There are several ways that healthcare organizations can use to capture data and use it for marketing purposes without violating any regulatory stipulations. This paper presents an analysis of two of such ways and how they might change in future.
The first way healthcare organizations use to collect data is patient-centered analytics. This method involves healthcare providers recording patterns of illnesses and treatment outcomes across a given patient demographic instead of focusing on a single chart at a time (Cummings, 2001). The data is recorded mostly in electronic devices. Health care providers try and collect data about the patient at every point of the care continuum including inpatient and outpatient, structured and unstructured, and clinical and non-clinical settings such as social media (Cummings, 2001). This method of capturing data does not violate any regulatory stipulations and in fact supports the development of better and cheaper healthcare programmes.
Interoperability is another way to capture data for use in marketing. This method involves healthcare organizations obtaining and information across an enterprise. There is increased rise of patient-centered care models and initiatives that heavily rely on seamless communication between different healthcare providers. Interoperability provides healthcare organizations with massive data that they can use to plan on marketing strategies by effectively comparing themselves with similar organizations (Shortliffe & Cimino, 2006). As such they are able to recognize markets that are underserved and therefore develop strategies to reach those markets.
Going into the future these ways of capturing data may change. The advent of advanced technology will aid in the recording and retention of massive data for many years. This will help healthcare organizations to gather data in a cheaper and more effective way. Moreover, technology will aid in the organization and analysis of captured data in a manner that it becomes effective for healthcare organizations to leverage their marketing decisions.
References
Cummings, N. A. (2001). Integrated behavioral healthcare: Positioning mental health practice with medical/surgical practice. San Diego: Academic.
Shortliffe, E. H., & Cimino, J. J. (2006). Biomedical informatics: Computer applications in health care and biomedicine. New York, NY: Springer.
