Healthgrades drives stronger patient and provider connections with Oracle Cloud

Healthgrades takes the guesswork out of finding the right medical care. By gathering in-depth information, feedback, and reviews on over 3 million US care providers, the company enables patients to find the right provider for their unique healthcare needs.

The primary challenge for Healthgrades from a technical perspective was the massive amount of data it handled on a daily basis. Multiplying tens of thousands of users per month by millions of providers along with all the details on those providers adds up to trillions upon trillions of data points. The company needed to scale to manage, interpret, and act on the insights from that data in real time. To drive the patient journey forward and cater each journey to an individual’s needs, it’s crucial that the company can gather information from multiple sources and consolidate it to deliver the best experience for patients.

Additionally, Healthgrades put a strong focus on patient privacy and convenience, so nearly all the information gathered on patients is through their digital footprint without the need to fill out a form or questionnaire. The other focus was to understand more behavioral signals from various channels like the company website. Healthgrades wanted a deeper understanding of users’ needs and experiences so it could further personalize each unique patient journey from finding a doctor or surgeon to recovery, physical therapy, and beyond.

To further personalize the patient experience, Healthgrades considered several vendors. While other solutions provided good potential, the company had an incredibly strong relationship with the Oracle team. This trust paired with the security, reliability, and interoperability of Oracle’s marketing stack made selecting Oracle Marketing Cloud a simple choice.

A critical part of Healthgrades’ business is search engine optimization (SEO) and ranking highly on search results, so anything that could potentially put that in jeopardy was a deal breaker. The company heavily tested the products and they all met and exceeded performance expectations. The flexibility, scalability, and deployment options stood out to the Healthgrades team and gave them the confidence that it would work the way they planned and drive results.

On top of that, being able to get deeper knowledge on user behavior in real time was incredibly valuable to Healthgrades. Using those insights along with the AI and machine learning capabilities of Oracle Infinity Behavioral Intelligence was the exact recipe needed to personalize the patient journey even more.

Since implementing Oracle, Healthgrades expanded the personalization of the patient journey and the interactions the company has with its users. Being able to visually understand campaign mapping through Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation has been a huge benefit. With only three to four core people managing these campaigns, the ease of use, automation, and intuition of Oracle Eloqua has saved a lot of time and headaches for the team.

By capturing and managing vast amounts of real-time data through Oracle Eloqua, Healthgrades built scoring models, complex user segments, and personalized emails that recommended topics or areas that users would be most interested in. Throughout this email campaign, six emails each were sent to 150,000 users. Only six people clicked the ‘not interested’ button, representing an efficiency rate of over 99.99%. These emails also generated a 50% open rate, a 50% click-through rate, and a 35% increase in appointments booked through the Healthgrades platform. This resulted in 7.6 million new touchpoints on the company’s site. Moreover, the company could drive the patient journey forward with personalized next steps to make sure each user got the right care to fit their needs.

Healthgrades also tapped Oracle Marketing Cloud to personalize newsletters for customers, touching on topics that were relevant for readers and boosting engagement. The company saw 18X the amount of volume on its site compared to just six months prior. This type of volume was also happening week after week, driving more users to the site looking for the best care and the best providers.

Additionally, Oracle provided Healthgrades with testing tools and the ability to personalize, allowing the company to deploy thousands of campaign journeys to millions of different users based on dynamic segments in real time. This scalability was something the company didn’t have before, and it improved the ability to meet the variety of different patients’ needs.

Healthgrades is still in the early stages with Oracle Infinity but has already realized the solution’s value. With humans at the center of everything Healthgrades does, the company is starting to understand users on a deeper level and drive similarly positive results on the company website. The Healthgrades product team has also benefited from Oracle Infinity, tapping into the tool’s capabilities to concept new offerings and roll them out on the website.

Looking ahead, the technical strength Oracle provides has the company excited for the future, building better connections with millions of users, and personalizing their healthcare journey even more.