Using marketing automation techniques to improve information delivery and lifestyle change in patients with diabetes

If people with type 2 diabetes make significant lifestyle changes that enable them to optimise diabetes control, they can reduce their risk of death and complications by up to 50–75% over 5–7 years. However, in reality, only about 20% of diabetes patients achieve this.

As part of the diabetes transformation strategy for North West London, Hammersmith and Fulham CCG is developing a diabetes information and structured education hub that aims to improve patient engagement and self-management.

Patients and carers currently receive fragmented, reactive diabetes-related information. This innovation will offer them one proactive solution that includes secure access to their clinical information, self-management and lifestyle-change videos, interactive e-learning courses and local user-group information and events.

Technical support from Dynamic Health Systems will enable data-driven ‘marketing automation’ techniques to be used to deliver targeted information to different groups of patients, carers and clinical teams. Although this approach is used on commercial websites (for example, to automatically recommend products based on a visitor’s past viewing history or demographics), it has not previously been applied to the health care sector. 

Using this approach is expected to improve people’s level of active involvement in their self-care, lifestyle behaviours and biomedical markers of diabetes risk and control. Data analytics will measure the relationship between these improvements and how people interact with the information hub.

This scalable, digital-engagement approach has the potential to improve the delivery of diabetes information without increasing the workload of primary care staff, while also reducing the use of diabetes health care services.

Contact information

For more information about this project, please contact Dr Tony Willis, Clinical Lead for Diabetes, North West London Collaboration of CCGs.