*Note: Any business subject to HIPAA compliance requiring a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) should contact the Iterable team to learn more about Iterable HIPAA requirements and exclusions.

It’s no secret – the healthcare system is complex. As patients, navigating a web of providers and specialities is not only frustrating, but also creates a disconnected view of our medical history.

For PicnicHealth co-founder and CEO, Noga Leviner, being diagnosed with a chronic illness and lacking a single, comprehensive view of her medical history was just the “aha!” moment she needed. Started in 2014, PicnicHealth is a platform that combines patient medical records into a single, easy-to-understand timeline and allows users to share that history for anonymised medical research.

Early on, PicnicHealth’s homegrown marketing solution was enough to support their nascent email and automation needs. But as their platform and research programmes grew, they recognised that the engineering effort spent maintaining their marketing tools could be better spent on the PicnicHealth platform.

With the security and privacy of sensitive patient data top-of-mind, the PicnicHealth engineering team (the marketing team didn’t even exist yet!) set out to find a solution that would minimise their time spent coding email logic while also allowing them to deliver a more seamless user experience.

Recognising the Opportunity of Personalisation

Helping tens of thousands of patients better navigate their unique medical history requires personalised touchpoints that put the patient first. From new user onboarding to updating user profiles as additional medical history became available, the PicnicHealth team was spending tens of hours a week manually segmenting their users and building emails in their homegrown marketing tool.

As part of onboarding, one of the most critical milestones in the user journey is signing the consent form that enables PicnicHealth to collect a patient’s medical records. While many users opt for a one-time collection of their records, the customer experience and PicnicHealth’s research programmes benefit greatly when users subscribe to recurring record updates. For the user, their PicnicHealth record stays up-to-date with a comprehensive view of their history, while PicnicHealth’s research programmes gain valuable real-world data with patient-reported outcomes – insight not included in traditional clinical research.

With their homegrown marketing tool, nurturing users to sign up for ongoing medical record collection required the PicnicHealth team to manually segment users who had not opted in to recurring updates and send an additional consent form. This manual process was inconsistent and wasn’t producing the results they hoped to see.

Recognising the extent of their limitations in segmentation, automation and analytics capabilities, as well as the burden of their homegrown solution on their engineering teams, PicnicHealth upgraded their tech stack to include Iterable.

Tailoring the Customer Experience with Iterable

With Iterable, PicnicHealth nurtures each user differently based on their medical condition, the types of doctors they’ve added and the opportunities to improve the quality of their medical history. For example, some research programmes offer compensation, while others request additional surveys to be completed to gather patient-reported outcomes.

“We evaluated other marketing tools, but they didn’t have the advanced segmentation logic we needed for our diverse customer base,” said Justin Maslin, Software Engineer at PicnicHealth.

Since making the switch to Iterable, the process of identifying and nurturing users to complete the ongoing medical history consent form is now fully automated, with a nearly 90% conversion rate.

Prior to Iterable, 25–50% of an engineer’s bandwidth was dedicated to building and managing email logic in their homegrown solution. Today, PicnicHealth’s marketing team is largely self-sufficient and able to easily support the continued expansion of PicnicHealth’s research programmes.