The current value of the global healthcare market is $11.9 trillion, according to Business Wire. The healthcare industry has been seeing a gradual increase in sales over the last years with corresponding developments in medicine, and the current pandemic has revealed the true potential of this industry.
The healthcare marketing industry, however, continues to look for new ways to promote their brand and increase sales. The most promising asset they have, in recent years, is artificial intelligence.
One study by Accenture showed that AI could potentially create $150 billion in annual savings for the US healthcare economy by 2026. Across the world, from Sydney to boston ai for healthcare marketingcan vastly influence the entire domain in the next decade or so.
This article talks about the few methods through which AI is used for healthcare marketing.
The Vast Potential of AI in Healthcare Marketing
1. Big Data
Like any other industry, healthcare marketing involves a massive amount of data: a predicted value of 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes in 2020, to be exact, according to Curtis and Coulter.
Data is collected from patients, hospitals, online purchases, and various other sources in the healthcare sector.
This enormous amount of data is useless as such unless you can analyze the numbers and make sense of them. It is ultimately this data and the analytics tools that work on the data that are the foundation for various other applications of AI (as described below).
2. Social Media Marketing
From a marketer’s point of view, the best place to pitch your products to connect with people in social media. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other platforms have people of all demographics, ages, backgrounds, and professions, and the task is to find the right sub-group to market your product.
The instagram marketing agencies, for example, use AI-embedded software to predict the behavior of the target audience: what pages they follow, what keywords are likely to capture their attention, what time they are most active on the platform, etc.
Keyword-searching applications collect information about the currently trending keywords and the terms that your competitors are using so that you can choose appropriate words in your content to boost the SEO ranking.
The essential goal of using AI for social media marketing is to curate your content based on what your followers seem to want or like so that you can improve your outreach.
Another common feature in most social media accounts and websites is a live chat feature, which use chatbots to answer commonly asked questions, thereby contributing to patient engagement and website traffic.
3. Knowing the Patient
In healthcare, it is crucial to know your patient as a doctor or as any healthcare practitioner. However, if you have thousands of clients, it is better to let an AI-embedded software manage the customer database.
By collecting and storing the patient’s history on your platform, as well as other information you can get from their medical records and prescriptions, you can keep monitoring each patient’s health and progress.
That way, smart software can suggest product recommendations to the patient based on their history. Of course, to be doubly sure of the medication suggestions your software comes up with, it is best to run some test samples and consult with a doctor regarding the accuracy.
Patients are shifting more towards virtual consultations modes with doctors because they cannot afford to go out as much as before.
Technology has evolved to an extent where software applications perform predictive analysis on a patient’s life (for example, percentage risk of developing a significant fatal or nonfatal disease in the coming years), something that was never possible earlier because of the level of sophistication.
So, if your AI software can act as a stand-in doctor as far as medications are concerned, it gives your company a huge boost in brand promotion.
4. Continuous Monitoring
Some patients need continuous monitoring of their sugar levels, hemoglobin levels, and insulin. For these, people commonly use wearable sensors, which collect data from the patient’s body and continuously transmit it to the healthcare company that makes the device.
These devices are also sources of information about the patient, using which AI tools can recommend medications and behavioral changes as well.
With these devices, the patients can be confident that they can be warned well in advance of any danger or risk. Healthcare companies that use AI to connect with patients this way also build trust with the patient in the process, by ensuring constant support.
If you do have tie-ups with hospitals and doctors, you can send this data to them as well to help the patient further.
5. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision
To monitor a patient, you first need to feed in all the details into the system, like the patient’s age, gender, medical history, symptoms, and other personal information.
A way to automate the process is by using technology like natural language processing (NLP), image processing, and computer vision.
Patients can upload electronic health reports, pathology reports, clinical notes, and prescriptions on your website (you can set up a portal and login credentials for the same).
From these pictures or documents, the AI software can collect information from these semi-structured and unstructured textual documents and add the details to its database.
Similarly, if the patient has uploaded images of scans or X-rays, the software can analyze those and interpret the photographs appropriately to identify symptoms, problems, and hence, suggest medication as well.
Stay Safe with Healthcare
The healthcare industry caters to every human in the world at some point or the other, so marketing companies must channel their efforts to reach the audience properly.
Every sector is incorporating AI and data analytics into their business models, especially with the digital acceleration that every industry is experiencing today.
The issue of privacy and data security when AI is involved is still an ongoing debate, so it is your responsibility to protect your patient’s personal information and convince them of the same.
There are enough tools available to conduct marketing campaigns effectively, and putting AI to good use can benefit your company and customers significantly.