CPM contributes marketing program to Michigan hospital

Middleton, Wis. - Customer Potential Management, a developer of databases and healthcare marketing software, announced Thursday that its customer relationship management solution has been implemented at the Michigan hospital St. John Health.

St. John used the CRM solution to promote its collaboration with the University of Michigan's Comprehensive Cancer Center, a 15-year partnership with oncologists from both hospitals. While market research said the partnership had a lot of potential, outside knowledge of it was low.

Using CRM to evaluate its options and opportunities, St. John decided to open a year-long direct mail campaign encouraging cancer screenings for men and women around the Providence Hospital, a division of St. John. The database sent postcards to around 55,000 individuals, both non-patients in the market most likely to use the department and current patients in CPM's Patient Disease Index who needed the service.

After six months of using the new service, recipients had responded to the oncology mailings at a rate of 8.22 percent, compared to a rate of 7.05 percent of a control group which received no mailings. Across all service lines, the recipients responded at a rate of 41 percent compared to the 36.35 percent in the control group.

To personalize the messages, each of the 108,000 postcards sent out was converted with CPM's printing technology. Messages and photos were customized around the gender and ethnicity of the recipient, building off 20 variations in the server.