” It's an advantage “to talk about it when people are trying to understand what it means” and trying to grasp how it is can be used. That's why “now is the time to have a voice for thought leadership.”

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Hurdles & Headways for Cloud Adoption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Cloud computing offers clear benefits in terms of efficiency, function and cost, which is why most organizations are already using cloud services or planning to do so in the near future. However, cloud hurdles like security remain top of mind for many verticals such as healthcare.

While Cisco predicts cloud usage will quadruple by 2019, as we saw in Cisco's Cloudy Forecast, some organizations and sectors are still holding back. The question is: What is keeping them back? (See Cisco's Cloudy Forecast.)

To gain insight into the current hurdles and headways of cloud adoption, The New IP spoke with Sarah Lahav, CEO of SysAid Technologies, and John Grady, senior manager of product marketing for XO Communications Inc. Although both agree that security is the primary concern for organizations that have yet to adopt the cloud, there are other factors at play, as well.

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Cloud Hurdles & Headways

Collaboration as a winning strategy

We're used to thinking of competition as the key to lower prices. But in certain cases, cooperation leads to more efficient use of resources. That was the case for an Ohio hospital alliance that realized substantial savings just a few months after pooling resources. Read more in 

Collaboration & the Supply Chain