Most people have a lot of choices now when it comes to their health journey. If they don’t like your location, your staff, etc. they can often just pick a new place to go instead. This makes it vital to acquire, retain, and personalize the experience for their healthcare consumers. To get a better understanding of how to do this, we reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — what role do analytics and patient engagement tools play in acquiring, retaining, and personalizing experiences for healthcare consumers? Below is what they had to share.
Karin Hayes, Senior Vice President, Analytics Products and Services at OptimizeRx
Before healthcare appointments, patients are already influenced by advertising across social media, streaming TV, search, patient portals, and increasingly AI-powered assistants that answer questions about symptoms, treatment options, cost, and access, shaping expectations well before they see a provider. AI-powered health IT platforms can transform this journey by identifying the patients most likely to benefit from therapy, the providers caring for them, and the optimal channels, messaging, and timing for engagement.
AI can also improve campaign planning by recommending more effective audience strategies, channel mix, and content optimization to maximize reach, engagement, and marketing ROI. The greatest impact comes from aligning direct-to-consumer (DTC) and healthcare professional (HCP) engagement. Privacy-safe DTC campaigns educate patients ahead of visits, while EHR-integrated messaging delivers clinically relevant insights to providers at the point of care, supporting more informed conversations and treatment decisions.
By connecting AI, demand-side platforms (DSPs), EHR networks, and privacy-safe data, life sciences organizations can move beyond traditional advertising toward more intelligent engagement, ultimately improving efficiency, accelerating time to therapy, and supporting better patient outcomes.
Jason Griffin, Managing Director of Digital Health Strategy and Cyber Security Practice at Nordic
Analytics and engagement tools help organizations move from reactive communication to personalized, proactive engagement. By combining clinical, operational, and consumer data, healthcare organizations can better understand patient preferences, identify care gaps, and deliver more relevant communications. That could mean helping a patient schedule preventive care, reminding them about follow-up appointments, or providing educational content tailored to their needs.
From an acquisition and retention standpoint, these tools help organizations understand what consumers value and where friction exists in the care journey. The ability to measure engagement, access patterns, and outcomes gives leaders actionable insights that can improve both the patient experience and organizational performance. The key is having trusted, connected data. Personalization becomes much more effective when organizations can create a complete view of the patient rather than relying on information trapped in separate systems.
Michael Dalton, Founder and CEO at Ovatient
Analytics and patient engagement tools help health systems understand demand, reduce friction by guiding patients to the most appropriate care, and sustain relationships over time. From an acquisition standpoint, they can show where consumers are searching for care, where scheduling breaks down, which campaigns convert, and which populations are failing to fully engage. From a retention standpoint, the more important question is what happens after the first visit: whether patients return, establish a longitudinal care relationship, complete follow-ups, and stay connected to the system. The goal is not engagement for engagement’s sake, but shared accountability between a better-informed patient and a better-informed care team to create better health outcomes.
Beth Godsey, GM Insights at Tendo
Healthcare measures clinical outcomes, but the missing layer is understanding the process steps in between, specifically how care is actually being delivered. Analytics closes that gap only when you’re measuring the actions being taken (or not) to deliver care: not just what happened, but how it happened. The organizations genuinely moving the needle use operational and engagement data to identify dropout points, unmet needs, and moments where the care delivery process broke down before it could support a positive outcome. Understanding how someone experienced their path through the system so you can bridge the distance between clinical results and patient satisfaction before the gap widens.
Nicola Wodlinger, CEO at mBIOTA Labs
Patient engagement tools are most powerful when they do two things at once: lower the barrier to entry and raise the standard of care behind it. Nowhere is this more clear than in conditions that people are reluctant to discuss, especially digestive health, where embarrassment and uncertainty keep patients from seeking help until symptoms escalate.
Insurance-covered digital platforms have shown that low-friction, personalized entry points draw these patients in. But acquisition is only the first step. The real value emerges when engagement channels double as triage and education. Live concierge sessions give patients one-on-one time that builds trust and surfaces red flags a static intake form might miss. Educational webinars can keep patients engaged and let them arrive better prepared and feel more confident in the platform, their treatment, and the physicians guiding it.
Together, these tools do more than attract patients. They build the engagement and trust that keep people committed to their care. And when patients are engaged and supported, with credentialed clinicians ready to step in when a case calls for more, the result is improved compliance, greater satisfaction, and better patient outcomes.
Michael Meucci, President and CEO at Arcadia
Consumers increasingly expect healthcare experiences to reflect the same level of personalization they encounter in other industries. Analytics and patient engagement tools help organizations understand a patient’s clinical needs and the channels they are most likely to engage with. It’s helping organizations determine which patients need outreach, what intervention is most likely to be effective, and when action is most likely to improve outcomes.
By combining clinical, behavioral, and engagement data, healthcare organizations can move from broad outreach campaigns to individualized engagement strategies that prioritize resources where they can have the greatest impact. For example, some patients respond best to text messages, others to phone calls, apps, email, or outreach in their preferred language and at specific times of day. Analytics help organizations deliver the right message through the right channel at the right moment, improving engagement while also supporting better adherence, stronger patient relationships, and better outcomes.
Chris Schneider, Chief Marketing Officer at IQVIA Digital
Healthcare consumers don’t move through a tidy funnel; they move through a journey full of hesitation and emotion. Analytics allow marketers to finally see this path clearly enough to reach them with empathy and retain them with relevance. Analytics and engagement tools are evolving from a way to reach healthcare consumers into the foundation of a genuinely personalized health experience, one that anticipates needs rather than just responding to them. We’re moving toward a future where the right guidance finds a person at the exact moment it matters, and where every interaction — grounded in strong standards for privacy and trust — makes the next one smarter, more relevant and more human.
Greg Mortimer, VP of Marketing at Receptive
Analytics and engagement tools let healthcare companies do something the traditional model rarely could: stay present between appointments, not just during them. The best implementations use that presence to reinforce the care relationship: a timely check-in, a progress signal, a reminder that someone’s ready to listen. Beyond measuring retention, these tools can now predict when someone is about to disengage—and enable action before that happens.
Amber Gill, CEO at Receptive
Analytics tell us where patients are getting stuck, and engagement tools help us keep them moving forward. Healthcare shouldn’t end when an appointment ends. The best platforms use technology to stay connected, keep people engaged, and help them achieve better outcomes.
Kamya Elawadhi, Co-Founder and President at Doceree
Analytics and engagement tools are only as valuable as the intelligence layer underneath them. Generic platforms can track behavior, but healthcare demands something deeper: the ability to interpret clinical context, predict need, and deliver relevance at the precise moment it matters. The organizations winning in consumer healthcare are those using behavioral, clinical, and engagement signals simultaneously, not in silos. In healthcare, personalization is not about better marketing — it is about better access to care. When the right information reaches the right consumer at the right moment, acquisition improves, retention strengthens, and, most importantly, patients are more likely to initiate and stay on treatment, ultimately improving patient care.
Dr. Scott Schell, Chief Medical Officer at Cognizant
Analytics and engagement platforms help organizations understand who their consumers are, and where they experience friction across their care journey. Historically, healthcare measured encounters. Increasingly, organizations are measuring behavior: abandoned appointments, incomplete referrals, medication adherence, care plan engagement, communication preferences, and access barriers. Those insights enable more personalized experiences and more targeted interventions. The most valuable analytics then become about operational performance and not marketing responses. Understanding why patients disengage, where delays occur, and which workflows create unnecessary effort frequently produces greater value than simply increasing digital engagement metrics.
So many great insights to consider here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.
What role do you think analytics and patient engagement tools play in acquiring, retaining, and personalizing experiences for healthcare consumers? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!
