Executive Q&A: Healthcare and compliance

How marketing can create dynamic strategies for distributed sales networks

Sales and marketing professionals working in highly regulated industries face unique compliance challenges in their day-to-day work that can cause delays and create inefficiencies. Worse, over time it can even contribute to a mindset of “we can’t do it that way” as organizations weigh the risks inherent with new tools and platforms or giving large teams the ability to personalize content. In healthcare specifically, data protection and adherence to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements are absolutely critical. Plus with limited staff and budgets, many healthcare marketing teams often don’t believe they can present dynamic strategies or have the bandwidth to support them for an entire distributed sales channel.

In this executive Q&A, Tami Marek-Loper, president and co-owner of The Marek Group, Inc, discusses how the right technology choices for healthcare sales and marketing can unleash new capabilities, align teams, find efficiencies and enable personalized content that resonates – all while still protecting data and meeting industry standards.

Q: Compliance, particularly in the health care sector, is vital to protecting those who work in that space from costly litigation and public relations crises. What should marketers know about protecting themselves and their clients from HIPAA and other violations?

A: I think HIPPA is a really broad and overused term that largely pertains to the healthcare professionals themselves. That said, patient data is crucial to keep private and secure. The only way to ensure patient data remains secure is to use HiTrust Certified practices – and that should pertain to all vendors touching that data – not just IT firms. For example, direct marketing companies have access to an abundance of data but aren’t necessarily certified to keep it safe. This is potentially a huge liability if these firms are not properly vetted and held accountable for the chain of custody with regard to the data they access. The process is one thing, but knowing the people who touch this data are trained as to its sensitivity is just as important.

Q: Supporting distributed sales teams is a tall task for healthcare marketer. Each agent has unique needs and his or her own style for doing business. To what extent is it possible for marketing to create highly personalized content for them?

A: It’s absolutely possible with the right tools and layers combined. In the Triptych platform, individual marketing campaigns can be personalized by each agent and sent through the toolkit. When personalizing content, each agent has a profile tied to data that is preapproved to use by the organization. For example, they have access to contact information; territory for sending content; disclaimer generation by rep territory; plan data (who can/can’t sell a particular product) by licensure and product line, regulatory compliance (disclaimers), brand compliance and more. These fields are tied to the user profile and drive the values offered for customization within the angular form on the product page.

Q: And what controls or oversight does the organization have when these individual marketing efforts are in play?

A: Multi-level approvals are automated through Triptych to include immediate approval, editing prior to an approval or order rejection by marketing and/or compliance. Once the order is completed, Triptych automates SEC filings for every version of content generated on the platform. Essentially, this platform is a great way for marketing to set up intelligent strategies for sales while eliminating compliance risk, simply by putting the right parameters around the configuration of each asset. This allows sales reps to have incredible choice in how they want to serve their customers.

Q: To what extent has social media become a critical trap in this space? How can marketers leverage social media while remaining compliant?

A: Ensuring posts meet organization requirements is the big hurdle. In fact, some teams find this exasperating and therefore limit their social strategies to bland, generic content – or don’t attempt it all. It doesn’t have to be that way! Using Triptych, for example, allows marketing to publish social-friendly content templates that can be personalized and customized by the person sharing the content (sales, distributor, etc). By using data to drive such customization and personalization, the posts are ensured to fall within the parameters allowed by various governmental agencies, rules and regulations.

Q: In working with healthcare customers and adapting to their needs, what have you learned about the way they work and how sales enablement technology can improve their operations?

A: What has been really interesting working in this space is watching how the right technology choices can completely transform a team and manufacture more time for them. For example, we work with one healthcare insurance company that originally had seven marketing professionals servicing 150 top-level agents. As the business grew, the sales force grew to several thousand while the marketing team remained the same size. The marketing team is able to produce personalized and customized omnichannel content at a ratio of one marketer to 700 sales reps. It can be done with document strategy, data and willingness to do things differently.

Read more about how Triptych can support your organization in our sales support guide to healthcare.