In moments of high stress, many professional marketers relax by reminding ourselves that, after all, what we do isn’t brain surgery. 

While we may not be saving lives regularly, sometimes our role can make a real difference. By taking on the challenge of health equity, healthcare marketers and their partners have an opportunity to help improve the quality of life of millions of Americans.      

According to the CDC, health equity is “the state in which everyone has a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health.” Unfortunately, the U.S. has many pre-existing injustices in the way healthcare is delivered, resulting in serious consequences. Deloitte reports that health inequities in the U.S. account for approximately $320 billion in annual healthcare spending. If unaddressed, this figure could grow to $1 trillion or more by 2040.

In our recent webinar, Chris Paquette, founder, and CEO of DeepIntent, reviewed different approaches for addressing health equity with Brady Gadberry, Acxiom’s SVP of Data Products, and Martin Wexler, Acxiom’s SVP of Channel Partnerships. Here are five strategies they outlined that can be used to improve health equity:   

1. Better engage underserved or vulnerable populations by leveraging high-quality, predictive data.   

Where you live can determine your access to education, healthcare, and public infrastructure. During the webinar, Paquette discussed a research finding called “the zip code effect,” which asserts that your zip code is a better predictor of health than your genetic code. If just location can be that predictive, healthcare marketers have the opportunity to further leverage high-quality demographic data layered with other social determinants of health to better devise communication strategies to focus on those underserved or vulnerable populations. 

2. Use real-world health data to improve your audience quality, and measure results to better understand your impact.   

Campaigns delivering information to the right audiences at the right time can reduce barriers to better health. Marketers using real-time signals of disease such as incident rates and acting on those insights programmatically and in a deidentified way can be highly prescriptive about the interventions that need to happen on the provider or the cohort level. Reaching people who need that information the most by detecting opportunities for engagement day by day, week by week, has a compound effect that can improve overall health and prevent negative outcomes. 

3. Integrate campaigns and break down the silos between physician and patient advertising to build trust.

Informed decisions lead to better compliance and outcomes; however, trust in the healthcare industry is steadily eroding, resulting in more friction between patients and healthcare providers. Health education and awareness represent a massive opportunity to improve care. Coordinating campaigns across healthcare providers (HCP) and direct-to-consumers (DTC) can help restore trust by giving each a similar starting point for discussions about diseases and medications. Having a common language and framework facilitates more productive conversations inside and outside the doctor’s office.   

4. Know your audiences as people, and build more customer intelligence on your health audiences. 

Gadberry pointed out that, like with many other industries, there’s a lot of separation of systems that need to be addressed. If you think about the relevant data that’s locked away in payer systems and across the different parts of their enterprise, just removing those silos and understanding all the data inputs that can support marketing would provide major advantages. Technology and services such as data management and identity solutions can break down these barriers and give analytics teams a stronger starting point for audience creation, segmentation, and other modeling, with privacy always top of mind.  

5. Always maintain strict compliance with regulatory and industry restrictions while balancing innovation with digital adoption.   

Healthcare is a highly regulated industry, as it should be. We all want our health information to stay private. However, due to the patchwork of state privacy laws, some platforms are limiting health advertising and the opportunity to educate and inform the public. Companies across the industry – payers, providers, pharmaceutical companies, and more – are finding it more difficult to understand and inform those who likely have an interest in learning more about treatments and medications, which has the opposite effect of people pulling away from the system instead of engaging with it. Working with experts who can navigate the complexity of these regulations is critical to leveraging the data in the system and building agility for marketing operations.  

With Health Equity, Everyone’s a Winner 

Americans have the lowest life expectancy at birth and the highest avoidable death rates when compared to their peer countries, despite the U.S. spending far more on health care, according to the Commonwealth Fund. 

If we can engage more people in healthcare, everyone wins. With a larger base of insurance members, the overall cost of healthcare goes down. A healthier workforce helps the economy and society. By providing better access to information, pharmaceutical companies, providers, and payers can help patients get treated and help solve their conditions, mitigating chronic disease and extending both life expectancy and quality. 

To find out how Acxiom and DeepIntent are working together to support the healthcare industry in achieving these goals, read more about our partnership in our recent press release.