Beyond the Brochure: 5 Cutting-Edge Health Campaigns Driving Measurable Results

Health campaign ideas are important to healthcare leaders and medical providers who are hyper-focused on addressing gaps in patient care. The need is growing as physicians and medical providers from all specialties are finding that a lot of their patient put off important preventive and follow-up care during the COVID-19 pandemic, creating higher risk for complications, adverse outcomes, and disease progression.

With the many priorities competing for patients’ attention, health campaigns are an important tool for cutting through the noise, creating lasting relationships with patients, and helping them prioritize their health.

Read on to find out how the right health campaign ideas can get the right patients to the right care at the right time.

Why Focus on Health Campaign Ideas?

A health campaign is an automated engagement program that utilizes clinical information in the EHR to identify patients that are overdue for screenings, vaccines, exams, and other ongoing care and reaches these patients with specific messaging, education, and a prompt to take action. Varying health campaign ideas also help patients stay informed and up-to-date on available treatment options and expertise.

Automated health campaigns also aid in reporting for quality initiatives, thanks to time stamps and analytics. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health campaigns ensure that your healthcare organization delivers quality care improvement and patient safety.

The Purpose of a Health Campaign

Health campaigns and patient engagement are redefining how we perceive healthcare. Engaging patients in their own healthcare helps healthcare organizations such as hospitals and medical groups to keep patients up to date in their care and drives positive patient and clinical outcomes.

Patients engaged with their healthcare providers are well-informed and thus better placed to make critical decisions regarding their health. They’re also positioned to voice their needs and share care opportunities with their contacts.

Patient engagement strategies are aimed at encouraging patients to share in the responsibility of maintaining and improving their health, acknowledging a patient’s knowledge of their own bodies and health statuses. Involving patients in their own healthcare decisions in turn drives better adherence to care plans, medication plans, preventive, and follow-up care.

Using Health Campaign Ideas to Drive Engagement

Patient engagement through health campaigns allows healthcare providers to easily share important information on health risks and needs, preferred treatment options, and new services and care options that are available to patients.

Health campaigns empower patients to better understand how to maintain and improve their health and is timed in a way that delivers the right information to patients at the right time so patients can more easily consume healthcare information and take steps towards their care.

Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare organizations can reduce costs, offer better patient care, and enhance health outcomes through patient engagement.

Patients experience better health outcomes, higher satisfaction (up to 90% general rate of satisfaction) and reduce re-admission rates. Patient-centric healthcare allows individuals to change behaviors and adopt healthier lifestyle changes that adhere to their treatment plans.

Access to updated practice information and personal health or clinical data allows patients to take part in their care regimen. Further, caregivers are well-placed to better diagnose medical problems and treat patients who actively participate in their treatment. Patients better understand their health conditions and the steps necessary for management, ensuring they have access to better, safer care.

Similarly, health campaigns help create shared responsibility between patients and provider and drive better patient retention. The right tools for patient engagement allow health providers to spend up to 60% less time on paperwork.

5 Health Campaign Ideas That Work

Consistently targeted health campaigns are winning strategies for retaining patients and reducing gaps in care. Utilizing clinical EHR data equips you to segment your patients by screenings, vaccines, and other care they are due or overdue for while leveraging a combination of voice, text, and email accounts for varying patients behaviors and makes it easy to get your patients’ attention.

Next, choose between an awareness and direct response healthcare campaign. An awareness campaign would allow you to educate and inform your patients about any of the following:

• Practice information
• New treatment options
• New healthcare trends
• Diseases
• News
• Tips for prevention and protection against particular diseases

Direct response campaigns encourage patients to act or commit to action such as booking an appointment. We use submission of forms, touch-points, number of newly-scheduled appointments, and new leads to measure or gauge patient engagement.

The right campaign type ensures that healthcare organizations don’t just reach out to the right audience, but do so earlier in the campaign process.

Tailor engagement and create clear communication to personalize care and related campaigns.

Health literacy, through healthcare campaigns that inform, educate, and help patients assist themselves, is key to driving engagement. With visibility, assurance, and personalization, you’ll improve patient engagement, outcomes, and create an easily reportable database of patient outreach and engagement.

These health campaign tips will help you deliver successful health campaigns.

Leverage the Power of Text Message, Email, and Voice Messages

Create targeted messages for your target audience. This ensures that you reach them with personalized messages that resonate with their needs.

Text, email, and voice messages are cost-effective ways to reach your patients and offer a level of reliability and efficiency that manual outreach can’t match. Relatient’s health campaign manager makes it easy to create personalized messages for patients, track the outreach, deliverability, and responses. Use groups to develop templates for future campaigns based on chosen demographics.

Use Timing Strategically

You can leverage the timing of your health campaigns to build on the momentum of other events, timelines, and themes.

For instance, if you’re running a Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign, October is the right time to promote your campaign as it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Let your campaign begin a month earlier and end a month later to make the most impact.

Leverage a Clear Call to Action

The purpose of a health campaign is to inform, remind, and educate patients about their ongoing healthcare and make it easy for them to take steps towards their providers. Leverage your other patient engagement solutions and easy action steps to drive better conversions from your campaigns. If you offer self-scheduling, either through your patient portal or your website, include the link in your health campaign so patients can make an appointment directly from the campaign messaging.

Customize the Campaigns Based on Patients’ Feedback

Use feedback from patients to create health campaigns that resonate with your audience. This helps create content that patients find useful and interesting. It can encourage patients to share your content with their network, further improving patient engagement.

We use patient surveys to collect feedback from target audiences and patients.

Utilize an Automated Health Campaign Manager

Sending text messages, reminders, emails, follow-up instructions, and voice messages are repetitive tasks that can consume a lot of resources if attempted manually. Using an automated health campaign manager ensures these tasks go out to patients consistently, regardless of staffing levels. 

Automation allows hospitals and other healthcare institutions to nurture inactive patients and offer ongoing support through existing patient engagement until they convert. The right healthcare campaign manager allows for automation of communication, building loyalty outside practice, and keeping patients informed and engaged.

Data

Data is important for optimizing your campaign content for future communications and can consistently improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

Data allows healthcare providers and organizations to better understand their patients and develop better future campaigns. High deliverability, email open rates, and reply rates/conversions indicate that content resonated with patients and made it easy for them to respond. 

Positive feedback from patients also indicates campaign success. It showcases what’s working, relevant and effective, and what needs adjustment. 

3 Examples of Common Health Campaigns

• Melanoma Re-checks: Patients who have been diagnosed and treated for melanoma need consistent follow-up care and rechecks to ensure the melanoma does recur or spread. Ongoing follow-up is often hard for patients to keep up with but timed melanoma follow-up campaigns make it easy for patients to reengage at 3, 6. and 9 months post-treatment. Medical practices would create a list of patients due for these rechecks based on clinical data fields in the EHR and then customize messaging and include a link or phone number to make it easy for patients to schedule their recheck appointment. 
• Annual mammograms, colonoscopies, and other screening: Annual preventive care is incredibly important in driving early cancer detection and driving better patient outcomes. Health campaigns that utilize data sets of patients without current appointments or values within a 12 month period can be used to deliver education and appointment availability to patients who are due for this kind of care. If a patient’s physician provides a digital “tap on the shoulder” to remind the patient to get preventive screening done, the patient is more likely to stay current and is more likely to catch cancer in an earlier phase when it’s more easily treated. 
• “Not Seen in 3”– It’s common for patients to drop off a physician’s roster if they haven’t been seen in 3 years, something that contributes to patient leakage and is also preventable. Medical practices can utilize a “not seen in 3” campaign to message patients, remind them they’re due for a check-up, and make it easy to schedule an appointment. Take a look at how this women’s health group added new appointments. and revenue to the schedule using this strategy.