Converging forces are creating a surge in demand for occupational health services, says Linda MacCracken, vice president, Truven Health Analytics, who spoke on health care marketing tactics at RYAN Associates’ 26th annual conference in October. Truven’s objective is to improve quality and lower the cost of health care through the better use of data and analytics.
In this climate of change, it is essential to be mindful of workforce demographics, employers’ concerns about rising health care costs, and overall perceptions about what it means to have a culture of health, she said.
MS. MACCRACKEN OFFERED THESE TIPS:
- Recognize urgency. What drives consumers’ decisions? What are their current and anticipated pain points?
- Develop a range of engaging options and solutions to address customers’ problems. For example, help reduce costly emergency department visits by redirecting patients (as appropriate) to other care access points.
- Build teams and partnerships. Strive to increase your understanding of various consumer and demographic groups to obtain their buy-in.
- Identify personally relevant impacts for target generations, for example, disease-state marketing.
- Demonstrate short-term wins such as downstream financial benefits and website visits and “click-throughs.”
- Don’t let up. Establish “crawl-walk-run” solution stages for sales and marketing based on your available and anticipated resources.
- Encourage culture change and a preventive mindset. Ask employers how committed they are to instilling a culture of health and what types of wellness incentives they believe would be most effective for their workforce. Work with clients to find ways to engage and reward employees for participating in health and wellness programs.
- Help clients understand workforce diversity and generational differences.
- Learn as much as you can about workforce similarities, differences, and preferences. For example, how committed is the workforce to using social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) – extensively, moderately, hardly at all?
- Interview clients and prospects about their health care costs, both workers’ compensation and personal health benefits. Share successes you have had driving down these costs for other employers.
GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES
To help occupational health professionals effectively target customers, Ms. MacCracken provides useful sketches and characterizations of various demographic groups. Successful marketing strategies can be built around an understanding of each group’s tendencies and preferences (Table 1). She cautioned that it is important to recognize that diversity exists within each group, so while certain assumptions may be made, they may not be universally applicable to a given generation.
