HIPAA-Compliant Call Tracking: The Missing Piece of Your Healthcare Marketing Plan
Most Fall Friday nights, when I click the profile photo of my teenage daughter on my phone, location services tells me she’s at her high school football game. Long after the game has ended and she texts, “on my way home,” my phone more accurately indicates that her current location is Waffle House. A good marketing plan needs this same level of insight.
Similar to the way my phone gives me a more accurate picture of my daughter’s journey from the football field to our house, a good call tracking feature gives your practice a more accurate picture of a prospective patient’s journey from marketing campaign to scheduled appointment. Call tracking helps you understand a patient’s behavior after they view your Google Business Profile, one of your paid ads on social media, or another marketing channel, and helps answer questions like:
- Did the patient call the office, make an appointment, or perform the intended action?
- How much did it cost to acquire each new patient?
- Based on performance and volume of new business, which campaigns should receive more of your marketing budget and which ones should you rethink or cancel altogether?
To understand how your practice can benefit from this type of data, let’s take a closer look at why call tracking may be the missing piece of your healthcare marketing plan.
What is call tracking and why does your healthcare practice need it?
When it comes to collecting valuable marketing data about patients’ behavior, call tracking for healthcare is indispensable. This deeply insightful feature helps your practice determine patient acquisition costs, and understand how effective your marketing campaigns are at attracting high-value patients to your healthcare organization.
Beyond just reporting what your patients are looking at, including your paid ads and Google Business Profile, a call tracking feature that fully integrates with your Practice Management or EHR software shows you which patients scheduled an appointment after viewing an ad or perusing your profile—even if it’s months after they originally viewed it. Your call tracking software should also record patients’ names, so you can determine individual patient acquisition costs. When you track each new patient and their response to your marketing efforts, you can do more of what’s working, and make adjustments to campaigns that aren’t producing the best return on your investment.
How does call tracking work?
An ideal call tracking feature reports calls from different marketing channels using unique phone numbers that you can assign to each channel. When a new patient calls the office from a particular number, you can see where they came from—your practice website, a billboard, a Facebook ad, or anywhere else you’re marketing to patients who need your unique services.
Beyond the basics, look for a call tracking that provides the data you need to understand the effectiveness of your marketing plan or campaigns, including the total number of calls generated; total number of appointments scheduled; and total number of new patients acquired from each campaign.
You should also be able to see how many calls came from organic searches (i.e., “physical therapist near me”), and paid searches where prospective patients clicked on one of your ads or promotions (i.e., “free consultation for knee pain”). Additionally, through this type of advanced call tracking software, you will have access to the total costs involved in acquiring new patients and the drilled-down cost per call, cost per patient, and cost per appointment.
What about call tracking and HIPAA compliance?
We’re glad you asked. While some healthcare marketing software may allow you to track similar data, if it doesn’t integrate with your PM/EHR software, you run the risk of being noncompliant with protected health information (PHI). SocialClimb’s entire platform fully integrates with your PM/EHR software. We like to think of our call tracking feature paired with HIPAA-compliant integration as the gold standard in call tracking.
Without the SocialClimb platform, you won’t be able to track relevant patient data down to a micro-detailed level so you can fully understand the effectiveness of your marketing plan or campaigns. SocialClimb’s call tracking feature paired with HIPAA-compliant integration means you get the data you need to run successful marketing campaigns while protecting patients’ confidential health information at all times.
Just as a teenager’s journey from a home football game to a home address isn’t always a straight line, nor the least expensive route, patient acquisition is often a zigzagged path as well. HIPAA-compliant call tracking—part of the SocialClimb healthcare marketing platform—provides extra insight along that journey, so you can lead patients right to your door.
We can help eliminate the guesswork of marketing your healthcare practice. Get in touch with us today to learn more about call tracking and partnering with SocialClimb.
