HealthEngine: Providing Business-Enhancing Communications to 1000's of Healthcare Practices

HealthEngine are committed to providing their customers, thousands of healthcare providers in Australia, with useful data insights to help improve their practice efficiency. The dynamic marketplace was looking for a way to provide clear, engaging & digestible information that would not only help practices action improvements but also highlight the ROI that they are getting through using HealthEngine’s services. We spoke to Mark Dick, HealthEngine's General Manager of Provider Solutions, to understand more.

A Bit of Background.

HealthEngine is Australia's largest consumer healthcare platform. Their network of healthcare providers offers patients an easy way to connect with their healthcare team including GPs, Dentists, Physios & more. On the reverse of that, they also offer a way for healthcare providers to connect with millions of Australians.

HealthEngine work with over 1000's healthcare practices including many GP clinics.

What Challenges were HealthEngine facing?

With a small team of Customer Success representatives looking after thousands of healthcare providers, the company were struggling to offer the level of personal service that they wanted for their customers. 

Mark describes the situation, “There were 2 fundamental challenges we were facing. Firstly, we were trying to figure out a way to provide a really personalised experience for our customers that would allow us to contact those customers at scale, in a meaningful way. We just weren’t able to do that.”

“Secondly, we had a lot of customers using our products, but we weren’t doing a very good job of communicating the value that we were adding to their day to day, essentially the return on investment they were getting by utilising our services.”

A summary of the main challenges faced by HealthEngine's Customer Success team.

Wisdom Trapped in Data.

HealthEngine have visibility of the way patients interact and book appointments with an individual practice, which is potentially valuable insight for that practice. The challenge is there’s a lot of data and it needs organising, interpreting and communicating to be of any use. 

“I think like a lot of companies, data was in a number of different sources” explains Mark, “We have a number of different systems internally and therefore historically we were trying to pull different pieces of information from everywhere so it was fairly cumbersome. Our reporting situation was fairly ad hoc to tell you the truth.” 

Mark continues, “We aim to provide practices with insights that have something actionable that they can implement to improve their efficiency. For example, from looking at a practice's booking flow we can indicate to them ‘Hey, there’s something here that will benefit your business moving forward. You should start to think about placing more appointments or making more availability on that day because that’s your highest booking day.’ ”

The Hunt for a Scalable Solution.

Working with a growing number of practices, it was important for HealthEngine to find a scalable solution that would help reduce the burden on their Customer Success team and empower team members to add value through their communications with customers.

“The ideal solution for us was something that could be somewhat low touch for us, something that was automated in a sense and didn’t need a huge amount of work. We wanted to find something that would help us achieve a level of standardisation but at the same time be personalised to every single one of our customers.”

Why Data Storytelling?

HealthEngine have now introduced monthly Data Storytelling reports for thousands of their customers. Mark explains why he believes Data Storytelling is so powerful.

“In a world where there’s so much data, I think it’s still very challenging for people to understand necessarily what to do with it. I think the power of data storytelling is that it takes that data and builds an actionable narrative around that so it’s easy for people to digest. It gives people something they can actually do with that data afterwards, that’s really what makes it powerful.”

>> Discover more about Automated Data Storytelling: Take the Nugit Platform tour.

An example of a HealthEngine data story that would be sent out to a healthcare practice.

Communicating HealthEngine's Value Add.

Working with a mix of high-touch and low-touch customers, HealthEngine wanted to make sure the solution they implemented was beneficial to all customers. By using Nugit, the CS team are able to easily automate data stories to land regularly in their customer's inboxes.

“I think the data storytelling for high-touch customers allows us to have deep and meaningful conversations.” Mark observes, “Whether that’s in a quarterly or monthly business review it allows us to look at that data together and make strategic action plans. For the thousands of lower touch customers where it’s just not feasible to have this kind of contact, data story reports allow us to stay in regular contact but in a very meaningful way.”

Like any service-based business, it’s important for HealthEngine to also be able to show the value that they’re adding for their customers, in a measurable way. Customers want to be able to see the return on investment they’re getting, which can be a tricky thing to prove as Mark knows only too well.

“Data storytelling allows us to communicate the practice efficiency that they’re getting from utilising our services every day, and that in return ensures that customers get value from us and stay with us.”

Data stories provide HealthEngine's customers with monthly insights sent directly to their inbox.

Making Data Consumable for People.

The data story reports are structured to be quick and easy for practice owners to consume valuable insights. The aim is to make it straightforward and effortless for HealthEngine's customers to see clearly what to focus on.

In Mark's view “Data storytelling is really powerful because it takes the data and surrounds it with a really simplified narrative so people can understand what the data is all about. People learn in different ways so rather than just having numbers and words on a page we wanted to make something that was more digestible. Adding some really nice visuals on there made it feel very relevant to our customers and more engaging.”

“Having the text headlines makes it easy for our customers to understand what the immediate takeaway is from that data. If they’re just glancing at that they can walk away with that immediate insight very quickly.”

Automated Personalisation.

Powering the service, Nugit’s Data Storytelling platform uses sophisticated AI to automate HealthEngine's data stories. The technology cleans & combines data from a number of sources, picks out the relevant metrics and showcases them as insights in story templates designed specifically for that audience. This automation takes the pressure off the human team but still ensures the resulting communication feels very personalised to the end recipient.

Mark emphasises, “We’ve managed to automate everything at scale for thousands of practices but at the same time, every data story that goes out is personalised to that practice.”

The Natural Language Generation feature responds to changes in the data to provide a relevant text description for every insight in the story.

Mark elaborates, “If something’s trending up, it will indicate that and if there’s an area for development it will change the language to specifically reflect the development or improvement that can be made”

Whilst the stories are designed to simplify data down to focus on what the audience actually needs to know, the interactive format is flexible and supports customers who want to explore insights further as Mark explains...

“Some customers will want to drill down into some of those insights, they can do that really easily at the click of a button. Or if they want to discuss it with one of our CSMs we have that ability to do that together.”

Data stories are customised for each of HealthEngine's customers. They can be used for a quick performance check or deep-dives into insights using the interactive format. 

Customer Feedback Impacted the Story Structure.

Creating the initial Data Story design was a collaborative process. Whilst HealthEngine had a good idea of the insight they wanted to be able to provide customers, the Nugit customer success team supported them in bringing that vision to life. After exploring requirements the team built draft story templates for feedback and then tested them out with the people whose opinion really matters... HealthEngine customers.

“We started with a far longer data story initially” explains Mark, “And based upon the feedback from our customers we recognised that essentially it was too much data. They helped to identify what was really important and impactful for them, allowing us to customise the story down.”

The Nugit platform UX is designed to make it easy for HealthEngine team members to self serve: building, editing and scheduling stories when and where they need. Nugit Customer Success Manager Issa Sandoval is always on hand when they need any Data Storytelling expertise.

From Mark's perspective, “It was very easy to get set up and it’s really easy for our team now, there’s drag and drop functionality in there so our team can go in and change date ranges and essentially customise data stories just by dragging and dropping different fields that they want.”

“Data Storytelling is really important for HealthEngine. It’s really allowed us to stand out from our competition in the market because it’s allowed us to take insights and make them far more digestible for our customers and therefore be able to translate our ROI far more effectively.”

Want to learn more about the impact of Data Storytelling within different organisations? Check out other Nugit case studies or reach out to the team to book a demo and find out what it can do for your business.

>> See another example of a business using Data Storytelling to provide customers with valuable insights: Fave use Data Storytelling to enable 30,000 merchants to 'Grow-Their-Own' Business

>> See another example of a business using Data Storytelling to show ROI: TUV Marketing Team use Data Storytelling to Prove Their Strategic Value.