What is digital analytics for healthcare?

Healthcare is a unique industry. Regulations are strict, the stakes are high, and healthcare providers are notoriously overworked. At the same time, spending in the health and wellness space in particular is at an all-time high, with consumers spending $1.8 trillion in 2024, according to McKinsey. Consumers have more options than ever, and competition is fierce. 

Within that maelstrom, healthcare companies are turning to data and analytics to deliver a better experience for their customers and their providers. Digital analytics is the key to harnessing that data for streamlined operations and better decision-making. 

Let’s take a look at how digital analytics works for healthcare, the benefits and challenges of using it, and how to implement it. 

Digital analytics for healthcare is the combination of tools and processes that give healthcare companies the ability to use their data to create better experiences for both patients and service providers. When instrumented for healthcare products and companies, digital analytics needs to balance in-depth analysis with maintaining patient privacy and complying with healthcare information regulations.

After many decades of relying on outdated systems and processes, the healthcare industry has undergone rapid digital transformation in the last few years, partly fueled by the need to innovate during the COVID-19 pandemic. A company’s ability to respond to changes at speed is often dependent on how quickly they can get answers. 

Most healthcare organizations have some kind of data analytics tools in place, but they rarely have the right tools in place to be able to answer all of their product questions. 

Learn more about user behavior analytics for healthcare. 

Having powerful digital analytics in place is valuable for healthcare companies of all sizes, but the effect is particularly noticeable for larger organizations, which have larger amounts of structured and unstructured data to work with. 

Digital analytics for healthcare can help improve patient outcomes through predictive modeling. Predictive modeling looks at historical data to analyze the likelihood of different outcomes. For example, predictive modeling can help assess a patient’s risk for particular medical conditions or the effectiveness of different treatments. 

The right digital analytics can also enhance patient engagement with personalized interventions and tailored product experiences. For example, an app that helps patients book appointments online might send reminders for annual check-ups, nudging them to return to the app and schedule that appointment.

In addition to benefits for patients, digital analytics also offers a lot of important benefits to healthcare and health-tech businesses. The right analytics solutions can optimize resource allocation by identifying underutilized resources or unnecessary expenses. They can also improve the cost efficiency of operations by identifying workflow bottlenecks.

Perhaps most importantly, digital analytics can power data-driven decision-making in healthcare at every touchpoint without compromising patient privacy, especially when it connects different tools and eliminates data siloes

Medical technology company Bamboo Health helps healthcare networks communicate and collaborate in real time on patient care coordination.  

When Bamboo Health began building a data-first culture, one of their first goals was increasing retention. Using Mixpanel’s Retention report, they realized that new users who were very active during their first week using the app were most likely to continue using it. When they dug deeper, they realized that users who interacted with the Patient Story feature had very high retention numbers. 

They used this insight to modify the onboarding process and shorten the period between login and first Patient Story view. 

That small tweak increased user retention by 10% in the first seven days.

“Actually knowing that the needle on our efforts to improve healthcare efficiency has moved feels really good,” says Julia Sanders, Director of Operations–User Success at Bamboo Health. 

Read the full case study to learn more. 

One of the most serious and challenging constraints for any healthcare company that deals with patient data—that is to say, pretty much all of them—is maintaining patient privacy. That includes keeping personal health information (PHI) safe and remaining compliant with all health data privacy regulations, such as HIPAA. 

Regulatory agencies are cracking down on healthcare companies for data breaches and risks,  as Mixpanel’s lead privacy attorney, Ted Kinch, explains: 

“Regulatory sands are shifting under the feet of the Healthcare industry in the United States. The FTC and HHS recently issued a joint letter to 130 major hospitals, warning them about the ‘serious privacy and security risks’ relating to the use of third-party user data and ad tech like Google Analytics and Facebook/Meta pixels. The letter comes on the heels of the FTC’s prior guidance and major enforcement actions against GoodRx and BetterHelp.” 

Read more about Mixpanel’s HIPAA-compliant analytics for healthtech. 

In addition to regulatory challenges, the healthcare industry has historically been somewhat slow to adapt to new technologies and digital processes—though necessity from COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation, data siloes and interoperability challenges from legacy systems often remain, making digital analytics harder to implement for healthcare and creating roadblocks when it comes to gathering insights from data. 

European parenting app May publishes a lot of different content for new and expectant parents on topics ranging from pregnancy all the way to the first day of school. 

May’s content team uses analytics to see which categories and ages are working best, and they use that data to adapt their content product strategy quickly. They get insights into content performance instantly and track that performance for the first 14 days after launch. 

As May co-founder Antoine Creuze says, “If the content appears to be resonating, we will put more focus on producing content on that topic.”

By using analytics to evaluate the success of their content, the May team discovered that a specific content format was popular and linked to higher retention rates. They used that insight to produce more of that type of content and doubled their user retention rate. 

“We speak with our users often for feedback, but without Mixpanel, we wouldn’t have discovered this finding which was glaringly obvious when we looked at the report. As a result, we were able to double our retention rate. We’ve also seen two-digit growth per month in users.”

Read the full case study. 

HIPAA-compliant product analytics is the key to accelerating growth and creating a better, more secure patient experience. But it can be tricky and overwhelming to know how to get started. 

Here are a few steps to follow to implement digital analytics at your healthcare organization. 

The first step to setting up digital analytics is understanding what are the metrics that matter to your organization. 

Healthtech companies selling wearable technology might focus on the frequency of site visits or motivation and engagement across wearable devices, for example. Companies focused on mental health or plugging gaps in the healthcare system might be more focused on healthcare product analytics like acquisition and activation. 

Other healthcare businesses will be more focused on metrics like patient satisfaction or time-to-treatment. 

There are always plenty of metrics to track, but they don’t all carry the same weight: think strategically about the metrics you need to measure and use that information to build a tracking schema. 

The best way to get the most out of your digital analytics solution is to make sure all of your data is accurate and connected.

Does your analytics solution need to connect to your patient portal or electronic health record (EHR) system, for example? Look for solutions that are HIPAA-compliant and can enter into a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), plus have the capacity to integrate well with your existing tools, without compromising patient privacy. 

Once you have the key metrics you want to track and a fully integrated tech stack, you can start to build reports and dashboards to track key metrics all in one place. 

Winona is a healthcare brand designed to connect women to physicians, FDA-approved prescription treatments, and educational resources to help them understand their personal menopause experience. 

At first, the company worried about balancing HIPAA compliance with powerful digital analytics, as co-founder Austin Kueffner explains:  

“Like many brands, we set out to deliver exceptional experiences to our customers and be data-driven from day one. However, like most companies, especially those in regulated spaces, we struggled to know where to start. Management was fearful of regulation. Everyone was busy. When we talked about optimization, our conversations jumped to the most sophisticated ideas, which quickly went nowhere.”

Fast forward to today, and Winona serves over 6,000 women in 31 states, delivering personal health experiences that better serve healthcare needs. 

The key was focusing on their customers and embracing analytics—while remaining HIPAA-compliant:

“Through trial and error, we’ve learned that by being customer-centric we can easily measure and optimize patient experience. Our investments in analytics and optimization solutions are being put to good use."

Austin has a few pieces of advice for healthcare brands hoping to improve customer experience with data, including: 

Check out Austin’s guest blog post or read the Winona case study to learn more. 

There are several key considerations to keep in mind when choosing digital analytics software for healthcare. 

Healthcare companies need to work with software that has the features they need and can meet compliance requirements. 

Here are a few questions to consider during the evaluation process: 

Visit the Mixpanel product page to explore how Mixpanel can solve challenges in digital analytics for healthcare.