How Digital Strategy Shapes Patient Engagement at Boston Children's Hospital

The chief marketing officer of this pediatric powerhouse says that social media and mobile access are essential to its strategy and "innovation promises to be an ever-important part of our brand."

Boston Children's Hospital is on a roll.

The 396-bed organization was ranked the top pediatric hospital in 2014 by the U.S. News & World Report, it has revitalized revenue after a decrease in patient discharges, and, to top it all off, pop star Taylor Swift made a surprise appearance this month to serenade a young patient.

By all accounts things are going well, thanks in part to Margaret Coughlin, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer. Coughlin orchestrated tweaking the organization's name back in 2012 (from Children's Hospital Boston to Boston Children's Hospital, as it was commonly referred to) and now is focusing her attention on patient experience and digital marketing endeavors.

To learn more about how Boston Children's is aligning its marketing strategy, I asked Coughlin to shed some insight on the inner-workings of her well-oiled marketing machine.

HLM: Do you think children's hospitals have more pressure to be in the vanguard of digital/social media since patients and their families are younger than the general patient population?

Coughlin: The consumerism of healthcare demands that all providers engage with their patients and families (our customers) when, how, and where the customer desires. The healthcare consumer of today is curious and demanding and that is a great opportunity for health care marketers to engage.

But the ante is up because the content competition is fierce. The fastest growing age band for Twitter use is 55–64, which indicates that digital engagement is an opportunity for all demographic segments. We certainly have many older parents and grandparents heavily engaged with us in our social channels.

HLM: Can you tell me about Boston Children's longitudinal-approach to patient relationships and how that affects the marketing strategy?

Coughlin: Boston Children's sees nearly 600,000 patients annually. These patients are a mixture of first-timers and frequent flyers—but remember they are all children. This gives us a unique perspective of serving the patient and their family through a lifetime of healthcare needs. We see the patients and their families as our responsibility for decades.

As marketers, therefore, we must understand our patient segments well—ensure that our brand promises are met at every touch point and engage the patient and their family all along the journey. Marketing has an exclusive role in that we work across the enterprise and we have the responsibility of assuring consistency and excellence in all touch points.

HLM: How does your marketing department play a role in improving the patient experience?

Coughlin: We're providing an enhanced patient experience through digital engagement. For many patients and families the first touch point with our organization will be our digital properties—our website, social channels, etc. By providing a great user experience in these avenues we're starting this new relationship with them off right.

We need to make it easy for them to interact with us, whether it be learning more about our services, finding a provider, or requesting an appointment. This is the starting point of our journey together.

As the CMO, I am one of a team of executive sponsors directing our customer experience initiatives. This includes referring physicians and patients and families. The combination of marketing's "outside-in customer lens," in partnership with our operations and patient care executives, is a powerful team leading our experience initiatives.

HLM: What practices have led to Boston Children's social media success? Can you tell me about how you approach community-building online?

Coughlin: Early on we recognized that our social media channels are essential—they contribute to customer loyalty and positive word-of-mouth "buzz," which are increasingly important pieces to a brand's reputation.

We took the time to assess our social channels to determine audience and appropriate content for each, across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+. For example, our science/research content receives higher engagement through our LinkedIn company page and Innovation Twitter handle, whereas a strong patient story will resonate better with our consumer audience on Facebook.

Regardless of channel, providing compelling, engaging content is key, and we always strive to stay true to this.

We treat social media as an integral part of the patient experience and we work to create a supportive, inspirational, and informative environment for past, current, and prospective patient families—specifically on Facebook. Parents have never been more involved in their child's care and it is becoming increasingly important to meet them where they are.

They scour the Internet for information, often seeking out meaningful connections, reviews, and support systems [advocacy groups, are an example] with most of this occurring through an online social experience.

By sharing patient success stories, parenting tips, and health information we have been able to create a dynamic environment that is a useful resource for families. We respond to each question and comment to our wall as a way to directly engage with our consumers, demonstrate that we're listening, direct them to the care they need, and celebrate their milestones, such as birthdays and graduations.

HLM: How important is measuring return-on-investment with social media and other marketing initiatives? How do you go about tracking that?

Coughlin: Recently, we created a link-tracking system so that we can measure the engagement with our links shared through social media channels and blogs. By tracking clicks and page views post-click, time spent on page, etc., we have a better sense of what content is working and what isn't.

While social media can sometimes be more difficult to track and analyze, we have had some strong results with our measuring efforts so far and continue to move in the right direction.

We are testing and building CTA's across all of our channels and improving our tracking constantly. I can tell you that we can directly track patient appointments to our digital channels and that is exciting.

HLM: To what extent do you use mobile marketing, apps, etc.? Do you think mobile elements will continue to grow in importance?

Coughlin: Currently our online engagement is over 50% mobile-based. As we continue to shift toward device-agnostic architectures we're going to see further reliance on a mobile-first mindset.

There so many tasks we as users can now accomplish on mobile devices that we couldn't do in the past. Five years ago we would have never thought to book a flight, pay a bill, or find critical healthcare information from a mobile device—now we expect to do that.

This year we've retrofitted our existing web site to be fully-responsive, further enabling our patients and families to find the information they need from any device, anywhere. The site will respond to the user's screen size to provide the optimal user-experience regardless of being on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone.

Over the next few years I see Web-based applications becoming more important versus natively built iOS/Android/Java-based applications. Rather than requiring one application to find a provider, another to pay a bill, and yet another to find a location we should be able to integrate those applications into one cohesive user experience.

HLM: Can you tell me about the efforts you have in the works now? What's next?

Coughlin: Our efforts are multi-faceted. One or our initiatives that is getting tremendous traction is our Pediatric Innovation campaign. We lead the world in pediatric innovation and research and as such are actively growing our ecosystem that supports that part of our brand. This global initiative will culminate this year in our second annual Global Pediatric Innovation Summit October 30 and 31—innovation promises to be an ever important part of our brand.

At any given time, we will have upwards of 50 targeted campaigns in the market. Many of our patients travel from around the nation and the globe to get our hospital.

We pioneer and innovate new healthcare solutions for children across all types of treatment and have a responsibility to be sure that our patients and their doctors can find the right solutions here at Boston Children's. Marketing has to engage and convert those patients to Boston Children's patients.

HLM: What else is on the horizon?

Coughlin: Healthcare is the most exciting category for marketing right now in my opinion. The market is changing rapidly, which means opportunities abound and sophisticated marketing has only just begun in this category.

Technology in both the products and the delivery of marketing is accelerating and that is invigorating. The power and value of the brand is growing and the stewardship of the brand is raising marketing's importance and influence.