We know that private equity firms lean heavily on data to assess and create value. They have to. To that end, we’ve talked at length about building a foundation for better ROI measurement in the context of digital marketing performance.
Yet, making the most of opportunities for value creation encompasses all aspects of operations. And today there’s a variety of data platforms that any healthcare private equity firm ought to consider for a more complete view of operations, finance, patients, and so on.
These are the tools that will help you create value faster. As you’ll see below, I’ve broken down my recommendations into high-level operational categories.
SEO Tools for Assessing Organic Demand Generation
To assess the ROI of your search engine optimization investments, you’ll want to look beyond just clicks, traffic, and rankings. You’ll want to gauge site health. Then there’s keyword share, backlink portfolio, and so on. SEO tools will even alert you to dead, broken, or redundant links that are hurting your scores.
And ultimately, you’ll want to see how organic site traffic is converting and contributing to lead generation and revenue.
There are a number of SEO and site audit tools that will provide in-depth SEO assessments. Google Analytics will be an essential piece, for sure. SEO tools like Semrush, MOZ, or Ahrefs can help you run competitive analysis, keyword projects, and backlink outreach (among many other functionalities). Our team has used all of these personally.
Use some combination of these tools to see conversions from organic search traffic, a particularly interesting metric for private equity investors. While you’re at it, here are a few other all-in-one SEO tools to consider:
- RavenTools (known for competitive insights and visualizations)
- SpyFu (known for its rich feature set)
- Screaming Frog (a renowned website crawler)
Predictive Tools for Personalized Experiences
According to the 2021 Digital Trends: Healthcare & Pharma in Focus report from Adobe, 49% of respondents are interested in “intelligently predicting and preventing possible medical issues.” As the Adobe Experience Cloud for Healthcare platform demonstrates, there are a variety of vertical-specific data platforms that make these kinds of insights possible.
What you’re looking for is a comprehensive platform that can not only connect health data, but use AI and machine learning to extract insights from your customer data—analytics and insights that can be used to improve and personalize the experience and, in turn, create tremendous value.
One very interesting example is Prealize, which can “get predictions 12 months before a diagnosis hits a claim so that you can act earlier.” What an opportunity to not only improve patient outcomes but to keep costs down. Here are some other business intelligence and machine learning platforms to look into:
- ThinkDataWorks
- DataAgora
- LTI (we like the healthcare specialization here)
- IBM
- Oracle
- Deloitte
Financial Tools For Maximizing Value
What do finances look like at a particular portfolio company? Perhaps more importantly, what are they going to look like next quarter, next year, and beyond? Are there trends or indicators that give you pause or make certain investments infeasible? Assessing financial performance is crucial for private equity firms, including:
- Business valuation
- Financial modeling, for which there are many purposes
- Real-time analysis for financial forecasting
To maximize value from a financial perspective—to seize opportunities and get ahead of potential risks—many firms turn to financial analysis solutions, such as:
- Capital IQ
- Bloomberg
- PitchBook
- Reuters
PitchBook is a useful one. The firm boasts access to the most private market data than anyone else. Their platform offers robust data and analytics to help private equity firms get the insight they need for proper valuation.
Call Tracking Analytics Tools for Closing the Loop
The healthcare industry has always relied upon phone calls as a primary contact medium. Despite the convenience that online scheduling brings, people often want to talk on the phone with a provider when a healthcare issue arises. And all those calls create a massive amount of data and information that can be leveraged to optimize marketing performance.
Enter: call tracking software. Solutions like CallRail, Infinity, Hubspot, and Novocall can not only show you call source (which is quite valuable information in and of itself), but also:
- Analyze phone calls, web forms, static and offline call tracking
- Feed call data into marketing and CRM platforms
- Reveal common keywords that come up during phone calls
- Record calls and display data and trends in customizable dashboards
- Automate call routing
These capabilities can provide tremendous insights into patient behavior, keywords, acquisition channels, and opportunities for more efficient healthcare journeys.
Data Management Tools for Intelligent Decisions
As this list already demonstrates, healthcare organizations generate a lot of data from a lot of different sources. You’ve got:
- Clinical and administrative data
- Electronic health record systems
- Business intelligence
- Marketing and advertising tools
- Surveys
- Claims
Many organizations still struggle to bring data out of silos and into an aggregated and centralized platform. As a result, the access, availability, and reliability of data can be severely limited. A data management solution such as
Salesforce, Nielsen, or Neustar can bring the data together seamlessly, opening up opportunities for better patient experience and acquisition, investment allocation, and more.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools for Aligning Sales and Marketing
A common problem we encounter with clients in healthcare is a lack of alignment between sales and marketing. Either they’re not talking to each other, literally, or they lack visibility into what one another is up to. In these scenarios, things like lead attribution tend to be a struggle.
So much of this alignment hinges on having a CRM, that central place for contact information, patient preferences, history, and other important data. Your portco should look for CRMs that are HIPAA compliant, first and foremost. Don’t forget about patient acquisition, email automation, and contact center integrations either. We mentioned business intelligence and analytics, as well—whatever functionality makes the most sense for your particular healthcare vertical.
Here are some of the leading CRMs for healthcare:
- Salesforce Health Cloud
- Leadsquared
- PatientPop
- Healthgrades
- PlayMaker Health
- Onpipeline
- Zendesk
Leadstream, our proprietary marketing analytics software, integrates with most CRM solutions to extract AI-powered marketing insights.
CASE STUDY
The LifeStance Blueprint for Scaling to 20 National Brands
Here’s a healthcare organization from our own client portfolio that needed to create value quickly and at scale. To help LifeStance reach its aggressive growth objectives, we needed a comprehensive approach with attention to all of the high-level categories described in this blog post. To see the results of what we did, read the full LifeStance case study.
Finally, Be As Comprehensive as This List Suggests
We’re not the in-your-face, you-gotta-do-this-to-survive types. But we do work with all kinds of healthcare private equity firms. Across the board, a data-driven approach is the only reliable way to create portfolio value. And that data-driven approach ought to be supported by tools for each of the seven categories I’ve outlined above:
- SEO
- Predictive analytics
- Financial tools
- Call tracking
- Data management
- Customer relationship management
The opportunities for growth are there. You just need the right tools to help identify them.
