A Growing Gateway To New Healthcare IT Clients: Case Studies

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Winning new healthcare clients as an IT solutions provider means building trust, assuring clients that their problems are understood, and communicating the fact that you offer products and services that can directly address those problems.

Relating all of that can be challenging, but that challenge becomes a bit easier when you address it in the form of a case study.

Why Case Studies Beat Other Materials

The white paper is used heavily in healthcare B2B marketing, and for many organizations, that can be a mistake.

According to a study from the CMO Council, 67 percent of B2B buyers indicated that they didn’t trust vendor content. So while white papers were highly trusted when they came from professional organizations (67 percent) and industry groups (50 percent) the same couldn’t be said for vendor-generated work.

One major exception to that trend was customer case studies, which were cited as trustworthy by 48 percent of respondents. This is likely because a case study involves a story not told exclusively by the vendor, but from the customer perspective, which is what buyers are looking to examine in the vendor consideration process.

The Traits Of A Good Case Study

The way you approach a case study should be deliberate and done with the goal of generating new leads or moving clients further along your sales funnel. A strong case study will:

• Focus on selling only one product or service: Do not try to sell readers on your generic brand or multiple services. Decide which product or service you’d like to highlight (a recent launch for example) and make it the star of the case study.
• Be constructed in a format that is enjoyable to read: Most case studies in healthcare are dry and formulaic. Take advantage of the fascinating and deeply human stories that healthcare has to offer and feature them prominently.
• Be concise: Don’t distract from the story with details. Case studies are generally much shorter than white papers and that’s for good reason. They aim to tell a story, not re-list product features and technical specifications. If that information is important, you can easily link to it or include additional information in a separate document.
• Highlight a customer that is a strong advocate for your organization: Effective case studies require a relatively in-depth interview process, so you’ll need a customer that’s had a positive experience with your organization and that ideally is willing to share the study themselves. Don’t just aim for the customer who brought in the most revenue. Find one that’s happy they chose you as a vendor.
• Be structured around a client’s problem: A case study is meant to sell what you offer, but you don’t want it to read like a reformatted version of a page on your website. Clearly state and describe the issue the client was having, and highlight your brand only in describing how you as a vendor addressed that issue.

Going Deeper

To review an example of a case study examining EHR deployment in a hospital setting, please read “CHIME Case Study Details Steps Of Hospital EHR Deployment.”