Digital health has become a hot topic lately. With the abundance of health data available from electronic health records, personal fitness apps and devices, and home genome test kits, we now have the potential to gain valuable insights into our well-being and take appropriate action.
However, simply having vast amounts of data is not sufficient. It’s crucial to be aware of what data we possess, comprehend its significance, and act upon that understanding. While the United States faces particular challenges due to its fragmented healthcare system, similar obstacles exist in healthcare worldwide.
So, how can we tackle this issue? Ragnarok Co-founder and Co-CEO Steven Aldrich, offers his insights:
Step 1: Define Standards
The primary purpose of digital health in healthcare is to enhance the patient experience, which often extends to their family members and caretakers. Before delving into data analysis, it is crucial for organizations to establish their standards of excellence upfront. This ensures a clear understanding of what a robust data architecture should support at a high level. Standards of excellence might include:
Step 2: Data Audit
Once you have set your desired standard, the next step is to document your existing data infrastructure. This involves identifying where your data resides, who has access to it, and how it is currently being used. Legacy analytics systems often suffer from sluggishness and incompleteness, leading to blind spots that obscure vital insights. Consequently, this creates gaps in understanding the true customer journey and hampers effective action.
Step 3: Data Strategy
After assessing your current data landscape, it’s time to develop your future state strategy. This entails crafting use cases that address the identified gaps and align with your business goals. Document the following:
- What data do you need to track and why?
- What new programs or initiatives should you launch that are not feasible with your current setup?
- What is your vision for data accessibility and the stakeholders who should have access?
At this stage, you’ll likely generate a comprehensive list of requirements that will be subsequently refined and prioritized by project owners.
Tip: Involve all relevant business stakeholders from the beginning. Incorporating internal users' input upfront maximizes the impact of improvements in data-related work.
Step 4: Data Enablement
Armed with a well-defined strategy, it’s time to embark on the exciting phase of enablement. This is where partners like Heap come into play, streamlining the process of discovering and acting upon digital insights. Heap’s platform accelerates your progress, enabling you to obtain better answers and take action based on your customer’s journey across various digital touchpoints.
At Ragnarok, we support the implementation of Heap to ensure the setup aligns with the established data strategy and to empower teams to extract maximum value from the platform.
Case Study
Atria Senior Living, a leading operator of over 370 senior living communities in the U.S. and Canada, serves residents and families with a track record of more than twenty years. Atria creates exceptional communities where over 39,000 older adults can thrive.
Atria's Goals
Atria engaged Heap to support their objectives of increasing website conversions for scheduling tours and analyzing customer journey patterns.
Problems
- Lack of insight into funnel drop-off and impacts to conversion
- Difficult to segment event data into actionable insights
- Data governance across multiple sources of traffic, brands, and internal users
Needs
- Ability to know where drop-off is happening and how it’s impacting conversion rates
- Better segmentation of user behavioral data
- Ability to easily see insights across multiple sources without added engineering work
Why Heap?
Atria found that their legacy provider lacked the depth of insight and data capture capabilities they required. Gaps in data governance complicated data comprehension, and analytics were neither intuitive nor easily actionable.
Key Benefits
Post-implementation, Atria Senior Living experienced significant benefits, including:
- Behavioral Segmentation: Heap enabled them to segment customers at a nuanced level, facilitating tailored communications. Segmentation included distinctions between adult children of residents versus residents, memory care residents, financially unqualified individuals, rural versus urban visitors, and more.
- Funnel Analysis + Journey Mapping: Atria could now track customer interactions beyond mere pageviews. Tracking was extended to form submission funnels, key events (e.g., viewing pricing, floor plans, and room photo galleries), and sessions across community pages, all of which represent vital milestones in the customer journey.
- Session Replay: The ability to replay customer sessions allowed Atria to identify “rage clicks” or instances where customers experienced confusion, offering invaluable insights into areas with gaps in the customer experience.
- Speed to Insights: As part of the implementation project, Ragnarok built three dashboards comprising 8-10 charts each, providing overviews of the site, audience analytics, and account information. These dashboards were easily replicable across various Atria Senior Living entities.
Case Study
Return on Investment
Building a robust data infrastructure is an investment that should yield returns. We advise clients to prioritize use cases that focus on delivering a significant return on investment (ROI). Here’s a quick example of how one client prioritized a use case for immediate impact:
- Goal: Increase conversion rate from pageviews to “Apply Now” submissions.
- Hypothesis: Simplifying the list of job categories and adding a job category search bar will improve user experience and guide users to the correct job faster.
- Change: Implemented a job category search bar and streamlined the list of options.
- Results: Comparing data from March 21 to May 8, 2023, the total conversion rate increased from 14.5% to 14.9%. Notably, the funnel for the “Find Your Career” button witnessed a one-percentage-point increase, and the conversion rate for users who modified their job category choice increased fourfold compared to those who did not modify it.
In summary, modernizing analytics capabilities with partners like Heap can benefit healthcare and other industries by providing a comprehensive view of customer behavior. By leveraging advanced analytics tools, you can unlock valuable insights to optimize your digital experiences and drive business growth.
Questions? Comments? Wanna chat? Reach out to hear more about how Heap and Ragnarok can help.
Steven Aldrich
Steven Aldrich is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Ragnarok, an agency that blends Marketing acumen with MarTech consultancy. For more than 15 years, Steven has helped brands improve their app retention through strategic mapping, increasing automation and personalization, implementing new marketing tools, and training teams to think more strategically.
