How UCLA Health tackled complex data to send highly personalized emails using Eloqua

Apr 23, 2023

3 min read

UCLA Health prides itself on providing the best patient experience every time - a commitment that the Digital Marketing team takes seriously. The team knew that leveraging their vast patient database to produce highly personalized communications was a no-brainer. But first? They needed an easy way to manage contacts with complex many-to-one relationships to ensure the right message was addressed to the right individual. They reached out to Sojourn Solutions for help solving the issue.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at how UCLA Health utilized Eloqua and the 4Thought Many-to-One Email Cloud App to improve their transactional patient marketing.

The Challenge

UCLA Health wanted to send highly personalized messages to its patients. On the surface, they had everything they needed to do this. Each day, their Office of Health Informatics and Analytics (OHIA) team would send a daily feed of patient data to Eloqua (suppressing certain records with restricted flags as needed). Each patient has a unique encrypted patient identification code in OHIA and a valid, though not necessarily unique, email address. Eloqua – by design – uses email address as the unique identifier.

UCLA Health faced a specific and difficult challenge: find a way to manage duplicate email addresses to accommodate multiple family members who share a single email address while still sending the right message to the right person.

Patients occasionally share email addresses. For instance, a parent might use their own email address for information not just about his or herself but also for his or her child.

For example, Jane Doe and her son John are both active patients. Jane and her son each have their unique patient identification code, but they both use Jane’s email address. UCLA Health wanted to remind both of them to get their COVID-19 booster, which ideally would generate two separate emails: one addressed to Jane/herself, and one for John. UCLA Health simply couldn’t personalize the message with the old system.

So when OHIA sent data to Eloqua, Eloqua was simply updating the single contact record with the most recent patient data available for that email address. As a result, individual patient data was mixed together, which made it impossible to identify who was who in Eloqua and prevented UCLA Health from personalizing any message specific to a unique individual.

Bottom line? This problem prevented them from sending an email to all applicable patients at that email address regarding a clinical update (e.g., COVID vaccine eligibility) using even simple personalization such as patient First Name.

The Solution

First, Sojourn addressed the data, recommending integrating UCLA Health’s Eloqua instance with the 4Thought Many-to-One Email Cloud App.

This allowed for management of the complex, many-to-one relationships and enabled seamless updates to the unique patient’s contact by leveraging Eloqua’s Custom Object data. That capability hadn’t previously existed for UCLA Health.

Once the data was addressed, the next steps were as follows -

Once the app was installed, it was then time to set up all the necessary assets and components such as new contact and custom object fields. This allowed the app to work appropriately with the necessary data.
Next, the related template campaign canvas flows were updated to ensure that the new campaigns would act properly.
Once the necessary configuration and campaign pieces in place, Sojourn worked with OHIA to update the daily data feed into Eloqua to migrate the storage of patient data from Eloqua’s Contact table to the new Custom Object.
After testing and troubleshooting, Sojourn fully documented the new data integration process.
With the new integration in place, it was also time to document the changes in the patient communications process. This included new steps for appropriate segmentation, campaign canvas and app configuration.
The final step was to document how the team could finally use personalization in their patient messaging.

The Results

The results to date have been impressive.

The Digital Marketing team saved hours of time in monotonous, manual work. But more importantly, the personalized messaging significantly improved response rates, which helped reinforce their goal of a superior patient experience every time.

UCLA Health is now able to deploy their transactional patient communications in a much simpler and efficient manner, while ensuring each patient receives the appropriate email(s) (even if the same email address is included more than once in the list). The straightforward configuration allows their email specialist to build and execute the campaigns herself. Emails deploy to more than 50k patients within minutes and the UCLA/OHIA team is able to easily reference standard campaign-level reporting. Since patient communication is now more personalized, overall patient engagement has been enhanced.

To learn more about how Sojourn can help you improve personalized email messaging for your organization, contact us today.