How Identifying One Barrier Drove 17.8% Growth in Primary Care
It started with a single question: “What is actually stopping these patients from listening?”
The assumption behind most patient acquisition campaigns is that the audience is ready to receive the message. That if you reach enough people, often enough, through the right channels, conversion will follow. What that assumption misses is the patient who has already decided the message does not apply to them.
That is not a media problem, it’s a belief problem that turns into a behavioral problem.
What Was Actually Wrong
A large academic health system was experiencing stalled engagement with a segment of commercially insured patients. Causeway’s research revealed the source of the friction: a meaningful portion of the target population incorrectly believed the health system was out of network and had stopped engaging with its marketing entirely.
The insight was straightforward but consequential. No service line message, however compelling, would move this audience until the underlying misconception was resolved. Broad reach campaigns were not failing because of poor creative or wrong channels, they were failing because a segment of the audience had already disqualified itself.
As a strategic partner, Causeway helped define the problem, build the audience, and oversee execution from the ground up.
How We Reframed It
Rather than recommending increased media spend, Causeway reframed the campaign brief around a single question: what is actually stopping these patients from listening?
Using custom behavioral modeling, Causeway identified 185,000 commercially insured individuals most likely to be affected by insurance confusion. From that universe, 100,000 were selected as the test group for a precision-targeted education campaign.
The message was singular: we accept most insurance plans.
No appointment CTA. No service line promotion. Just clarity.
Phase Two introduced standard service line marketing with appointment scheduling CTAs to both the test and control groups. The purpose was to measure whether removing the access barrier in Phase One changed real world patient behavior downstream.
The campaign ran across Meta, CTV, display, and direct mail, channels selected based on the behavioral profile of the target audience, not standard media planning assumptions.
What Changed
The test group saw a 7.5% overall increase in completed visits compared to the control group over six months. Primary Care showed the sharpest response at 17.8% growth.
Critically, digital click through rates did not differ between groups. This confirmed the education phase changed behavior, not just awareness. Patients did not just click differently, they showed up differently.
Based on industry standard outpatient visit revenue averages, the campaign is estimated to have produced approximately $800,000 to $900,000 in incremental patient revenue over six months. That estimate accounts only for immediate visit revenue and does not include downstream value from follow-up services, diagnostics, or specialist referrals.
Why This Works Everywhere
The barrier in this campaign was insurance confusion. But the model is not specific to that barrier.
Any friction point that prevents patients from believing a message applies to them creates the same dynamic. Cost concerns, brand fatigue, prior negative experiences, lack of differentiation. The cause changes, but the strategic response does not.
Reframe the problem first. Identify what is holding patients back before deciding what to say.
Model the audience around the barrier. Behavioral modeling isolates the patients most affected. Demographics and service line segmentation will not.
Educate before you ask. Remove the obstacle before introducing the conversion message.
Measure downstream behavior. The metric that matters is whether patients showed up, not whether they clicked.
The Better Question
This campaign succeeded because the problem was correctly identified before a single dollar was spent on anything else.
For health systems facing stalled volume growth, the question worth asking is not how to reach more people. It is what is stopping the right people from responding to what you are already saying.
Most health systems never ask it. The ones that do build very different campaigns and see very different results.
To see the full methodology and detailed results, download the complete case study below.
We help health systems identify and remove real barriers that keep high-value patients from engaging. Contact us at info@causewaysolutions.com for more information.