From Reactive to Proactive: The Data-Driven Pivot Healthcare Needs Now

I spend a significant portion of my life “plugged in” to the AI ecosystem. Yet, even for me, it’s hard to keep up with the dizzying pace of announcements and tools. I feel like I am constantly falling behind even though I spend a lot of my free time learning, experimenting and trying to apply new things to my workflows. If I’m feeling the pressure, I can only imagine what it feels like for others who don’t spend as much time on AI.

These days, most announcements aren’t about new models because we don’t need a slightly smarter chatbot anymore. Instead, we are now seeing more announcements centered around context. OpenAI’s CRO, Denise Dresser, leaked a letter that she wrote to her team that outlined their push to make ChatGPT an “all-in-one” ecosystem. Google has been slowly rolling out Personalized Intelligence globally. And Anthropic has crafted an experience to not only port your chat history from other chatbots but also to connect everything to be used with Claude Cowork. It’s no longer about how the model thinks; it’s about what the model knows about you. The winner won’t be the smartest AI; it will be the one with the fastest access to your specific context.

Consumers have very, very different expectations today as a result of these upgrades.

Over the years, I’ve talked a lot about consumer changes. In many of my presentations over the years, I would reference two specific cultural shifts:

1. The view of Vatican Square. In 2005, a photo of the square showed a sea of humans, many with digital cameras (remember those?). In the second photo, taken in 2013, that same square was a sea of glowing screens. We shifted from witnessing moments to capturing them in less than a decade.

2. Expectations of Personalization. We didn’t demand it overnight; over the years, we were trained to expect it. Starbucks taught us we could customize a latte 15,000 ways. Apple let us curate our home screens. Spotify told us exactly what we wanted to hear before we knew we wanted to hear it.

We even see this in healthcare with “precision medicine.” We don’t treat two breast cancer patients with a blanket protocol anymore; we look at their specific genetics to tailor the treatment.

Everything is personalized now. Everything.

Except, it seems, the way we market in the healthcare industry.

Just as the consumer has come to expect personalized experiences, so, too, do we need to start thinking about how marketing teams can leverage data and context to move further, faster.

The days of the one-year marketing strategy plan, built on six months of focus groups and lag-time surveys from the year before, are over. For years, marketers in other industries like retail have been leveraging data to move quickly. For example, they’ve been able to take data to build a full view of the customer, to personalize the shopping experience and to even manage inventory. If a product isn’t available anymore, they don’t market it until it’s available again.

There is a lot of personalization going on within these industries to market more specifically, with more precision and with a data-first approach. Leveraging AI and agents has allowed these organizations to take these strategies even further.

Are we doing this in healthcare?

Not really. I hear a lot of people in marketing talk about how they can’t get access to the data to do any of this. (It’s hard, I know! As recently as last week, I was talking to a member of the data team for a health system in Florida who didn’t want to give Epic data to marketers because he “thought they would do something bad with it.”)

To be successful, this takes a lot of internal coordination with many different teams (and convincing people like the person I mentioned above that you’re going to treat the data with kid gloves). True: maybe it’s easier to access customer data in other industries. But it doesn’t mean we can’t try to do better in our industry.

It takes sophisticated thinking about things such as:

• How do I gain access to de-identified patient data? And, how can I use that data?

• How can I build a patient 360 to understand all patient touch points within the health system?

• Do I have access to provider appointment slots and availability in near-real time so that I can figure out how to turn campaigns on and off on a dime?

I think we’re missing the boat by not taking a more data-driven approach to marketing and targeting. I know we’re trying, but I haven’t seen any organization in the provider space truly succeed at this yet.

It’s one thing to talk about websites and whether you show up on Google and in ChatGPT.

It’s one thing to talk about how hard it is to get the data or how you lose the lead once they enter the system.

It’s one thing to create targeted “audiences” and think that if you market to those audiences, you’re all set.

It’s a whole new ballgame to really understand the full view of the patient/consumer, and even use external data points about population health and conditions to be able to better target patients in different communities (without targeting actual patients).

Personalizing a marketing strategy using data from within your health system means you’re moving from being reactive (having people come to you, say, via your website or your app) to being proactive (building more sophisticated targeting strategies to fill critical gaps in your system).

Even if you didn’t want to start with patient data, you could do more sophisticated things to gain insights about your organization and take action. For example, a colleague of mine recently used AI to analyze real-time sentiment from a year of social media, reddit and patient experience comments regarding a messy breakup between two large healthcare organizations. In less than 20 minutes, he had taken that data and had AI help him build a plan to pivot community sentiment and to highlight how to stand out against the other organization in the local market. In the past, an agency would have taken months to deliver that same insight. He did it in less than 20 minutes.

That is the power of “precision marketing” in today’s day and age. It’s about collecting data, leveraging AI to do something with the data, and quickly acting on it, and learning from that action to quickly pivot the strategy to what’s working and cancel what’s not.

Other industries have already figured this out. Data has become a weapon that allows organizations to move quickly for those that have built the foundation and have access to it. AI has allowed organizations to accelerate how to use this data to execute.

We have to move beyond using AI simply as a better version of Google Search. We need to use it to “slice and dice” our strategy by service line, by brand experience, and by micro-market. It’s possible to do this now. We know this because it’s happening outside of the healthcare industry. So now it’s time to start acting on this within our industry.

Consumers have been trained to expect that you know them. They expect that when they interact with you, they aren’t starting from scratch but instead, trust that you have context to deliver them a better personalized experience. (This is why OpenAI, Perplexity,Anthropic and even Google are trying to link medical information and records together via b.well.) Context is key. They want personalized answers and experiences. They aren’t looking for a “one size fits all” healthcare experience. You shouldn’t be delivering it anymore.

The world is only going to become more context-driven and personalized in every experience. Why not jump in, think differently, and start to test some new approaches?