Wanted: Healthcare Innovation for Convenience, Personalization and AI

August 2023 is “innovation month” here at Swaay.Health and we have been publishing a number of innovation-related stories. We thought it would be fun to ask the Swaay.Health audience for their opinion on where innovation is happening. We received several fantastic responses. Here are four of them.

Convenient Care

There is no doubt that the arrival of retail health has changed the healthcare landscape. With a focus on convenience, these providers are innovating along a vector that was not given much attention by incumbent healthcare organizations.

Here is what Dean Browell, Chief Behavioral Officer at Feedback had to say:

Amazon, CVS, Walmart, Walgreens and others don’t need to innovate on healthcare itself – they only need to innovate on accessibility. Not just “access” in terms of availability, but ease. They are helping consumers realize that healthcare CAN be a transaction rather than how hospitals have been pretending it isn’t. The innovation is in the expectations, which is not where we have always fought best.

Personalized & Empathic Care

As more and more healthcare processes become automated (or semi-automated), there should be more time for clinicians to offer more personalized and empathic care. At least that is the hope.

Rebecca Throop, VP Marketing & Public Relations at LynxDx, encourages us to get back to seeing patients as people and innovating from there.

Healthcare marketing needs to be individualized, with a focus on the unique needs of every person in the target community. It can’t be about generic personas or business needs. Healthcare has a deep impact on people’s lives, and they expect organizations to communicate with them with the respect and empathy they deserve.

Artificial Intelligence

There is no hotter topic these days than Artificial Intelligence (AI). In just a short time, this technology has entered the public consciousness with some reacting with excitement and others asking for caution. AI has a lot of potential to help improve healthcare.

Lyndi Hirsch, Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Medisafe, believes that AI can help improve patient experiences by synthesizing past behaviors and using predictive models to impact patient engagement.

Healthcare marketers need to ensure that predictive machine learning is on their radars. In the past, healthcare marketers could use predictive analytics to weigh historical and real-time data and make predictions. Now, predictive machine learning can automatically adjust the patient experience by continually evaluating supersets of patient profiles and data such as recognized behavior patterns to evaluate and anticipate human behavior. Artificial intelligence is here to stay – its various applications will continue to stake a dominating presence in healthcare, especially since the boom of various widely available generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

Jonathan Kaufman, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer at Sage Dental had a very interesting perspective on the application of AI in dental care. Patients may not yet be ready for AI-powered surgeons, but dentists assisted by AI is something Kaufman believes patients are willing to accept.

All eyes are on AI. In dentistry, AI is instrumental in enhancing diagnostics and improving patient outcomes. As the tech becomes more widespread, industry professionals are looking to AI to not only improve efficiency and streamline workflows, but also to help with that creative spark. Tools such as ChatGPT, WriteSonic, and Lex, for example, can help marketers generate more (both quantity and quality) creative written content so that marketing campaigns stand out and reach the right audiences.

What are your thoughts on innovation in healthcare marketing or patient experience?