Thinking about Changing Your Healthcare CMS? Steps to Selecting the Right Solution

Kyra Hagan, SVP and General Manager of Marketing & Communications for Influence Health, offers tips for selecting a new content management system (CMS)

Faced with rising costs and accustomed to shopping for the best deals online, today's patients are behaving exactly like the savvy and discerning consumers they’ve become. Due to a marketing sea change called liquid expectations, wherein consumers’ experiences with one industry seep over into an entirely different industry, previously thought to be unrelated, healthcare consumers now expect provider brands to deliver personalized content, more transparency into costs and quality, and access to convenient self-service options that they can access in a multitude of ways – from traditional websites to mobile apps and social channels. In fact, nearly two-thirds of U.S. healthcare consumers indicated that they want their digital healthcare interactions to mirror their retail experiences, according to research released at HIMSS18.

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Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations are facing a huge uphill battle to meet – or better yet, exceed – these increasing consumer expectations. Creating these 1:1 experiences requires variations of content at an order of magnitude that is almost beyond comprehension to manage in the current environment. Most organizations are dealing with existing content management systems (CMS) hampered by outdated feature sets, archaic deployment models and expensive cost structures. Critical content and consumer data, needed for personalization, lives in martech system silos. Marketing, IT, and operations have become accustomed to working disparately, each with their own content and vision for improving patient interactions. These problems combine to hold back meaningful digital transformation efforts and make it more difficult to create the contemporary, cross-channel digital experience current and prospective patients seek.

If your health system is struggling with a game plan to modernize the way consumers experience your brand online, it may be time for a new CMS. Here are seven steps you should take to ensure you’re adopting a technology and an approach that will meet your enterprise-wide content management needs – today, and into the future.

Step One: Write down your goals.

Studies have shown that documenting goals makes achieving them more likely. Write down the main goals – including finding a cohesive design or building conversion environments that work – for implementing a new CMS. These goals will be the foundation for developing a strong business case that ensures buy-in from your C-suite and other organizational leaders when you ask to fund a new technology investment.

Step Two: Assemble a team to choose and manage the solution.

Breakthrough the silos and bring together all parties who are involved in supporting enterprise-wide goals around the digital consumer experience. While one team, such as marketing, may own the budget for CMS, other divisions, like IT, will need to make sure it passes muster from the technology and integration perspective. Other primary users – designers and developers – can provide critical, practical input as well. By getting buy-in across the organization, efforts related to provider promotion and web personalization can be integrated with other strategies to better set apart your practice.

Step Three: Assess the vendor landscape.

There are three categories of companies that offer CMS, so it is important to compare your needs to their capabilities since there are some clear differences:

• Marketing agency – While these firms focus on developing eye-catching websites, they rarely assist with sustained engagement, conversion performance and return on investment.
• Horizontal CMS vendor – These companies focus on delivering robust capabilities, but often do not have significant domain expertise, making it tough to ensure that the final product is anchored around the healthcare personas, consumer journeys, and user experience you are trying to create.
• Dedicated healthcare expert – With domain and technological expertise, these firms are often the best in the business, delivering a full menu of consulting, design, implementation, post-go-live support and ongoing optimization services that help you create cross-channel experiences that deliver real bottom-line results.
   

As you evaluate these potential vendors, you’ll want to make sure they align with your high-level requirements and check their websites, or issue a request for proposal (RFP), to ensure they can meet specific, important criteria.

Step Four: Conduct demos and onsite presentations.

After finding vendors that check off the initial boxes for your basic criteria, invite them to demonstrate their technology’s capabilities and differentiators. Learn more about how the solution can help you meet your organization’s goals; whether the user interface, dashboards, and analytics are intuitive; and what is required to build landing pages, format provider profiles, set up personalization rules, and address other unique business cases.

Step Five: Get to know the team that will be an extension of your own.

There’s more than just the core technology to consider. You also want to be sure that whatever vendor you select is committed to building a strong partnership. Forming a strong relationship with the vendor’s team will play a vital role in delivering an exceptional and highly differentiated consumer experience that continues to evolve quickly to meet ever-rising demands.

Step Six: Talk to actual customers.

Speak with customer references to gather insights into how the CMS solutions are helping other organizations achieve their goals, and ask about best practices and lessons learned that would be valuable for your CMS implementation. Expand beyond references provided by the vendor, reaching out to professional and social networks to find other clients and talking to them, too.

Step Seven: Decide.

Once you’ve done your homework, checked your requirements, evaluated vendor options and sought references, it’s time to make your selection. While the budget is important, you shouldn’t always go for the cheapest option. You can save time, hassles and the expense of potential upgrades or changes to the technology in the future if you choose the solution that is architected to meet both your near-term and long-term goals. The right CMS will move the needle in terms of engagement, which will lead to an increase in conversions that delivers a measurable return on investment.

These seven steps are just a starting point. However, the bottom line is that when you can get all stakeholders in your organization to work together, anchored around an agreed upon consumer experience roadmap, finding a CMS solution that fits those requirements becomes much simpler.