Consumer Intelligence for Healthcare Growth: From Market Signals to Smarter Decisions

People choose healthcare long before they enter an exam room. They form opinions while searching for care, scheduling an appointment, comparing locations, navigating digital tools, and deciding whether an organization feels easy to trust. 

That makes consumer intelligence a core input for healthcare growth planning. Historical utilization and market share still matter, but they reveal what happened.  

Consumer intelligence helps leaders understand what people value, where demand is forming, and what stands between awareness and choice. 

During a recent NRC Health webcast, Leveraging Consumer Intelligence to Drive Growth, Don Stanziano, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Banner Health, joined Brian Wynne, Senior Vice President of Growth at NRC Health, to discuss how health systems can turn consumer feedback and market perceptions into clearer growth decisions.  

“Health system leaders understand that growth aspirations are often outpacing population growth in their markets,” said Wynne. “We rely on historical signals, but we owe it to ourselves to have the conversation about what else we could be looking at that might help guide our growth decisions.” 

Key Takeaways: 

• Consumer intelligence helps health systems identify growth opportunities earlier by tracking awareness, preference, trust, and access perceptions alongside traditional utilization data. 
• The most valuable growth signals pass two tests: they can be measured consistently over time, and they lead to actions leaders can actually take. 
• Consumer expectations continue to rise. People increasingly choose providers based on convenience, digital access, ease of navigation, and a frictionless care experience. 
• Market expansion decisions become less risky when validated with consumer intelligence. Preference and awareness data can help organizations determine where, when, and how to expand services.  
• Trust has become a key growth lever. As healthcare brands become harder for consumers to distinguish, access, convenience, and trust increasingly shape choice and loyalty. 

Consumer intelligence brings together awareness, preference, access, experience, trust, and competitive perception to explain how people make healthcare choices. It gives leaders a forward-looking view to complement retrospective operational and utilization data. 

Healthcare already has plenty of data. The harder task is finding the information that deserves action. 

“Often in healthcare we say we are data rich and insights poor,” said Stanziano. “I see noise as having just a lot of disparate data and, you know, maybe chasing squirrels.”  

The comment captures a familiar problem: more dashboards do not automatically create better decisions. Consumer intelligence becomes useful when teams connect specific signals to a choice they can make, such as where to place a service, which access barrier to address, or how to position an expansion. 

Understanding emerging needs and underserved populations is one example of how health systems can identify meaningful signals before they appear in utilization data.  

Organizations that invest in building stronger healthcare consumer relationships are often better positioned to recognize changing expectations and new sources of demand. 

How Can Health Systems Separate Consumer Signals From Noise? 

Health systems can separate signal from noise by asking two questions: Has the pattern persisted over time, and does it change a decision? 

The first is the “measured over time” test. An isolated change can be interesting without being meaningful. Leaders need to determine whether it reflects a sustained shift or a short-lived anomaly. 

The second is the “So what?” test. If a data point does not inform an action, it probably should not dominate the growth agenda. 

“The ‘So what?’ really resonates with me because I think you have to take a step back when you get a new piece of data, maybe something that’s surprising, but does it matter?” said Stanziano. 

Quiet signals rarely create the urgency of a sudden spike. A consistent change in preference, access perception, or trust can be more valuable than the loudest metric on this month’s report. 

“Noise is chaotic and demands a reaction, and signals are quiet and earn a measured response,” said Wynne.

Awareness and preference are the most useful starting points because they show whether people know an organization and include it in their consideration set. Organizations that want a more complete picture should focus on the metrics that matter most to brand experience, trust, and loyalty, not just utilization and market-share reports.

Leaders should then examine the attributes behind those measures, including access, convenience, perceived quality, physician quality, technology advancement, and trust.

“I’m always looking at the first thing I’m looking at is preference data,” said Stanziano. “How strongly are consumers thinking of us as their top-of-mind choice for whatever it is that I’m interested in? Is it top-line brand? Is it a particular service line? Is it a particular geography?”

Preference alone does not tell teams what to fix. Its drivers do.

If consumers know a health system but do not prefer it, leaders can investigate whether the barrier is appointment availability, location, digital scheduling, convenience, trust, or another part of the experience.

Understanding the relationship between healthcare consumerism, trust, and brand differentiation can help leaders identify which perceptions are most influencing consumer choice.

This turns market research into an operating agenda. Marketing cannot repair an inaccessible appointment pathway by itself.

Operations cannot build preference without understanding what people value. Growth depends on both teams seeing the same journey and aligning brand and patient experience across every touchpoint.

Consumer intelligence strengthens expansion planning by testing whether people want a proposed service, where they want it, and how they want it configured before the organization commits resources.

Stanziano described an oncology expansion in which healthcare consumer research supplemented retrospective patient-origin data. The organization tested people’s likelihood to choose its services if they were placed in a new location and packaged differently. The findings supported the planned direction and increased confidence in the investment.

“It made the investment that much more. I’m going to put more confidence in the investment and in strategy, to be able to say consumers are saying they want this service and they want these services together,” said Stanziano.

This approach does not replace financial, clinical, capacity, or utilization analysis. It answers a different question: If the organization changes the offer, location, or experience, how are people likely to respond?

How Should Health Systems Measure Market Readiness? 

Health systems should measure market readiness through awareness, preference, competitive context, and the specific perceptions required for a service to succeed.

A market with low awareness needs a different entry plan from one where the organization is well known but not preferred. Competitive preference data can also reveal whether there is an open lane or whether the health system will need to build differentiation earlier.

Leaders should define the signals they expect to move before launch. If awareness, preference, trust, or access perceptions remain flat, teams have an early opportunity to adjust the service, experience, or go-to-market plan.

The goal is not to prove an existing idea right. It is to make the right decision while there is still room to change it.

Access and trust differentiate healthcare brands because people can evaluate them directly. Consumers cannot always judge clinical quality before receiving care, but they know whether scheduling was difficult, instructions were clear, and the experience matched the organization’s promise. 

Stanziano described ease of use as the trend every health system should watch. 

“We’ve got to make it easier to navigate our health systems,” said Stanziano. 

Brand credibility grows when the advertised experience matches what people actually encounter. 

NRC Health’s research on the Trust Cliff shows that when experiences fail to meet brand expectations, trust can decline significantly, even among organizations with strong reputations.

Experiences that fail to meet expectations averaged 66.2% trust, compared with 74.3% when strong expectations were validated by experience.

“The best brands are the ones that say that they are and then they prove that they are,” said Wynne. “When that becomes true, then you earn trust in the community.”

For healthcare organizations, that means aligning brand and patient experience to build trust so that every interaction reinforces the expectations consumers have of the organization.

Every touchpoint contributes evidence. Scheduling, digital navigation, check-in, care transitions, follow-up, and billing collectively prove whether a brand promise is real. Nobody chose healthcare marketing as a career just to generate demand that a difficult journey cannot convert.

Healthcare growth leaders should include consumer awareness, preference, trust, and access perceptions at the beginning of planning, not as validation after major decisions are already made.

“Those that listen to their consumers and make decisions based on consumer feedback and consumer data,” said Stanziano, will be the organizations positioned to reach their growth aspirations.

Start with one decision. Define the consumer signals that should inform it, connect those signals to operational data, and agree on what would trigger investment, adjustment, or pause.

Explore the full Leveraging Consumer Intelligence to Drive Growth webcast to hear the complete conversation and identify the signals your organization should bring into its next growth discussion.

For organizations looking to connect growth strategy with consumer insight, explore NRC Health’s Market Insights solutions.