The Mission
City of Hope's mission is to deliver the cures of tomorrow to the people who need them today. Founded in 1913, City of Hope has grown into one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the U.S. and one of the leading research centers for diabetes and other life-threatening illnesses. City of Hope research has been the basis for numerous breakthrough cancer medicines, as well as human synthetic insulin and monoclonal antibodies. With an independent, National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center at its core, City of Hope brings a uniquely integrated model to patients spanning cancer care, research and development, academics and training, and innovation initiatives.
The Challenge
Healthcare patients often have questions about treatment options and they need the reassurance of speaking to a person — that’s why the majority of them call providers to schedule appointments. City of Hope estimates that over 60% of its new patients prefer using the phone for appointment scheduling or asking questions about their medical condition.
Because phone calls play such a critical role in the patient journey, City of Hope needed to attribute them to the channels and campaigns driving them. Without call tracking data, they lacked visibility into their conversion funnel and weren’t able to tie together the digital-to-call experience. To get the right call attribution data, City of Hope and its digital marketing agency, Merkle, turned to Invoca.
The Resolution
Tracking the Patient Journey with Invoca
The City of Hope and Merkle teams use various channels and campaigns to move patients down the funnel. Their key funnel stages are: actionable lead, qualified lead, insurance submission, insurance approval, appointment made, appointment kept, and then first treatment. With such a long funnel, it’s imperative that the team has the right attribution models in place to track patients through each stage of the journey. Because many of the funnel stages occur over the phone, Invoca plays a key role in City of Hope’s attribution strategy.
If we didn’t have Invoca, our journey towards making our business more efficient would've been much, much harder. Invoca has helped us understand which channels and campaigns are most effective at driving patients through the funnel. As a result, we decreased our cost per acquisition by 66%.
Ivan Stamenov, Head of marketing, performance media & analytics at City of Hope
City of Hope and Merkle use Invoca to build unique media mix models for its designated marketing areas (DMAs), so they can understand how effective their media is at driving calls to each location. This allows them to make the right campaign optimizations to ensure every physician and hospital is receiving the right volume of leads.
City of Hope also placed Invoca trackable phone numbers in its TV ads, allowing Merkle to determine the incremental lift driven by the channel. This enabled them to find new optimization opportunities in television advertising to increase patient acquisition.
Invoca helps us optimize our marketing budget to drive more new patients for City of Hope at a lower cost. It allows us to see how effective a media channel is at not only driving traffic to the website, but at generating high-value calls.
Trevor Hadick, VP, media managing director at Merkle
Integrating Invoca Data with Systems While Maintaining HIPAA Compliance
Invoca also allows City of Hope and Merkle to associate phone calls with session-level data from each callers’ web activity, including Google Client ID. This allows them to stitch together the full digital-to-call journey. They then integrate this data with Salesforce, and from there, they anonymize it and push it out to their data lake, which is an unstructured database. Finally, they can structure it in a data warehouse solution for further analysis.
Invoca is a pivotal solution for our team. Our attribution strategy and media mix modeling hinge on our ability to integrate Invoca with the rest of our data.
Ivan Stamenov, Head of marketing, performance media & analytics at City of Hope
Invoca’s standard Business Associate Agreement (BAA) ensures it is in full compliance with HIPAA regulations. Beyond that, City of Hope’s patient data is not used for any marketing purposes, and it has taken all the necessary prescribed steps to maintain compliance on its end as well.
Using Invoca Signals to Get Insights from Phone Conversations
The City of Hope and Merkle teams also use Invoca to get deep insights from phone conversations. The solution allows them to track if the caller was a lead, if any competitors are part of the patient’s journey, if they’re seeking a second opinion, and more.
“If I had to stop using Invoca today, what I would miss most would be the signals,” said Stamenov. “Invoca’s signals help us gain a deeper understanding of key patient preference and satisfaction drivers. They also help us QA our data and ensure that what we’re seeing on calls is being properly integrated with the rest of our systems.”
The Results
- 66% Decrease in cost per acquisition
The Invoca team is fantastic. Our CSM is a rockstar and she’s really helped us accelerate our deployment.
