Plain Talk

Patient profile. Consumer profile. Both terms are used in the healthcare industry today. Both terms are correct. But there are subtle yet significant differences between these terms that can reveal a lot about a healthcare organization’s overall strategy and mindset.

To illustrate the differences, we need to examine how the healthcare industry has evolved over the last few decades.

Patient Profiles in Hospitals and Clinics: The Traditional Approach
Traditionally, hospitals and clinics viewed patients as simply that – patients. The focus was on medical conditions and patients were labeled based on diagnoses. Patient profiles may have factored in some demographic information such as gender, race, and income, but the emphasis was on how those demographic factors influenced healthcare outcomes.

The medically focused approach to patient profiles isn’t wrong; in fact, it can be critical in identifying trends to refine treatments. But profiling patients based solely on medical history and demographics does little to inform overall organization strategy, which is a challenge in today’s highly competitive healthcare environment.

Fortunately, there are other aspects of patient profiling that healthcare organizations have started to explore.

Consumer Profiles: Transforming Healthcare Personalization and More
Without question, the healthcare industry is more competitive today than it was in recent decades. That’s led to an emphasis on patient acquisition and retention.

In order to acquire new patients (and keep them), you need to know who they are – not just in terms of their medical conditions or demographics, but in terms of who they are as consumers.

• What are their approaches toward healthcare? Are they proactive or reactive?
• How do they like to receive information? What channels are the best way to reach them?
• What’s their lifestyle? What things do they find engaging and interesting?

This is a significant mindset shift. Understanding diagnoses and looking for medical patterns still matters, but to effectively reach and keep patients over time you need to be able to speak to them on a personal level.

That’s where consumer profiles come into play. Consumer profiles are a different type of patient profile that provide insights into your patients’ lifestyles. They can be developed at an overall level or by service line but go beyond basic demographics to help you really understand your patients.

Organizations that use consumer‑oriented patient profiles understand what it takes to win in the current healthcare environment. Even nonprofit organizations have realized that a consumer mentality can help them to generate enough margin to fund their mission of caring for those who can’t afford medical treatment. Identifying who your patients are and where others like them are located allows you to make more effective decisions in areas ranging from marketing to facilities planning.

Comparing Patient Profiles vs. Consumer Profiles in Healthcare
While healthcare often views patients through a clinical lens, there's growing recognition that patients are also consumers with distinct preferences, behaviors, and expectations. Traditionally, a patient profile focuses on essential clinical information, including medical history, insurance provider information, contact details, and basic demographics. These data points allow healthcare organizations to enhance treatment approaches, identify health behavior trends, and predict patient health outcomes. However, these profiles typically emphasize quantitative metrics and overlook qualitative insights that reflect consumer needs and preferences.

In contrast, a consumer profile enriches this foundational data by adding layers of psychographic and behavioral data. These additional qualitative and quantitative data points capture the broader consumer needs of individuals, providing healthcare organizations with insights that extend beyond clinical interactions. For example, consumer profiles enable healthcare providers to enhance marketing strategies, optimize site selection, and fine‑tune facility offerings by better understanding the population in each facility's trade area.

By embracing a patient’s role as both a patient and a consumer, healthcare organizations can create a more comprehensive profile, bridging the gap between clinical care and consumer experience, ultimately fostering more personalized, patient‑centered services.

Methods of Profiling Consumers in Healthcare
Healthcare organizations have two primary options for consumer profiling, allowing them to leverage insights from either their own unique patient data or from broader industry trends to enhance their growth strategies.

1. Custom Profiles Using Patient Data
Custom profiles are tailored to a healthcare organization’s specific patient base, combining patient data with household‑level consumer data sources, such as demographics, psychographics, and behavioral data. By creating unique profiles based on real patient data, healthcare organizations can gain actionable consumer insights into who their best patients are, where more of them can be found, and their value to your organization. Custom profiling is particularly effective for established healthcare providers with a robust patient database.

2. Goal Profiles Based on Industry Trends
Industry profiles are created using broader healthcare trends and data points across various service lines and facility types, ideal for organizations with limited or restricted patient data. Emerging healthcare brands, organizations unable to share patient information, and large health systems with diverse service lines benefit from these profiles, as they provide a data-driven foundation for understanding target markets without needing or sharing extensive internal data. Leveraging these insights helps healthcare providers ensure their growth plans align with who their most likely patients are and where more of those patients can be found.

How to Create a Consumer Profile for Healthcare
Creating a consumer profile in healthcare involves blending patient data with third-party insights to gain a full understanding of who the patient is.

Step 1: A consumer profiling process begins with patient data collection (this step is, of course, skipped when developing industry profiles). Required client data usually includes patient first and last name, address, and patient visit history.

Step 2: The next step in the process involves integrating third-party data sources to enrich the data collected in step 1. Key data sources include demographics (age, gender, income), and psychographics (values, lifestyle choices).

Step 3: Once the data is gathered and enriched, the analysis involves identifying patterns to determine the primary patient segments. This step is where actionable insights emerge, helping healthcare organizations better understand their patient’s characteristics, lifestyle and affinities, media consumption habits, and more.

By leveraging a comprehensive consumer profile, organizations can develop targeted, efficient marketing strategies that align with patients' preferences, ultimately improving both acquisition and retention efforts. The organization can also identify geographic concentrations of consumers who match their profile to guide future facility planning.

Use Case Examples of a Consumer Profile for Healthcare
Healthcare organizations, from large hospitals to small clinics, can benefit from the kinds of consumer profiles that Buxton offers. One large U.S. health system, for example, leveraged Buxton’s consumer profiles and other marketing intelligence solutions to drive a targeted campaign for its orthopedic services. By analyzing patient demographics and psychographics, they identified individuals likely to need specific services like hip and knee replacements. This data-driven approach enabled a multi-channel campaign that achieved a 14:1 ROI by refining targeting and aligning messaging based on consumer insights, including adjustments for younger-than-expected patient demographics.

In another case, a rapidly growing multi-unit urgent care practice used Buxton’s consumer profiles to improve site selection. By analyzing their patient and location performance data, they identified optimal locations for new clinics. The profile and other location intelligence solutions, combined with Buxton’s analytics platform, helped validate their growth strategy and ensure a strong patient experience.

These examples not only underscore Buxton’s expertise but also highlight how healthcare providers use consumer profiles to make informed decisions, resulting in improved patient care, optimized marketing, and successful site selection.

The Role of Consumer Profiles in Healthcare Decision-Making
In an era where the "consumerization" of healthcare is reshaping patient expectations, healthcare providers are increasingly seeing the value of consumer profiles beyond the clinical setting. Empowering teams across the organization with a detailed description of the patients you serve helps each team to make more consumer-centric decisions. Knowing your primary consumer segments provides focus and a clearer framework for enhancing the healthcare consumer experience.

The Bottom Line
Patient profiles have been and will continue to be important tools for healthcare organizations, but layering in consumer information makes them more actionable for today’s healthcare executives.

Buxton is the leading customer analytics firm that helps organizations identify who their customers are, where those customers are located, and the value those customers have to the organization.

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