A leading nonprofit healthcare system was seeing the same pattern across its business: fewer patients, slower growth, and no clear explanation for either.
Outcomes at-a-glance
- Clear view of patient priorities enables targeted retention and service redesign
- Investments shift toward the segments, services, and experiences patients value most
- Insight-led planning helps drive 21% revenue growth
Strategic opportunity
Elective procedures had not fully returned. Patient behavior had changed. But inside the organization, decisions were still being made based on historical benchmarks and internal assumptions that no longer held.
Leadership didn’t have a clear answer to the question of why weren’t patients coming back?
Without that clarity, the organization was making critical decisions – where to invest, what to improve, how to communicate – without knowing what would actually make a difference.
They suspected the issue wasn’t a single factor. Different patient groups likely had different expectations around access, cost, and experience. But that hypothesis hadn’t been tested or quantified.
As a result:
- The drivers of patient loyalty were unclear
- Investment decisions were not grounded in patient demand
- Service design and messaging risked missing what patients valued
This wasn’t about a short-term fix. Leadership needed a clear, fact-based understanding of patient behavior to stabilize performance and build a roadmap for long-term growth.
Solution
To answer that question, the health system built a large-scale consumer insight program modeled on how leading B2C companies understand customer behavior, preferences, and decision-making.
The program was designed to give leadership a clear, ongoing view of how different patient segments think, choose, and engage—and what it would take to win them back.
The program combined qualitative depth with quantitative scale to move beyond averages and uncover what drives patient behavior:
- Custom segmentation based on demographics, behaviors, and price sensitivity
- Survey research to quantify what patients value and where expectations were not being met
- In-depth interviews to understand the “why” behind patient decisions
Everything was built around application. Insights were directly tied to the decisions leadership needed to make – where to invest, what to fix, and what to stop doing.
The work aligned with the annual planning cycle, giving leadership a fact-based foundation for near-term decisions and a roadmap for longer-term growth.
Results
The work reframed how the health system understood and engaged patients, shifting decisions from assumption to evidence.
In the near term, leadership gained clarity on what drove satisfaction and loyalty—and where investments would have the greatest impact:
- Patient segments translated into actionable journey design frameworks
- Capital allocation aligned to patient preferences and willingness to pay
- Service and experience improvements targeted to highest-value segments
The insights extended into broader strategy. Segmentation became a core input into planning, enabling more disciplined prioritization of growth initiatives.
Over time, these changes contributed to measurable performance gains. The organization improved its ability to attract, retain, and engage patients, while strengthening alignment between patient expectations and service delivery.
Within the first year of using the new segmentation model, insight-led planning helped drive 21% revenue growth.
