Healthcare Market Segmentation: How to Strategically Expand Your Network

While everyone needs healthcare, certain demographics rely more heavily on your services. And some locations are more accessible to these populations than others. The success or failure of your branches can depend as much on your facility’s location as it does on your team’s quality of care.

Healthcare market segmentation is the process of grouping members or patients according to their shared characteristics. This can be for marketing and educational purposes (to help you craft more relevant messaging) or for market planning and site selection (to help you find more populations like those you currently serve).

Generally, healthcare market segmentation utilizes demographic information such as age, sex, marital status, education, household income, and ethnicity. It might also include interests, activities, and experiences. Depending on the depth of your own data and internal capabilities, you may even be able to create segments based on frequency of visits, cost of care, or illness history.

This categorization is intended to help you understand your patients or members in aggregate. In many cases, healthcare service providers already collect this information, and leveraging it for growth and optimization simply takes organizing that data and combining it with the right site selection service. However, if you don’t have this information, it’s not accessible, or you need to supplement what you have with additional information about the population you serve, you can still use segmentation for market planning and site selection purposes. You’ll just need a tool like Tango’s site selection software, Tango Predictive Analytics.

Whether you’re a payee or provider, healthcare organizations like yours turn to Tango to find and prioritize their next locations. In this article, we’ll cover how Tango helps you learn more about the people you serve, and how healthcare market segmentation helps you grow strategically.

How to learn more about the people you already serve

In healthcare, patient privacy and regulatory compliance are critical, so you often can’t use the data you collect—and that’s certainly part of why market segmentation has taken longer to find applications in the healthcare industry. However, Tango Predictive Analytics makes it easy to collect aggregate, anonymous data about the people who visit your clinics, offices, or lab testing facilities, giving you broad demographic information you can use to segment patients and find more people like them in other areas.

Tango lets you establish geofences around each of your current locations. This virtual perimeter collects anonymous demographic information from mobile devices that enter your facilities.

Once active, you can also use geofences to see information about people who have visited your locations in the past. Then you can segment these visitors into standard demographic categories, sorted by individual locations or all your locations collectively. You can even filter them by their average annual visits to your locations, or you can pair this information with Tango’s financial data to see how much these demographics typically spend on services like yours.

Note: You can set up geofences around competitors or potential acquisition targets to see how closely their patient demographics align with yours.

Some providers may want this information to craft better messaging and improve marketing to their existing patients or members. But with Tango Predictive Analytics, insights like these help fuel your market planning and site selection, empowering you to confidently prioritize your next branches.

Why healthcare market segmentation is critical to site selection

Healthcare is a service people need. Wherever you expand, there will always be some demand for what you provide. But to stay solvent, and for your organization to serve the most people possible, you have to place your clinics, offices, pharmacies, or lab testing facilities in the locations where the demand is greatest and where people have the greatest access to your service.

That all starts with understanding two things:

Who actually uses your services
Where you can find more people like them

If high-income senior citizens represent your most valuable (or your only) clientele, you don’t want to set up shop next to a bunch of student housing for a local college. You want to find a high concentration of the people you serve, and then get as close as possible to the places they spend their time—in a facility they can easily access.

Using your internal demographic data or information you’ve gathered through tools like Tango, you can identify markets with high concentrations of similar demographics, then zero in on the specific locations where your branch would be most visible and accessible to them.

In addition to collecting aggregate information about people in specific areas, mobile location data can be incredibly useful for exploring how populations move throughout a given market. With Tango Predictive Analytics, you can isolate the demographics your service is most relevant to, and then see where those people go throughout the day and over the course of the week.

Analyzing isolated traffic flows within a market is key to ensuring you select the best locations for your branches. Whether you’re considering acquisitions or planning new sites, it all begins with segmenting your patients or members based on shared traits. Then you’re ready for site selection.

Start your healthcare market segmentation with Tango

Tango Predictive Analytics is the most advanced market planning and site selection software on the market. Our suite of trusted data partners give you unparalleled real-time insights into the populations you serve, and the locations you’re considering. Coupling artificial intelligence with machine learning, Tango builds accurate predictive models that help you confidently evaluate real estate opportunities. And our team of experts works alongside yours to ensure you get everything you can out of the software.

We’ve helped eye and ear specialists, veterinary care clinics, primary care physicians, and more find the best markets and locations to grow their businesses.

Want to see how Tango can help you with healthcare market segmentation and site selection?

Request a demo of Tango Predictive Analytics today.