Healthcare's Amazon Prime Moment is here

 I'm AVP, Brand at Northwell Health. Five years ago, doing brand for a health system was perhaps the worst place a brand professional could hone their craft. Today health and health care is the largest sector of the American economy -- and more importantly, it's where culture is being created. 

Hear me out. All people today are OBSESSED with their health and wellness. The savvy and connected are as informed and equipped than many primary care physicians to optimize their minds, bodies, and health. Those who are not as connected or informed still have more options and more means at their fingertips, also to be their own general contractors, to question physicians, track their health, and advocate for better or more.

This doesn't mean that either group will always make the best choices, or will always have answers that physicians do not. But nearly everyone is far more informed, and opinionated, and expectant, of a better outcome, more effective treatment, and more positive experience. Which leads us to...

The Amazon Prime Moment 

Health care brands are sitting on our own Amazon Prime moment. We have customer-centric workflows powered by AI, mobile entry points and on ramps, virtual scheduling, multi-channel engagement, and automatic bill pay. 

Self-directed account management. Auto booking! 

AI is supporting our people to make them smarter, better decisions-makers, and better listeners. Our marketing tech stack enables a "core quarterback" approach to every patient account, with a wrapper of communications delivering what people need at the right time and place. 

We are finding lapsed customers—people who left their care journey for 6 to 12 months—and winning them back at conversion rates of 15% to 35%, which are monster numbers. We're sitting on a brand that was launched 10 years ago and reinvigorated 5 years ago in the Pandemic, has risen head and shoulders above regional competitors and registers nationally, punching well above its weight on differentiation and consideration.

This is monster stuff. This isn't just a health system; we are almost Amazon right now.

We’re sending people millions of text messages a day to get them to the right place. We’ve got a rigorous, vibrant social platform. We even have an editorial platform, a renowned wellness journal, a content editorial platform that gains millions of visits a year from influential wellness seekers. It's an all in one site and social-powered experience that goes head to head with some of the most influential wellness tiktokers out there, gaining 10s of millions of content engagements and influencing not only wellness but also healthcare behaviors and choices. 

Our Wellness platform is able to convert people to health care, and influence shopping trends. 

This is crazy, this isn’t a health system! We’ve unlocked Amazon-level goodness here. Monster stuff for any company, let alone a health system. 

Yet why is it all so hard?

Anyone here now can help me. Reps from mar-tech and data-insights firms all say you’ll work together. You say you are interoperable with Salesforce - and Epic. Sometimes you say you DO work together. You all say you’ll work for my media agency. But why does the prospect of working with you seem so hard? Maybe it’s interoperability? At this point in the evolution of mar-tech, there can no longer be any walled gardens. 

Well, we do this with nearly 100 people in an in-house agency. We’re people powered, with top-notch marketing tech stacks and analytics, data, reporting. Patient comms, editorial, creative. We’ve got great agencies. But in most places we’re duct-taping this together with raw human power, some decent tech, and raw ingenuity. But it’s always hard. And we need to do a better job connecting it up. 

I want to show you what good looks like. But I also want to shine some light on this. Full disclosure, what we do at my health system in marketing, patient communications, and brand building is really hard; we’re sweating most of this out.

If we could find a way to make this a little easier, connect this up more seamlessly, and free our best marketers to really shape programs for people, not transactions, just like our physicians are doing now, we’d achieve that goal of being the most customer-obsessed company in America today.

The Amazon Prime of health care? It's time.