5 ways to move at the speed of your patients

The acceleration of digital experiences doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. And why would we want it to?  Digital innovation has opened amazing opportunities. Consumers can easily find and order exactly what they want when they want it online. And while these new conveniences come at a welcome time, many businesses are challenged to keep pace with increasing consumer expectations. Now customers are demanding retail-like experiences every time they interact with a brand. And health care delivery is no exception.

From telehealth to any form of digital engagement, life sciences and health care (LSHC) companies feel the pressure to activate relevant experiences and compelling messages for patients, health care providers, and other customers. And more importantly, personalize content, maximize engagement, and build measurable improvements to keep customers coming back. In addition to the pressure, LSHC organizations face unique roadblocks when it comes to meeting the demands of today’s health care consumer.  

So, what’s standing in the way? In working with our clients, we’ve seen a major challenge is the ability—or inability—to create and approve content for consumers at the pace that they need it. It’s what we call, the content velocity challenge. The on-demand expectation for digital communications means marketers must generate a lot of content—all of which must clear the medical, legal, and regulatory (MLR) review process before it goes live. 

The content velocity challenge is real—approval for a single webpage can take weeks, LSHC digital campaigns upwards of 80 days to move into execution, and a multi-channel training program up to a year. By this time, critical information and content may no longer be relevant to the customer and you’ve lost them.

What’s causing these content delays and how can LSHC leaders work to minimize them? In our experience we’ve found five key factors can impede the content process:

1. Many LSHC companies find it challenging to bring the right stakeholders into the content creation process at the right time. Throughout the content approval process, companies must bounce between tools, data repositories, emails, spreadsheets, and various point solutions. This is leading to process breakdowns which makes it difficult for stakeholders to weigh in when they need to. 
2. Organizations typically outsource all their content creation to outside agencies. This limits content velocity because in many cases, the agencies are writing their own brief and determining the timeline for execution. In addition, it can be difficult to onboard agencies to your organization’s compliance requirements. 
3. LSHC organizations suffer from inefficient, manual processes, and workflows. As a result, communications between relevant teams, stakeholders, and approvers become bottlenecked and fragmented, further delaying the ability to get content approved and delivered to its intended audiences quickly.
4. The MLR content approval and regulatory compliance process become big bottlenecks. Due to existing medical legal and regulatory review processes and industry-specific regulatory oversight, all content must go through the same in-depth approval process. Which means regulatory teams are reviewing and re-reviewing low-risk updates and iterations of a previously approved asset.
5. Organizations approach all content like a finished asset. When content can’t be modified or changed it becomes impossible to adapt it for a specific individual’s experience. Given that content personalization is crucial in creating differentiated customer experiences, many LSHC companies face the risk of losing their audience and decreased engagement. 

These factors are lot to try to manage and tackle all at once. Relying on manual systems while trying to coordinate digital campaigns, and manage content quickly becomes overwhelming. And any type of delay is high stakes for your business patients and customers won’t stick around if digital health experiences fail to meet their expectations. 

That’s why we’ve come together with Adobe to develop a playbook that can help you address these challenges head on. From streamlining complex workflows to speeding up the risk-based approval process, we’ve identified five top plays to help solve major delay challenges, accelerate the content creation process, and shorten overall time to market. 

With these plays under your belt, we’ll show you how you can move at scale—helping you go beyond just meeting customer expectation to exceeding it. The first step is to create dynamic customer experiences that keeps customers, and the next is to scale the experience to achieve new growth.  

We’d love to hear how you’re managing the content velocity challenge. Please share your experience and insights—and if you take a look at our playbook let us know if it’s helpful.