EPG Health doubled revenue in two-year period since launching website with Optimizely

Building a fully immersive digital ecosystem in an infant digital marketplace

EPG Health, an IQVIA business is a leading global publisher of medical information, delivering a trusted learning environment for healthcare professionals. Providing convenient access to critical industry content needed to support better treatment decisions and patient outcomes, they an active reach of over a million healthcare professionals globally. 

The organisation supports two customer groups: the healthcare professionals that use their website to access clinical information, and the pharmaceutical companies that fund educational content on the platform.

The brunt of the information on the website revolves around raising awareness about diseases, treatment pathways, and other related drugs. Their aim is to increase each individual healthcare professional's awareness and understanding of a certain disease within their given specialty – for example, stroke prevention.

''It's about increasing a healthcare professional's awareness and understanding of a certain disease or treatment approach…to do that effectively in an information saturated, crowded content marketplace, we need to make that content discoverable, and easy to consume in a timely fashion'', comments Selena Smith-Taylor, Digital Project Manager at EPG Health, on the service EPG Health’s Medthority website (www.medthority.com) provides.

Creating an indulgent content strategy for a time-poor audience

Selena’s team leads EPG Health’s continuous improvement group. They experiment, iterate and optimise content and drive the adoption of a test and learn culture, which enables EPG Health to optimise its digital content and create first-class digital experiences. As Selena explains, the key to successfully promoting their content through Optimizely’s CMS is about delivering relevance and targeted content to its users.

By driving the right audience to the most important educational material, and measuring their engagement, EPG Health can confidently provide insight to clients regarding how well their key messages have landed amongst their target audience, and the likelihood of resultant behaviour change.

Content consumers cover a range of healthcare professionals all of whom can register with their chosen speciality as well as identify areas of interest, so they are kept abreast of industry news. Visitors include:

• Specialists
• General Medicine Professionals
• GPs
• Nurses
• Students

Selena comments, ''given we know, through our extensive market research, that Healthcare Professionals are generally ‘time-poor’, and there is an ocean of content to swim-through, we need to do the hard-work for them, by quickly presenting them with updates in their areas of interest….for example, if a Cardiologist is on Medthority [an EPG Health website], the platform will intuitively promote content ‘suggestions within their Specialty area’, or ‘your peers are looking at’ style recommendations”.

EPG Health’s customers expect robust well architected digital solutions that leverage the best in digital experience and marketing toolsets. Its web users are time poor healthcare professionals, and expect inspiring, reliable, safe and efficient digital experiences. Given the competition for time in a Healthcare Professional’s busy day, Selena’s team are constantly analysing what really matters to foster engagement, which means adopting a ‘digital publishing mindset’, within a typically traditional academic space.

EPG Health select Optimizely over competitors 

Before Optimizely, EPG Health’s development team were often developing or building functionality that replicated off-the-shelf tools. Because of this tactic, there was a perception internally that things often took too long, were rarely comparable to off-the-shelf products and were overly complex and vulnerable. EPG Health had developed their own web environment using CFML based coding principals in a CMS configuration based on a 3rd party proprietary configuration, with backend databases linked to 3rd party e-mail marketing tools.

EPG Health needed an extensible solution that allowed them to quickly adapt their web offering to the demands of their customers and web users. Prior to selecting Optimizely as a technology partner and ultimately leveraging the in-house Optimizely Expert Services team, EPG Health considered many CMS providers. Optimizely was ultimately chosen by the EPG Health team due to the internal perception of inherent solution extensibility and focus on personalisation features and intelligent search, with the (Optimizely) solution mix containing better integrated solutions for re-marketing and potential solutions aligned to EPG Health’s product roadmap.

Influencing and changing a health care professional's way of working

EPG Health launched its Medthority website in April 2020 on Optimizely’s customer-centric Digital Experience Platform utilizing:

• Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) with Search & Navigation
• Marketing Automation
• Content Recommendations.

Using registered profiles through Optimizely Visitor Intelligence helps learn what visitors are doing on the site and provides clever suggestions of relevant content based upon their profile and/or their behaviour. Selena describes EPG Health's digital approach as ''effectively taking the Amazon model for product merchandise recommendations and applying it to content for doctors’’.

Optimizely Content Recommendations helps signpost related content and has meant a larger proportion of visitors are travelling on rich content journeys, making their way into key messages.

Optimizely’s CMS, built on Microsoft Azure is fully scalable. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of Pharma industry congresses have been replaced with online educational messaging, with Medthority perfectly placed to handle the additional interest traffic. Visitors have generated 3x as many site page views compared with the same period in 2019.

'We selected Optimizely based on their forward-thinking roadmap, and stand-out focus on personalisation features leveraging AI. We’ve only just started to scratch the surface on what can be achieved using these powerful recommendation services, and intelligent search features, to deliver a quality interaction.

Selena Smith-Taylor

Digital Project Manager

Optimizely’s CMS integrates with multitude of products

Optimizely’s Expert Services are EPG Health’s delivery partner and much more. Selena commented that “the [Expert Services] team are like an extension of our team… always on hand and equally invested in our success and ambitions.” 

Working with the Expert Services team, EPG Health have integrated Auth 0 SSO to simplify registration, enable social sign on and provide a seamless experience for its users between Medthority and Learn.Medthority, a learning environment that includes Continuing Medical Education (CME), and is hosted on Moodle. Using this integration, EPG Health provides healthcare professionals with non-accredited and accredited CME modules and a dedicated Learning record.

Onsite interactivity for Medthority users is provided through the following integrations
o    Podbean for podcasts
o    Vimeo – KOL videos and on demand webinars
o    Qualtrics quizzes and surveys supports our understanding of a healthcare professionals Stages of learning and the tracking of learning objectives
o    Click meeting – Live webinars within the Medthority platform

 

Personalized journeys that place EPG Health ahead of the curve

The ability to deliver personalised updates, sending people on tailored content journeys, including sequencing of key messages, are all intrinsically linked to generating good engagement.

Optimizely Marketing Automation enables Healthcare Professionals to stay informed based on both their stated registered profile, and their onsite consumption behaviour.  The ability to easily generate specialty area roundups, relevant newsletters, and promote new educational destinations; is key to developing a habitual, membership economy amongst its users.

Future Plans

On a strategic level, EPG Health will continue to expand bespoke iterations of content to serve new geographies whilst also increasing the level of UX personalisation for all its users. EPG Health will utilise Optimizely’s Data Platform to fully harness user segments to tailor content journeys to the needs, wants & behaviours of specific user types or demographic sub-sets.

As well as continuous iterative development of Medthority, EPG Health plan to progressively build content nodes (outside of the Medthority environment but on the same tech infrastructure) to host web based activities for our client organisations, mirroring and drawing from the feature set and functions developed for the Medthority website. 

EPG Health’s future roadmap with Optimizely will focus on upgrading its website to Optimizely’s CMS 12 to increase speed. They are also considering acquiring the Content Marketing Platform to improve its content creation and collaboration process with clients.

EPG Health and Optimizely will continue their fruitful partnership for years to come.