Lead scoring criteria for the healthcare industry (and why the usual model breaks)

Two different jobs share this keyword

People searching for healthcare lead scoring either sell to healthcare organisations and need to prioritise accounts, or run a clinic and want to prioritise patient enquiries.

The criteria overlap a little, but the rules don't. Most of this post is about the first job. The patient side has its own section further down, because what you're allowed to score changes completely once health information is involved.

Fit criteria when you sell into healthcare

Fit is the part of the score that doesn't change week to week. It answers "if they bought, would they be a good customer?"

Take a company selling a wound care device into hospitals. A useful fit score for them looks at the type of organisation (acute trusts with inpatient wards, not GP surgeries), the size of the relevant department, and whether the organisation already buys in this category through an existing contract or framework. That last one matters more than people expect. If the trust is locked into a competitor's contract for another two years, it's a great future account and a terrible lead for this quarter.

The contact's role is the other big fit signal, and it's where generic models go wrong. A tissue viability nurse downloading your clinical evidence is gold, but they probably can't buy. A procurement manager can, but won't move without a clinical champion. Score both roles as valuable, and score them differently, rather than giving a job title bonus only to people with "Director" in theirs.

Score the account, not the person

This is the change that makes the biggest difference. In healthcare, one engaged person is interesting. Three engaged people from the same organisation is a deal forming.

Say the tissue viability nurse at a trust reads your evidence summary on Monday. On Wednesday, someone from the same trust's procurement team visits your pricing page. On Friday, a ward manager there registers for your webinar. Scored as individuals, none of them crosses your threshold. Scored as one account, that's the clearest buying signal you'll see all month.

If your CRM can't roll activity up to the account, a weekly manual check of which organisations have two or more engaged contacts still beats scoring individuals.

The engagement signals worth scoring

Not all engagement means the same thing. Opening a newsletter is close to worthless as a signal. Visiting a pricing page or requesting a sample points towards a decision.

Clinical and cost evidence is the healthcare-specific one. Buyers in this space have to justify purchases, so the people who read your outcomes data and cost-per-patient maths are usually building an internal case. Weight that engagement heavily, and weight it more if the reading goes deep rather than stopping at page one.

That's also why I'd rather know how someone read a document than whether they opened it. With LiveDocument you send the evidence pack as a single link, add a short video walkthrough from the rep, and see page-level analytics: which pages they spent time on and whether they came back. A procurement lead who returns to the pricing and cost-comparison pages twice is a very different lead from one who glanced at the cover. It won't score leads for you and it isn't a CRM, but it gives your scoring model a signal that's hard to get any other way.

Timing is its own criterion

Healthcare buying runs on calendars. Contract end dates and tender cycles decide when a deal can actually happen, however keen the clinician is.

So give timing its own slot in the score. A contract renewal in the next six to nine months should push an account up, and so should a published tender. In the UK, the Department of Health and Social Care's value-based procurement guidance for medical technology is also changing what NHS buyers ask suppliers for, and it's worth reading if you sell into the NHS, because it tells you what evidence a serious buyer will want to see.

Score the negatives too

A model that only adds points drifts upwards until everyone looks hot. Take points off for signals that mean "not now": students and researchers downloading your evidence for a paper, competitors, organisations outside your geography, and contacts who've gone quiet for 90 days. Decay old activity so a burst of interest last spring doesn't keep an account at the top of the list forever.

If you're scoring patient enquiries

If you're a clinic or provider scoring patient leads, be much more careful. Anything about someone's health counts as special category data under UK GDPR, which means you need both an Article 6 lawful basis and a separate Article 9 condition to process it, plus a DPA 2018 Schedule 1 condition where required. The ICO's guidance on special category data is the place to start. In the US, HIPAA applies to covered entities and business associates when the tracking data includes protected health information. A federal court in Texas vacated only the narrow part of HHS's guidance treating an IP address linked to a visit to an unauthenticated public health webpage as triggering HIPAA obligations, but HIPAA itself is untouched, and HHS still publishes its position on tracking technologies.

My view is that the safest scoring for patient enquiries sticks to operational signals: did they ask to book, which location are they nearest, did they respond to a callback. Scoring someone higher because of the condition they mentioned is the kind of thing that feels clever in a marketing meeting and awful in front of a regulator. None of this is legal advice, and if you're in doubt, ask your data protection officer before you build anything.

A starting scorecard

If you sell into hospitals, this is roughly where I'd start. Treat the points as something to tune against your own closed deals, not a benchmark.

Run it against your last dozen won and lost deals before you trust it. If the won deals don't come out on top, change the weights until they do.

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