Analytics helps Holzer Health promote orthopedic services

Holzer Health System applied predictive analytics to the data it holds to gain insights that boosted visits by 10 percent, boosting revenue.

The organization, with sites in southeast Ohio and western West Virginia, used the technology to raise consumer awareness of its orthopedic specialists, and the initiative is credited with generating $1 million in additional revenue.

“We conduct our own analytics and get help if needed,” says MarJean Kennedy, the system’s director of business development and marketing. “We have people in marketing building queries and have an advisor to ensure queries are hitting the populations we want to meet.”

To identify patients who could be in need of orthopedic treatment, Holzer Health conducted a query to identify patients who have had a diagnosis indicating joint replacement and coupled that information with data from platform vendor Tea Leaves Health to identify those who are taking over-the-counter pain medication or self-reported an injury.

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Other data comes from coding for related diagnoses, behavioral health surveys that patients have taken, encounter data, prescriptions and federal behavioral health data from the U.S. Census Bureau.



Holzer Health also conducts direct mail and email campaigns, such as the “Keeping You Moving” campaign that promoted “the most advanced Orthopedic and Joint Replacement services available to ensure you receive outstanding care and experience restored or improved quality of life.”

This campaign and others were integrated into the Tea Leaves platform to support follow-up messages to individuals, Kennedy explains. “Every month, we load encounter data into the system to see if people returned to us for services. We want to know, if we sent a message, did they come in the door and get services? And, what is the value of maintaining that loyalty?”

In general, Holzer has found the platform package of services to be quite user-friendly for laypeople, Kennedy asserts. “It has allowed my staff the ability to learn and use the system very quickly without having knowledge of SQL databases.”