I’ve spent much of my career learning how systems work, identifying the levers that make them perform differently, and tweaking them to learn the combinations of investments, operational rules, and structure that improve business results. I’ve done this for airlines, retail, manufacturing, restaurants, beverages, and healthcare. (Hint: beverages were the most fun!)
Ten years ago, I started working in healthcare in a full-time capacity. My emphasis was on leveraging healthcare data and systems to improve health system performance — with marketing, CRM, and patient experience systems as the levers to bring those strategies to reality.
When I entered healthcare, the focus of much of the analytics work was on reporting. Reporting is an analytics function that captures what happened and, under the best conditions, why it happened. By contrast, the goal of advanced analytics efforts is to identify what could be done differently to improve the future.
That’s not the way I’ve seen analytics used within many of the healthcare system marketing teams that I’ve had the opportunity to work with. The investment, data, and tools are often there. The interest in connecting those data elements across teams and functions is sometimes there. But the connection to important operational data is often siloed and there’s a disconnect across business teams that persists.
Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in reporting over the past decade. The infrastructure for reporting has improved dramatically:
- Campaign platform data is easier to access in data warehouses and lakes
- Tracking and attribution models are more refined than they used to be
- Dashboard and visualization tools are more sophisticated
- And now Anthropic’s Claude is enabling complex visualizations on the fly
As a result, teams can explain what happened across campaigns, service lines, and sometimes ad platforms and partners, over time with a level of precision that would have been difficult to achieve not that long ago. There is no shortage of visibility.
Healthcare organizations have visibility but lack alignment
Teams are focused on designing and using analytics to describe “what happened.” Moving from “what happened” to “why” to “what should we do about it” doesn’t happen on its own, even when the data is available. It requires connecting intentions with performance metrics across systems and then tying it to enterprise value.
And yet the same question continues to surface in leadership conversations. Is what we’re doing working? And if not, what should we do differently?
In my view, the more strategic leverage for analytics is at the front end of our work with health systems and marketers. Understanding the markets, audience, and growth goals of our clients. Identifying opportunities that exist within markets and specific audience segments. Determining where leakage occurs, and how important it is to the business strategy. Analyzing the SWOT of ourselves and our competitors. Prioritizing cross-departmental efforts to reflect those priorities.
Essentially, analytics helps us get better at playing the hand we have and changing the game when we should.
Analytics should shape decisions before campaigns begin
Analytics has the most impact when it informs decisions before teams design and launch marketing campaigns, not when they’re reporting performance. Marketers can use analytics-driven insights to inform health system strategies and ensure they’re addressing critical questions at the outset.
- Which service lines create the most value, and in which areas of the market?
- Are they growing, or shrinking, and in what delivery environment?
- Which audiences best align with long-term performance goals?
- Where does the organization have capacity to grow?
- Where will additional demand create strain and diminish the patient experience?
- How will we measure success in business terms, not just marketing terms?
When marketing answers these questions upfront, their efforts operate within a business context that aligns with organizational value. Marketing teams build campaigns with an understanding of value, not just activity. Reporting then reinforces the contribution to enterprise objectives and gives us the means to adjust marketing expenditures as we progress. There’s no need to reconstruct it and reverse engineer metrics to match business goals later.
Without a solid foundation in existing goals and decision criteria, reporting becomes retrospective. It may spark thoughtful conversation but also restart familiar debates about what to do next. While access to data has improved, many organizations still struggle to translate improved visibility into meaningful action.
Full-spectrum analytics changes how teams operate
Analytics also works best as part of a continuous system. It identifies opportunities, values them based on business impact, informs execution, measures results, and refines strategy over time.
Measurement and execution are familiar territory. Identifying and prioritizing opportunities requires a different level of discipline. It takes more time upfront, and the payoff is not always immediate. When timelines are tight it can be easy to compress or skip those steps entirely.
Over time, committing to this more disciplined approach to marketing changes how teams operate. They shape performance rather than react to it. They spend more time acting on strategies that reflect both market conditions and internal realities and less time interpreting results. The work becomes more consistent, even as the environment evolves.
Why healthcare marketing analytics must connect to enterprise value
Marketing campaign efficiency provides useful context. It does not define impact.
Impact is evident in how marketing activity influences revenue, contribution margin, payor mix, and long-term value. Demonstrating it requires connecting data across systems. Media performance aligns with CRM behavior. Appointment data connects to reimbursement realities. Campaign response translates into patient value. Capacity and access constraints are evaluated alongside demand generation.
With those connections in place, analytics starts to reshape how the organization defines opportunity. It identifies where growth strengthens financial performance, where it creates operational strain, and where it shifts activity without adding value. Not every gain carries the same weight, even when it appears that way in reporting. That becomes clearer the closer you get to the financials.
What separates reporting from real impact
Healthcare marketing continues to face increasing pressure to demonstrate impact, and that isn’t going to change. Simply producing more reporting doesn’t relieve the pressure. Connecting performance to strategies grounded in defined business objectives does.
Every team can bring a report into the room. Fewer bring a clear point of view on what should happen next and why. Analytics reflects a combination of strategic goals, operational implications and limitations, and audience insights that enable the goals to be achieved. That difference shapes how decisions are made, how resources are allocated, and how marketing contributes to growth.
Analytics-driven reporting informs our strategies and how well they worked — it guides what happens next. It takes cross-functional engagement and discipline to maximize it, but it is entirely workable once the system is designed with this continuous learning and execution in mind.
You can learn more about cross-functional engagement and shared governance in Stop the sprawl: maximize your MarTech.
