In the latest episode of Impetus Digital‘s Fireside Chat, Brent Walker, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Analytics at PatientBond, joined me to discuss how psychometric segmentation can be used to guide healthcare marketing campaigns, the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in extracting psychometric insights, and the controversies around using these kinds of data for marketing purposes.
Check out this preview of our discussion:
Q: Tell us a little bit about the momentum [around digital health adoption] that you have leveraged since COVID-19 in a positive way for the benefit of patients. Have there been any changes to the PatientBond solution?
A: Great question! There have been some elements of digital health that have grown gangbusters. There are some other areas of digital health that might not have grown as fast as people had anticipated or had assumed, and in some cases, kind of counterintuitive. For instance, telehealth obviously grew. Did it grow to the level that everybody thought it was going to? There isn’t necessarily 100% adoption and it hasn’t replaced the in-person caregiving that happens. We did a lot of work with telehealth before COVID, but we were actually looking at the tea leaves: we ended up building our own digital health or telehealth virtual care offering within PatientBond and that’s starting to take off, too.
Along the way, we do a lot of market research to find out what are people’s attitudes, what are their values, what are their behaviors, and trying to anticipate what some of those dynamics are going to be. We did some studies before COVID, during COVID, and we’re doing it after COVID, too, to say, “what kind of impact does this have on digital health?” As I said, telehealth obviously grew, but in the research that we did, measuring who was using telehealth before COVID and who was anticipating to use it during and after COVID, it looked like it was topping out at about only 30 or 40%. It is not 100% like people might have been assuming.
There are different consumer types or patient types that are much more likely to use things like virtual care and telehealth versus some other patient types. We call those “psychographic segments.” There is some low-hanging fruit there and then, there are some laggards that are coming along. There are other aspects like remote monitoring, at-home diagnostics, those are starting to take off a lot too. Health portals and digital apps didn’t see the big rocket-ship-hockey-stick adoption during and after COVID that people might have anticipated. There’s a lot of opportunities to drive digital health beyond where it just naturally fell after COVID started…
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Brent Walker, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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About Impetus Digital
Impetus Digital is the spark behind sustained healthcare stakeholder communication, collaboration, education, and insight synthesis. Our best-in-class technology and professional services ensure that life science organizations around the world can easily and cost-effectively grow and prosper—from brand or idea discovery to development, commercialization, execution, and beyond—in collaboration with colleagues, customers, healthcare providers, payers, and patients.