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The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market is currently estimated to be $123 billion, and it’s expected to surpass $305 billion by 2026. The healthcare industry makes up a large portion of this growth. Innovation is continuing rapidly, and the widespread adoption and continued demand for iterations of electronic health records and telehealth services present tremendous opportunities for healthcare SaaS companies. The global healthcare cloud computing market alone will reach $76.8 billion by 2026, and the healthcare enterprise software market demonstrates a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.0%.
So how can you market your healthcare SaaS company to be part of this growth?
Bringing in a solid pipeline of prospects doesn’t just happen. SaaS companies vying to stand out as a preferred healthcare vendor in such a competitive market must be highly strategic with their marketing activities.
Key will be:
With this in mind, let’s look at what SaaS marketing for healthcare entails, the best practices you should follow, and what the healthcare SaaS industry is likely to look like going into 2023 and beyond.
Implementing the right integrated digital healthcare SaaS marketing strategy is the key to reaching your ideal customers, nurturing relationships, progressing prospects down the sales funnel and driving conversions.
But what does such an approach entail? An integrated approach means companies will use a mix of inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound marketing attracts prospects and customers with relevant content and experiences tailored to their needs and challenges. They’re customized to each stage of the buyer’s journey, moving potential buyers from awareness and consideration to purchase and advocacy.
Inbound marketing helps you attract the right decision-makers and track their interactions with your brand. You can shorten the sales cycle by delivering the more relevant information to the right buying group members at the right customer lifecycle stages.
Outbound marketing, in contrast, involves reaching out to people and telling them about your product. It’s also called “push” marketing because it pushes information onto your prospects instead of drawing them in with informative content. Advertising is an example of outbound marketing.
You should use inbound and outbound marketing strategies in tandem. Inbound marketing helps nurture relationships with prospects and is often less expensive to execute than outbound strategies in the long term. Meanwhile, outbound marketing can be highly targeted, often generates quick results and its ROI is easy to measure.
As you begin thinking about the components of your integrated digital marketing strategy, a natural next step is examining potential channels you’ll use to share your message. Each channel will reach prospects in different ways. Healthcare software companies will want to assess whether they are optimizing reach and engagement across each.
Channel use best practices when marketing healthcare SaaS companies typically incorporate the following.
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Content MarketingHealthcare content marketers must capture the attention of multiple stakeholders and retain that engagement over the long sales process. Content marketing is the ideal technique because you can attract the attention of high-quality prospects by sharing valuable content, such as thought-leadership articles, webinars, videos, and how-to guides. Moreover, a strategic approach to content planning and marketing personalization enables you to attract different stakeholders (e.g., hospital administrators, doctors, financial managers) with targeted content for each group. You can create different content types to engage with prospects at each stage of the customer journey — from blog posts and videos for those at the awareness stage to demos, product documentation, and webinars for those considering your product more seriously. Content marketing can help you address all the stakeholders involved in the healthcare software purchasing process and keep them engaged as they make their buying decisions. |
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Social Media MarketingAs the old marketing saying goes, people buy from people, not businesses. The same principle applies even when it comes to technical products such as healthcare SaaS solutions. You must make a human connection and build relationships with prospective buyers. Social media marketing on your company’s LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages will allow you to combine humanity with authority when ensuring presence of your brand. These channels can be a great way to keep customers and others who know you engaged with your brand. Paid placements with social media are also a great way to reach new prospects on their social feeds. Advertising on social channels typically provides great control over audience reach and cost. Audience building options, different algorithm serving capabilities and deep diversity of ad formats make paid social media marketing an important component of most outbound strategies. |
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)Healthcare software companies are often up against well-known competitors with deep pockets. SEO can help you stand out in a crowded marketplace and get in front of ideal customers with high purchase intent. Companies that rank in the top 3 positions in Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) get more web visitors, leads and sales. Achieving a high ranking also helps you establish trust and credibility — an absolute must in the high-stake environment of healthcare software. |
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Email MarketingEmail marketing is still one of the most cost-effective ways to keep your brand top of mind during the long healthcare tech sales cycle. You can build a relationship with prospects by providing them with value to accelerate the "like, know, and trust" factor. You can use segmentation strategies to target your lead at each customer lifecycle stage and personalize your messaging depending on how they came across your business, how much they know about your products and their roles in the decision-making process. |
The rapid pace of digital transformation in the healthcare industry presents tremendous opportunities for healthcare software providers. However, the complexity of healthcare SaaS marketing can make growing your company an uphill battle.
Besides the typical challenges of B2B tech marketing, such as long sales cycles and complex buying group dynamics, healthcare software marketers must overcome industry-specific hurdles, such as a slow adoption rate and heavy regulations.
Additionally, healthcare software marketers must address a more diffused decision-making process, a higher reliance on peer opinions, the rise of omnichannel marketing and the emphasis on thought leadership.
You need the right digital marketing strategies to reach your ideal customers, nurture relationships, progress prospects down the sales funnel and drive conversions.
So what are successful peers doing? You’ll see that great digital marketing starts from a solid foundation of a well-defined, long-term digital marketing strategy. Otherwise, you could fall into the trap of short-term marketing campaigns that rarely deliver ROI.
Start by building a solid picture of your target audience to help you reach the right prospects. Persona interviews, competitive analysis, and keyword research can help you build buyer personas to inform your messaging, choice of platforms, content, and other marketing initiatives to deliver the best results.
Many digital marketers strategies begin with examining how the company can be found by search engines, such as Google, more readily. Having the right SEO strategy is integral to being seen.
SEO helps your website stand out amongst even the toughest competitors. By ranking for popular keywords and phrases related to your solutions, you can:
More website traffic = more healthcare leads = more conversions — a simple equation!
B2B SaaS marketers can publish various types of content to get in front of healthcare professionals searching for your products and services. Popular formats include blog posts, eBooks, white papers, and infographics.
However, it's not enough to publish content and hope that the right audience stumbles upon it. You need a B2B content marketing strategy with a strong SEO component.
SaaS content marketing without SEO is like starting a business with zero promotion and expecting a line at the door on opening day. While blog posts focus on offering valuable content, SEO is the technical process that results in potential customers seeing it. The two can't succeed without the other.
Aside from SEO, a lot of the value of content marketing is in its ability to meet prospects wherever their interest or research needs currently lie. The B2B buying cycle in the healthcare sector is lengthy. Plus, many buying decisions are made based on trust and credibility due to the nature of the industry.
SaaS content marketing supports an inbound strategy to help software providers address marketing challenges unique to the healthcare industry and achieve the following goals.
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Engage Prospects Early in The Buyer's Journey. Most B2B buyers start their buyer's journey with online research. Most of them are 70% into their decision-making process before they contact a seller. You must meet your prospects where they're at when they start the purchasing process — on relevant SERPs. SaaS content marketing is one of the best ways to increase your site's SEO ranking and get found by prospects. Our keyword strategy helped Prevounce increase its SEO ranking to drive organic traffic. As a result, the company experienced a 2,000% rise in demo requests, an 8,600% increase in meetings, and a 1,600% boost in the number of deals closed. |
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Build Trust and Credibility. Healthcare organizations handle a lot of sensitive patient information. Decision-makers must trust your brand before buying your products. However, B2B buyers spend very little time meeting with potential vendors — making it difficult for vendors to develop credibility through one-on-one conversations. B2B SaaS inbound marketing builds a brand's credibility throughout the customer journey to drive conversions. For example, our SaaS content marketing strategy for Prevounce included publishing informative and authoritative content to many reputable national publications in the industry (e.g., Becker's Health IT, Medical Economics) to establish the company's thought leadership positioning. |
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Navigate Long and Complex Sales Cycles. B2B SaaS inbound marketing focuses on addressing buyers' needs at different stages of the purchasing journey, making it particularly suitable for healthcare software marketing because of the lengthy and often non-linear nature of the sales cycle. SaaS content marketing also helps address the priorities of different decision-makers within large buying groups. You can effectively navigate complex buying group dynamics by creating blog content that covers a wide range of topics to address the concerns of various stakeholders. This will, in turn, help you build trust and relationships with specific audiences and deliver a personalized experience to accelerate the sales cycle. |
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Boost Your Omnichannel Presence. A SaaS content marketing strategy covers various content distribution channels so the right message can reach the right people at the right time to deliver a seamless user experience. It can help draw prospects to your website and generate high-quality leads cost-effectively. The B2B SaaS inbound marketing strategy we implemented for Cureatr covered multiple channels and included a website redesign to support an ongoing content marketing plan. The initiative resulted in a 563% increase in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and a 227% pipeline increase in opportunities within three months. |
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Improve Customer Retention and Advocacy. The subscription model of a SaaS business means the longer a customer uses your product, the more profitable the relationship is. B2B SaaS inbound marketing addresses the entire customer lifecycle — including building loyalty and advocacy post-sales — to improve customer retention and customer lifetime value. You can help users get the most out of your products by promoting customer success with relevant, valuable, and exclusive content. When they see ROI from their investments, they're more likely to keep their subscriptions, upgrade their plans, or tell others about your software. Getting loyal customers to vouch for your product can help shorten the sales cycle and improve conversions since trust and referrals can significantly impact decision-making in the healthcare industry. |
SaaS marketing blogs are the primary channel for sharing content and the central point for distributing your message. Your content marketing and healthcare marketing strategies reply on your blog because it provides many benefits and supports various content marketing strategies.
SaaS marketing blogs are critical for content marketing in the healthcare software industry because they address two major marketing challenges at once: They get your audience’s attention, and they convince them to use your product or service.
SaaS content marketing strategy or agency must target unique audience segments who are experts in their field or hold specific industry perspectives. As such, you must get into the mind of your B2B SaaS customers and create content that caters directly to their needs to achieve healthcare software marketing success.
Your company blog is the ideal platform to accomplish this goal. It gives you a space for an in-depth review of topics relevant to your audience's needs. Furthermore, you can re-purpose and re-distribute blog content across other channels such as social media or newsletters to increase their impact and engage with prospects through multiple touchpoints.
In addition to SEO-based content marketing, companies need the right website strategy. All too often, a healthcare SaaS-based marketing platform launches a new, beautiful website. But a few months later, the return on investment is abysmal — the effort yielded little traffic and few leads.
So what could be the reasons?
It's a hard pill to swallow, but your website design and overall user experience (UX) may be the roadblock to success.
Here are a few common culprits you must address in your healthcare web marketing for SaaS.
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Your Website Design Does Not Match Your Overall Strategy. Designing a website is exciting. The colors, the images, the text — oh my! But pretty pictures mean nothing if they don't align with the goals and objectives of your SaaS-based marketing platform. A website design and strategy must coexist to achieve the best results. Therefore, we always recommend starting with a marketing strategy and conducting a website redesign strategy session before jumping into the design and build process. |
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Your Website Has Little Content to Engage Customers. Content is the most critical element of every SaaS website. High-quality, valuable content can set your site apart from competitors. The design, imagery, and branding play a secondary role in driving conversions. Here's how to create valuable content across your healthcare SaaS-based marketing website:
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Educate Customers Through Email Nurture Campaigns. An email nurture campaign helps you engage with leads, showcase your offers, and stay in contact with them throughout the customer lifecycle. The engagement also gives you valuable SaaS marketing insights to identify and understand what information prospects require before converting into a customer. |
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Funnel Leads Through Email Drip Campaigns.You can identify the channels that produce the most email sign-ups and attract the highest quality leads to optimize your ad spend and marketing results. Let's say you are running three marketing channels on a campaign: paid ads, social media, and SEO/content marketing. With a coordinated campaign, you can track insights and optimize performance by having a single point of conversion (e.g., a landing page.) Conversion rate optimization (CRO) becomes significantly more effective because you can easily track and analyze SaaS marketing insights. |
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Use List Segmentation to Target Different Audience Segments. The best email marketing campaigns by SaaS healthcare companies leverages list segmentation tactics to categorize prospects and personalize the content. You can segment your list manually or automatically based on preferences and behaviors. The more granular the segments are, the more you can apply unique messaging to appeal to your target audience. |
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Create Personalized Engagement at Scale. You can use email automation to deliver personal touches at scale. For example, you can automatically populate details about each recipient or engage with a subscriber based on an action that they have taken. This level of personalization provides in-depth SaaS marketing insights because you can learn about customer behaviors and use email automation to track their activities for future optimization. |
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Understand Customer Behavior and Improve CRO Through A/B Email Tests. A/B email tests are one of the best SaaS email marketing examples of how you can gain actionable insights to predict customer behavior and optimize conversion rates. Understanding how your customers think is one of the biggest marketing challenges, and A/B tests can offer critical perspectives to inform decision-making. |
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Improve Content Marketing Rankings. Where your content lives on a SERP correlates with how many people visit your website. A study by Backlink.io shows the #1 result on Google gets 31.7% of all clicks. But how can you earn that coveted spot? PPC advertising is the most effective healthcare SaaS product marketing strategy to help you achieve top ranking quickly. |
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Outrank the Competition in Search. Aside from quality keywords related to your products and services, PPC can help your healthcare SaaS company rank for competitor brand names. Let's take email service providers as an example: When I search for "MailerLite," I get three competing platforms as the top results. |
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Explore Paid Social Media Advertising. A healthcare SaaS product marketing strategy is not limited to Google Ads. Marketers can also leverage PPC ads on various social media platforms. LinkedIn is an effective advertising tool for reaching niche B2B audiences and high-level decision-makers looking for SaaS solutions. In fact, LinkedIn sponsor posts are 277% more effective at lead generation than Facebook and Twitter. |
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Utilize Your CRM for Customer and Prospect List Targeting. Most major advertising platforms support list targeting to help you reach customers or prospects who have already shown an interest in your healthcare SaaS product. The process involves uploading a list to the ad platform with different identifiers such as emails, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. Then, the ad platform matches the information with users' profiles so you can reach specific audiences via various networks such as Google and Facebook. |
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Find Valuable Keywords to Increase Organic Traffic. PPC advertising can help you identify keywords you can apply to your content marketing strategy. Our SaaS marketing strategy advisors always recommend examining PPC data closely to see which keywords are working well and which aren't. Then, we use the insight to identify high-performing keywords that our content teams can leverage in blog posts, product pages, and other types of website content. |
Should you hire an in-house team, find an agency, or recruit freelancers to support your marketing efforts? Examining your needs and circumstance will often shape the best path.
Partnering with a healthcare digital marketing agency specializing in software companies is the fastest path to achieving tangible results in terms of leads, sales calls, and closed deals.
Still speed isn’t your only consideration. Below maps out some other important considerations.
How do you know you’ve found the right digital marketing agency for your healthcare software business?
If you’ve decided to hire a digital marketing agency, you may wonder how to find the right one. What should you expect from your new marketing partner? What’s the difference between a good agency and a great one?
Here are a few signs that you’ve found a healthcare SaaS marketing partner worth your consideration:
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They Behave Like a Business Partner, Not a Service Provider. Your agency should invest its time learning about your niche, product, market, challenges, and past and current marketing efforts. Once the team has grasped your current situation, it should provide clear strategic planning. You should also feel that your agency is making an effort to build relationships with you. The team should listen to your needs, deliver what you’re asking for, and respond promptly to your feedback. |
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They Demonstrate a Deep Understanding of the Healthcare Software Sector. Your agency should know the right places to pitch for guest content, which industry publications are appropriate for your audience, and which keywords are most relevant for your content marketing plans. They should have the knowledge to build an impactful strategy and the editorial staff with industry expertise to create high-quality content such as blog posts and guest articles on your behalf. |
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They Deliver Measurable, Data-Driven Results. Your healthcare software agency should leverage real-world data to deliver tangible results. It should provide comprehensive reporting regularly and explain the results. It should focus on the right metrics and help you improve KPIs that matter the most, including leads conversion rates, demo requests, increase in client meetings, SEO rankings, and the number of closed deals. |
In addition to weighing capabilities in these areas, it’s also useful to investigate what day-to-day working together will be like.
Below are some key questions you should ask when selecting a SaaS healthcare marketing agency:
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How Do You Handle Client Communications?A clear communication plan is the foundation of a healthy and productive working relationship. Your healthcare software agency should assign a single point of contact in charge of managing the account and handling client communications to minimize confusion, errors and delays. |
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What's Your Internal Process and Project Management Approach?An experienced SaaS healthcare marketing agency follows a well-defined process to cover all the bases. They should establish milestones for your campaigns and provide you with a detailed project plan to keep everyone on the same page. |
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What Data Analytics and Reporting Do You Offer?You hire an agency to achieve results, not to crank out Facebook ads just so you can pay for them! Accurate data-driven decision-making is the key to success in today's market, and your agency must have a robust reporting system to help you stay on track. Your agency should start by understanding your marketing objectives and identifying meaningful KPIs to measure each campaign's effectiveness. Beware of "vanity metrics," which could get you barking up the wrong trees and spending money on tactics that don't deliver real business benefits. |
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What's Your Experience in the Healthcare Software Industry?Unlike hiring individual freelancers, working with a healthcare software marketing agency allows you to access a wide range of expertise on demand to support an end-to-end marketing strategy. Your agency should stay on top of the latest news, trends and technologies in health tech and healthcare marketing to help you maximize your investment. When selecting a healthcare digital marketing agency, ask for testimonials and case studies from clients in the industry. |
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How Do You Implement a Strategy Across the Full Marketing Mix?As noted earlier, an integrated marketing approach is important. The agency should implement a strategy that includes both inbound marketing and outbound marketing tactics to cover all relevant digital channels and tie all these components together. |
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How Do You Handle Scoping, Budgeting and Billing?The best budgeting and billing approach depends on the nature and scope of your projects. For example, if you have a well-defined scope and deliverables, using a points-based system per project deliverable can make things more predictable for your planning and budgeting. |
In addition to sharing your day-to-day operational expectations, the right agency will be aligned with your company around key actions.
Here are 7 things you should expect from your SaaS content marketing agency:
The more specialized an industry, the more critical real-world experience is. Your audience is not everyday consumers—it consists of professionals with nuanced pain points and high technical standards for content. If your agency can’t speak your industry’s language, you risk having prospects view content created as irrelevant. Your agency should be familiar with HIPAA, virtual healthcare, electronic health records, healthcare workflow and staffing norms, patient experience concerns, regulations, payment and revenue cycle dynamics, etc.
A credible SaaS content marketing agency is deliberate about its approach to content marketing. High-quality content is authentically helpful and transparent about its motive.
Marketing expert Neil Patel notes: “If you’re going to provide value to customers, you need to mostly write content for the customers’ benefit and occasionally promote your products. People are interested in articles and posts that benefit them, not ad posts touting how awesome your product or business is.” Follow the 80-20 rule: Your content should be 80% educational and 20% promotional.
Spinning out content that does not serve the audience is a waste of money and time. A healthcare marketing agency should ask questions and create buyer personas to inform how it approaches content creation. It should consider your audience’s needs, your buyer's journey, your CRM and marketing tools, your timeline and your level of investment.
90% of customers expect a cohesive brand experience. Your agency should determine which channel is most appropriate for which message. Make sure it has experience with major tools of the trade, and the content creators can convey a consistent tone across media, including blogs, podcasts, white papers, infographics, YouTube videos and cross-promotional posts.
Nothing is static in the world of content marketing and search engine marketing. Your agency must place your SEO strategy in the context of creating audience-centered, well-researched content.
Digital marketers use keywords because they represent the topics important to the audience and how the audience thinks about these topics. In particular, long-tail keywords can inform the creation of content that meets an audience's needs at different points in the buyer’s journey.
If an agency guarantees unrealistic sales increases, dig deeper and make sure they will be on the hook to answer for those results. A digital content agency should set realistic expectations based on your long-term objectives. Content creation and inbound marketing generate momentum over time, so beware of agencies that promise you a magic wand.
An excellent SaaS content marketing agency sets expectations of how you might respond in future content directions. For example, if you get lots of short hits and fewer click-throughs, your content may not match your brand closely enough. Your agency should also consider how industry trends will affect which channels work best for your audience in the future.
A little more nuanced to consider when choosing among agencies is recognizing expertise around SaaS marketing strategy. How can you tell if your SaaS content marketing agency is the real deal? Health tech marketers can quickly assess differences among agencies in very clear ways. The following are a few questions that can make these differences very apparent.
The buyer journey for SaaS software is more complex than the traditional marketing funnel. The typical marketing funnel looks something like this:
At the top of the funnel, marketing campaigns attract prospects' attention and turn them into leads. Lead nurturing content encourages them to spend more time learning about your product. Those with purchase intent will evaluate your product and compare it with other solutions. Finally, your sales team moves in, offering demos and securing lead commitment to convert prospects into customers.
So far, so good – but SaaS marketing funnels for healthcare look rather different.
Profitability for SaaS companies is tied to customer retention as much as it is to acquisition — your marketing strategy must address existing customers while reaching new leads. Moreover, SaaS retention is tied to how useful your software is to your customers, so a significant portion of your marketing budget should be spent on product training, customer engagement, and community engagement.
In other words, the SaaS marketing “funnel” isn’t really a funnel at all! The long sales cycles mean that healthcare SaaS “funnels” might look like this:
Your leads may revisit each stage of the buyer journey at different times. You may engage different stakeholders at various decision stages at the same time. Or prospects may jump in far later in the sales process after receiving a recommendation from a respected contact.
You’ll know you’ve found a digital marketing agency that can tackle the unique challenges of healthcare SaaS marketing if it offers a comprehensive marketing strategy that targets leads at every stage of the convoluted buyer journey.
The right digital marketing agency will identify content marketing opportunities to align with the complexities of the healthcare marketing funnel. These include:
Consideration Stage •
Healthcare SaaS leads often consider educational content most valuable. They tend to be bombarded with information, so a “hard-sell” approach can appear overwhelming and even irritating. On the other hand, webinars, case studies, use cases, Q&A sessions, datasheets, and how-to video content are best for engaging prospects and demonstrating your unique value proposition.Decision Stage •
At the decision stage, healthcare software buyers are comparing your solution against alternatives. They look for free trials, live demos, recorded demos, and ROI calculators that will help them understand the benefits your products deliver. Bear in mind that some stakeholders may still be at the evaluation stage, while others might have already reached the decision stage. Or, a lead at the decision stage might go back to the evaluation stage if they run into red flags. Therefore, you need to identify and address trust issues or concerns that could give your prospects cold feet.Advocacy Stage •
Your success depends on your ability to transform leads into customers and customers into long-term advocates. The right digital marketing agency can help you create a marketing strategy to focus on acquisition and retention. Content for the post-sale advocacy stage may include exclusive information, free training courses, a free knowledge base, and customer-only events.
Once you have narrowed the field among agencies, you’ll need to choose the best one. While different agencies have different strengths, you should look for several common characteristics when selecting your agency.
You’ll want to look for 4 C’s: content, case studies, customer understanding and comprehensive mind-set.
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The Best SaaS Marketing Agencies Know How to Create Top-Quality ContentContent marketing is one of the most critical elements for any digital marketing strategy in the SaaS healthcare space. The best SaaS marketing agencies understand the importance of content's role in any digital marketing strategy. They are confident in their abilities to create meaningful, high-value content for their clients. Pro Tip: When evaluating a prospective agency partner:
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The Best SaaS Marketing Agencies Have Strong Knowledge of the SaaS Healthcare Market—and Clients That Can Vouch for ItThe SaaS healthcare space presents many unique challenges for marketers, but an experienced agency knows how to navigate them. Assess an agency's industry experience by examining its performance with previous clients. For example, the Spot On Agency regularly share insights and measured success when showcasing past client work, such as this Prevounce Case Study. |
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The Best SaaS Marketing Companies Understand Every Step of the Customer JourneyThe strongest SaaS marketing agencies understand the sales process of healthcare SaaS companies. They can also adapt their approach based on how your products meet your customers' needs. This understanding is critical because your agency must understand the buying journey your customers experience to recognize how to maximize the effectiveness and ROI of a campaign. If a campaign fails to align with the buying process, it could lose momentum or produce poorly qualified leads. Pro Tip: If you are unsure of your target customer's journey, work with a SaaS marketing agency that can help you define buyer needs and purchasing journeys during the campaign planning process. |
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The Best SaaS Marketing Agencies Build Comprehensive Digital Marketing StrategiesLaunching campaigns piecemeal will diminish your ROI, because leads will disengage when there are substandard or missing marketing elements. The most successful campaigns address every marketing channel available and coordinate each component to deliver a consistent customer experience that accelerates prospects down the sales funnel. |
Your healthcare SaaS marketing strategy should help you win business today and pave the way for future success.
Here are major healthcare SaaS market changes to anticipate over the next few years.
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Continued Rise of TelemedicineThe pandemic has increased the demand for telehealth services. The global telehealth market was valued at $62.4 billion in 2021 and will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.5% from 2022 to 2028. Telemedicine is here to stay because it creates a win-win situation for patients and providers. More people can access high-quality care while providers can treat more patients at a lower cost thanks to improved efficiency. As healthcare staffing continues to struggle from nursing to clinicians to physicians, telemedicine allows healthcare organizations to address access challenges and maximize footprint. Flexibility afforded can also be a driver of staff satisfaction. |
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Prioritization of Open APIOpen APIs (application programming interfaces) used by SaaS platforms facilitate data collection and healthcare information exchange. Organizations can migrate data between clouds or synchronize data with ease. A CIO publication notes: “The need for interoperability through APIs will guide SaaS decisions, as IT leaders try to design systems that can scale and adapt.” When providers, payers, pharma and vendors share more data, they can uncover new insights. Open API and interoperability remain a priority for organizations. |
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Data Security ConcernsHealthcare data breaches cost $9.3 million per occurrence in 2021. Besides the costs of remediation actions, legal fees and non-compliance penalties, organizations also suffer from lost business and tarnished reputations that would take years to repair. Meanwhile, it has become increasingly cost-prohibitive for healthcare organizations to assemble a large in-house IT department to address cybersecurity concerns and monitor an on-premise infrastructure. HIPAA-complaint SaaS platforms have teams of security experts to take this major headache off their customers' plates. Although a multi-cloud approach offers many benefits, it has new security concerns and complexities. SaaS providers must address these issues and offer secure and seamless integration and data exchange in the cloud. |
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The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)SaaS platforms can use machine learning and predictive analytics software to collect data, recognize patterns and detect potential security threats. Meanwhile, AI chatbots and speech recognition technologies can help improve customer service and deliver timely patient communications cost-effectively. These technologies are already widely used and have been changing patient expectations. More healthcare organizations will implement SaaS platforms that leverage AI applications to process data, reduce costs and improve the patient experience. |
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The Rise of Vertical SaaSMore SaaS platforms are zeroing in on delivering solutions to specific industry verticals. This approach will surpass horizontal SaaS thanks to many benefits, such as providing highly specialized applications and seamless workflows. Moreover, vertical SaaS solutions can address key performance indicators (KPIs) that focus on long-term results more effectively by enabling providers to access industry-specific intelligence and patient data for timely insights. |
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Telemedicine and 5G InfrastructureThe global telehealth market will reach $224.8 billion by 2030. The industry is growing and maturing rapidly, shifting from providing urgent care to delivering specialized care using sophisticated monitoring devices. 5G networks and edge computing will fuel the growth of the telehealth industry, enabling reliable and timely access to digital care for more people, especially underserved patients in remote regions. From patient communications and workflow automation to secure data exchange, the demand for cloud solutions to support telemedicine is high. Pro tip: Healthcare SaaS companies should plug into this industry trend by showing how products support telehealth services in their marketing messages. Pro Tip: Healthcare SaaS companies should plug into this industry trend by showing how products support telehealth services in their marketing messages. |
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Patient Communication PlatformConsumerism in healthcare has changed market demand and patient expectations. Legacy call center technologies can no longer engage patients effectively or streamline issue resolution. Not to mention, patients expect the ability to communicate with their providers through multiple channels 24/7. Pro Tip: Demonstrate how your solution can help providers deliver seamless and secure patient communications via multiple channels. Highlight how new technologies, such as workflow automation and AI-driven natural language processing, can improve the patient experience cost-effectively. |
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Care Delivery Without WallsThe shift from inpatient visits to more outpatient care is transforming care delivery. Cloud platforms can support the integration of patient care inside and outside healthcare facilities by ensuring seamless collaboration among care teams and real-time patient data sharing through wearables and monitoring devices. Healthcare providers will need increased capabilities to process and analyze an influx of patient data from remote monitoring devices. AI and machine learning applications are key to processing vast amounts of information and generating timely insights to optimize treatment outcomes. Pro Tip: Cloud platforms will become the hub where healthcare providers manage inpatient and outpatient care and switch seamlessly between the two. Demonstrate how your solution uses data to support team collaboration and care coordination to drive efficiency, save costs and improve treatment outcomes. |