Reach more consumers with targeted marketing

Jim Albrittain:

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining our Optum Forum session today. Both Dave Hook and I are excited to spend the next 45 minutes discussing Optum's latest provider growth solution and how it was deployed at John Muir Health to great effect. To ensure that we have enough time to cover all of our content, we're going to hold taking any live questions, but we do encourage you to submit any questions that you might have through the ask-a-question feature in your presentation window.

               We'll kick off our time today with introductions, I will then spend about 10 to 15 minutes providing an overview of the consumer acquisition services solution, or targeted digital marketing, as it's commonly referred to within John Muir Health, then I will turn it over to Dave who will walk through how this solution helped John Muir serve over 1200 net new patients in just seven months. Let's get started with some quick introductions. Dave, I'll let you kick us off.

Dave Hook:

Thanks Jim. I'm Dave Hook from John Muir Health, and I'm pleased to have the opportunity to share our story with you today. At John Muir Health, I lead marketing and digital consumer engagement. We are excited to partner with Optum on precision marketing, as one of my passions is bringing best practices from other industries to healthcare and specifically to John Muir Health.

Jim Albrittain:

Thank you, Dave. And since I may not have a chance to say it later on, Dave and his team have been passionate and absolutely fantastic partners over the last 16 or so months working shoulder to shoulder with my team and with our ad agency partner, Brown Parker and [inaudible 00:02:02], as we've developed and deployed a number of precision marketing campaigns across their market. So, Dave, thank you again for joining us today.

               My name is Jim Albrittain and I lead two of Optum's provider growth solutions, including the consumer acquisition services solution that we implemented for John Muir Health. I've spent the last seven years with Optum and before that with the Advisory Board Company, leading client value delivery teams across a suite of provider market performance technology solutions.

               I want to start my portion of today's presentation by sharing a bit of what we're hearing and seeing in the market. And this certainly will be familiar for folks on the line. The growth challenges facing provider organizations across the country are many. They are complex. A hospital's product, so to speak is extremely expensive, their market incredibly competitive and cost regulatory and consumer driven pressures continue to rise. On top of all of that, there's a global pandemic that's contributing to even higher expenses, fewer high margin outpatient visits, and it's causing many consumers to put off care.

               According to a recent Kaufman Hall study released by the American Hospital Association, [inaudible 00:03:23] margins could be 11% below pre-pandemic levels by the years end, and more than a third of hospitals ended 2021 with negative margins. Putting it all together, that makes for a very challenging environment for healthcare marketers.

               Now, marketers realize this, you all realize this and they've taken steps even before the pandemic to enhance their capabilities. We have spoken with dozens of hospital marketing executives and the left side of the slide here has a few examples of ways that marketers are looking to drive profit margins for their organizations. They're deploying new consumer technologies like CRM systems and marketing tools, but many of these resource demanding systems don't generate immediate or actionable insights and fail to live up to their promise as turnkey growth solutions.

               Next, they're emphasizing digital engagement channels. So social media campaigns, patient portals, newsletters, but these efforts are commonly met with low adoption rates, fail to make a meaningful impression on consumers and are often underfunded relative to traditional marketing channels. Finally, and perhaps as a result of these massive expenditures, marketers have continually have to find ways to do more with less. It's hard to demand more resources when you can't show a hard return on your marketing investment.

               So despite their efforts, they find themselves with few insights, little to no traction with consumers and still fighting for budget. That's what we set out to solve with our precision marketing solution. We wanted to arm provider and health system marketers with the ability to understand and engage with consumers who are most likely to have immediate care needs to motivate those consumers with personalized messaging and calls to action, and to measure the bottom line impact of their marketing investments. And that is what the consumer acquisition services solution provides. It is an end-to-end consumer analytics and precision marketing solution that enables our clients to be more precise and scalable in their direct to consumer marketing and ultimately drive growth in high value and strategically important service areas.

               This precision marketing capability delivers to our clients a number of benefits, including improved marketing engagement, efficiencies in marketing spend without compromising patient acquisition numbers, the ability to create a personalized marketing experience for consumers that stands out from the rest of the digital marketing noise and the means to both project and measure the success of marketing campaigns. Central to this, precision marketing capability are a set of integrated clinical and commercial data sets that together, provide us with a comprehensive identified consumer profile on every single person in the country. It is a database that likely contains every person listening to this presentation. It provides up to 800 unique data points on each of us. And that data is then further enriched by our data science team with clinical propensity models and predictive algorithms.

               The depth of this enriched data enables us to target for very specific patients and consumers based not only on key demographic information like age and gender, but also based on who they are as individuals. What do they value? How do they make healthcare decisions or buying decisions? What type of insurance are they on or what kind of clinical care needs are they likely to have today or in the future? And you can see a number of additional examples on the right side of this slide. And with that level of insight on consumers in a client's market, we can develop highly targeted ad campaigns and highly personalized campaign messaging that engages those consumers as individuals and directly addresses their unique needs and preferences.

               Let me show you a conceptual example of how we do all of that. We will use joint replacement surgeries for this example. And again, our goal is to find what you might think of as qualified buyers or consumers who need care. The problem is that most consumers in a community are not qualified buyers, certainly for joint replacement. It maybe 1% to 3% of a given market that needs or have a joint replaced. If we start with a hypothetical community of 2 million people, our first step is to qualify that audience. We likely start by narrowing down the market geographically, call it 15 to 20 miles around a facility. Maybe it's an ambulatory surgery center.

               Within that market, we then identify the specific consumers that meet a custom set of criteria. This is criteria that's based almost entirely on a client's campaign goals. And of course, that may vary from campaign to campaign. For our example here, we're looking for consumers who are not currently patients of our imaginary health system, who have commercial insurance or likely to need a joint replacement based on our clinical propensity models. And finally, based on their health attitudes and behaviors, consumers who when reached are likely to activate and actually come in for care rather than put off care or grin and bear their joint pain. By applying these filters, we produce a set of consumers who provide a little over 1% of that 2 million consumer market by eliminating those unqualified buyers or the consumers who likely don't need care immediately. We can now concentrate marketing efforts and resources on those 25,000 qualified consumers.

               When an organization buys a billboard or an ad spot, they're paying to advertise to everyone in that market in the hope that their static one size fits all advertisement will engage enough of that 1% to 3% of consumers who need care to justify the high cost of mass media marketing. What we are offering is the ability to advertise just to that qualified 1% to 3%, to do it for less money than a billboard or a TV spot, and to net more patients who need that specific care. While this is a great start, we actually don't stop here. Even at this level of precision, we still haven't learned enough about who those 25,000 qualified individuals are, or how to earn their attention and business.

               This is often where traditional segmentation falls apart. Here, I've pulled two consumers out of our 25,000 qualified joint replacement targets. They look identical. 58 years old male, commercial insurance, same zip code. Nearly every health system in America markets to these two men in the exact same way, yet they are very different consumers who require different marketing strategies and different messages to engage. So on the left, you have Joe, he's got nagging knee pain, it's killing his golf handicap. He wants pain relief that's going to get him back out on the course, and he's willing to undergo surgery if necessary. He makes good money, has no kids, cares about appearances, and he is a social media [inaudible 00:10:58]. On the right, Mike is in severe pain. He also has cardiac comorbidities. He doesn't trust doctors, doesn't like hospitals, but his motivation to seek care is less about himself and more about how his family will get by if something happens to him. He's not on social media, he still owns a flip phone, but he does enjoy going down the YouTube or video rabbit hole on weekends.

               To most marketers, they look the same, but their health and their attitudes couldn't be more different. Of course, we're not building individual ads for individual consumers, rather, we take that highly qualified audience, the 25,000 in our joint replacement example, and we segment them into groups of individuals with shared attitudes and behaviors. So in our joint replacement scenario, we find all the Joes and all the Mikes in the market, and group them into unique audiences. We then develop and serve each audience with personalized ads and messaging based on their unique needs, attitudes and behaviors. And then we deliver those personalized ads through their preferred marketing channels.

               Finally, we track and report on key campaign performance indicators, and that lets us optimize the marketing in real time. And ultimately as the campaign begins to generate encounters from targeted consumers, we track visit details and financial contributions for targeted services rendered to our targeted audience. Not only does this campaign ROI data help us prove the value that our precision marketing delivers, for example, we could show increased patient conversion rates, increased profitability for marketing campaigns, reduced media spend and marketing waste, and of course, all of that measured against benchmarks and control groups, but also tracking this data enables hospitals to evaluate and better understand who actually came in for care in response to their marketing efforts. And that intelligence will allow them to refine and tailor future campaigns.

               To date, the consumer acquisition services solution has documented over $350 million in marketing ROI for our clients, and I'm excited that today you will have an opportunity to hear from one of those clients. The work at John Muir Health is a strong example of how, even in the midst of a pandemic, targeting and engaging consumers through precision marketing works and it works well. Dave I'll turn it over to you to introduce your health system and share your experience.

Dave Hook:

Thank you, Jim. Before I tell you more about our precision marketing story, let me tell you who John Muir Health is. We're an integrated health system, just east of San Francisco in the east bay, with over 6,000 employees, 1,000 physicians, and about $1.9 billion in annual revenue. We are in a very competitive market that is both expensive and well saturated with healthcare marketing. Like many of you, our continual challenge in marketing is how to do more with less. We were thrilled to find that precision marketing solution at Optum as part of our innovative partnership with them.

               Just a few years ago, we had a comprehensive marketing approach that included both traditional advertising, for example, TV and outdoor, plus digital advertising. We were operating on an annual plan and the investment required to see results was significant if you think about agency fees and production expense in addition to the expense of media in the bay area. As is done with these media types, when building awareness, we measured success by looking at brand awareness and brand preference, in addition to media spend and website traffic. The main challenge though, was communicating and translating these metrics to service utilization and financial return on investment.

               In an environment where costs must be reduced and we're being asked to do more with less, we needed a better solution. With Optum's precision marketing solution, we now use sophisticated consumer data and analytics to identify specific consumers and consumer groups who are likely to need care, which is a huge step forward for us. We are also able to track which consumers from the advertising campaigns come to John Muir Health for care, the services that they use and the return on investment. Our metrics now speak the language of finance, visits generated, growth in new patients or lives and net financial contribution, or the revenue generated by the services utilized, less the direct cost of care and the cost of the marketing. Optum was able to compliment our existing team by bringing the data and analytics capabilities to the table.

               Another significant benefit of the precision marketing solution is the ability to quantify and forecast the impact of the marketing campaigns on the business, again, before we could measure brand awareness and preference, as well as web visits. And even forecast likely increases with an increase in spend, but we couldn't forecast volume growth. Now we are able to do that and importantly, connect directly to our overall strategic plan. And the strategic planning group can come to marketing with a specific goal, which we in turn can validate and modify.

               For a first set of campaigns, which were to launch in the fall of 2020, like many health systems, our first priority was restoring financial health. Therefore, we set out to identify what we called high value consumers, those consumers most likely to need acute care in addition to primary care. These would be new patients whom we could identify through the [CAST 00:18:05] database as having specific clinical care needs. The opportunity and financial analysis pointed to four campaigns, which we launched on a staggered basis in which our proforma financial analysis indicated we detract over 1200 new patients with a cumulative net benefit of over $9 million over five years.

               Let me step back a little and share how we arrived at these campaigns and how we conduct our planning for future campaigns. We started with a rigorous process to collect input from various stakeholders, and then developed a prioritization based on multiple strategic criteria, including financial considerations. By developing the criteria in conjunction with the stakeholders, we were also able to more easily gain consensus regarding the recommended campaigns, agreeing upon this prioritization with step one.

               With the agreed prioritization, we then defined the market opportunity and expected financial return. For the market opportunity, the CAST data provides us with clinical propensity models that allow us to identify market size in terms of the number of consumers to be marketed to. In turn, this allows us to calculate an expected number of new patients after factoring in competitor market share, existing patients and our conversion assumptions.

               Working with our analytics department, we developed a typical basket of services for each campaign over five years, and then calculated expected revenue, less the cost of care and the cost of marketing to arrive at a five year projected net benefit. This step is very important to us as a check to see if our proposed investment will prove profitable, something we couldn't do before. And it provides us with clear expectations, specifically a projected number of new lives and financial net benefit against which we can measure progress going forward.

               Our next step was segmenting the audiences for each campaign based on the wealth of data that Optum brings. The clinical propensity models tell us who meets the criteria for each campaign. The data then allows us to develop detailed audience profiles, including lifestyles, health behaviors, health values, and their desired care experience among many other insights. These insights provide us with the ability to create segments of like individuals and a new level of insight when developing our messaging and creative strategy.

               With this insight, we developed our campaign strategy to be consistent with our brand promise. We listen, we explain, we work together as a team and to meet consumers where they were at the time. Remember in fall 2020, we didn't yet have a vaccine. And so people were very concerned about coming in for care. Our first messaging focused on safety measures, what we were doing to make our facilities as safe as possible, after which we introduced references to symptoms that consumers maybe experiencing in a question and answer format. And finally, the third phase of messaging emphasized our call to action to schedule an appointment with a primary care doctor or cardiologist. All of these messages were designed to be delivered through the preferred and most effective media channels for each segment.

               Finally, all of that work became visible to our target consumers, thanks to the media plan, which included digital display, paid social advertising and online video, three important channels indicated by the CAST data. And our channel selection and messaging were tailored to each segment.

               Our next step completes the package, although the step is not a onetime event. Measuring progress and reporting results has never been so satisfying. At the campaign level, as you see in the dashboard at the top, we're tracking digital advertising metrics such as click through rate, cost per click and conversions. Monthly reports from the ad agency facilitate a discussion with the marketing team about optimization, which segments, as in channels are performing best, which in turn allows us to continually apply learning and further improve results throughout the life of the campaigns. At the executive level, and this is a powerful tool for us, we're able to report on the number of new lives for these campaigns, as well as the associated financial contribution.

               All of this good work has enabled us to more precisely plan, make decisions and articulate value to the organization. Of course, I was very pleased to tell our leadership that we achieved our total campaign goal of 1200 new patients in only seven months, with more new patients expected as the campaigns continue. Our campaigns significantly outperformed digital advertising benchmarks, and our return to the organization can be summarized as 1,234 new patients with an estimated contribution margin of 5.9 million and counting.

               We're thankful to our partners at Optum for bringing us the data, the analytics and the measurement tools to more precisely target our advertising to those who most need care, to conserve budget and to articulate marketing's value in financial terms.

Jim Albrittain:

Thank you, Dave, and thank you again to everyone who joined us today to hear about our precision marketing capability and how that has enabled our provider clients of John Muir Health to project and measure bottomline impact achieved by marketing to clinical buyers through preferred channels, with relevant calls to action. We hope that you found this presentation engaging, and look forward to responding to any questions we have received. I hope you enjoy the rest of Optum Forum. Thank you.