Question
Why are Utilization Rate and Attributed Patients calculated using different methodologies?
Can you explain why only Passive utilization is used to calculate the Utilization Rate percentage, but both Passive utilizers and Active utilizers are used to calculate the Attributed Patients?
Answer
Active utilizers raised their hands and engaged with the marketing's call-to-action (e.g., completed a HealthAdvisor assessment), they are expressing more interest and taking additional steps than Passive utilizers. So, we treat them like hand raisers who engaged with a pull channel and take credit for 100% of their activity and downstream encounters.
Passive utilizers, on the other hand, go through another methodology step to more accurately calculate the effect of the communication efforts. Since they did not identify themselves as having engaged with the campaign and only passively received a communication (like direct mail or email), their utilization is compared to the utilization of a control group that did not receive those communications. By using a control group, we can compare the results of the campaign to the results of a sample that were not targeted by the campaign. This gives us much better insight into how much difference the campaign made instead of taking credit for encounters that would likely have happened anyway. Only the difference in percentage of the passive utilizers' downstream activity will count toward the ROI. Active utilizers aren't included in this incremental calculation because their downstream visits are already being attributed to the ROI at 100%. Learn more about our methodologies.
