Epic is one of the leading electronic health record platforms, but did you know it can also help healthcare marketers gain deeper insights into their marketing efforts? In this episode, Jenny chats with Sam Seering, Product Manager of Cheers at Epic, about how healthcare organizations can use Epic’s CRM solution, Cheers, to better understand marketing impact and improve key performance indicators (KPIs).
What’s Discussed:
- An overview of marketing measurement possibilities within Cheers, including the tools available for healthcare marketers.
- Integration of scheduling features to track appointments from a variety of marketing channels such as search engine marketing.
- Utilization of Cheers for advanced analytics, allowing for a comprehensive view of patient engagement and the conversions from marketing efforts.
- Tracking patient outcomes throughout the marketing journey, enabling marketers to demonstrate the impact of their efforts.
- Different methods of attribution and how to merge Epic data with other marketing analytics.
- Compliance considerations, emphasizing the safety of using Epic’s data under existing Business Associate Agreements (BAAs).
- Future developments in the Cheers’ platform, including capacity-based marketing to specify appointment types and revenue tracking.
This conversation highlights the potential for healthcare systems to move beyond basic marketing metrics and understand the full ROI of their services through advanced technology.
Connect with Sam:
Connect with Jenny:
- Email: jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, and we are also the organization that produces this podcast. I am very excited to be here with you today to do an episode where we’re going to dig in and talk about how you can get into more in depth marketing measurements and KPIs and what that looks like.
So with me today, I have Sam Seering. He’s the product manager of their suite Cheers and I am very excited to dig in because Epic, as all of our listeners know is the gorilla of the electronic health record space, if you are a provider, a hospital system, many of you listening have Epic and use Epic.
And there’s lots of really cool ways that you can integrate your data into your marketing [00:01:00] tactics and get a better idea of how your marketing is actually impacting outcomes. So welcome, Sam. I’m excited to have you here today.
Sam: Thanks for having me, Jenny. Glad we were able finally to make it work and get me on the podcast.
Jenny: Yes, Sam and I have been emailing about this for, I think, two years.
Sam: Something about like that now.
Jenny: Yeah, so it’s great to have you. And I think there have been a lot of exciting developments on the Epic side in that time period. So I’m excited to bring the most up to date information to our listeners.
So I would love it to get started. If you could just give a little bit of an overview about what marketing measurement is possible what functionality and tools exist for our listeners that work at an organization that leverage Epic.
Sam: Absolutely, Jenny. So there’s a few different options, whether you’re using Epic, dedicated marketing automation capabilities through cheers, or maybe if you’re using other technologies, but you want to be able to [00:02:00] track data into Epic.
I think there’s pathways for marketers to take advantage of that. They might not be might not be aware of. So for as a baseline understanding for organizations that are just using Epic more holistically, not using the cheer suite of tools. Important thing that I would encourage you to start turning on is that if you are using online scheduling capabilities for your patient acquisition efforts, so showing your provider profiles and then linking to their available scheduling slots.
That component that goes on your website is able to ingest parameters coming from the website so that if you’re driving folks there from social media advertisings or display ads, you could actually understand for the folks that booked the appointment on that page, where did they actually come from?
And the nice piece is that information is then stamped on that new patient [00:03:00] record and that encounter. So that you can do back end analytics with that information to be able to tie that appointment schedule to your actual advertising work that you’re doing online. Now that’s something that I would encourage every organization to do because every organization has that as part of their toolbox.
When we start talking about, though, some of the more advanced capabilities that comes with Cheers campaigns, our marketing automation solution, this is where we can get that full end to end journey for that direct engagement. Of course, this is going to cover your more traditional marketing metrics.
Jenny, I think you did a great job of measuring this as part of your KPI 101 podcast that you did recently. And so you could include things like how many folks are you reaching out to? What communications are you sending them? Are they opening the emails or the MyChart messages? Are they clicking the links in the text message?
Your more traditional [00:04:00] marketing KPIs for your outreach campaigns. But because we then have an integrated longitudinal data set about the individuals that you’re engaging, we also can track what were outcomes that occurred before a conversion, a true conversion for the organization. And then what happened afterwards?
And I think an easy way to put this into context, Jenny, is with a real world example where an organization may be doing outreach as part of breast cancer screening initiatives, whether it’s part of a broader population health work, or maybe it’s a cancer awareness campaign that folks are doing.
What you would be able to do as a marketer is be able to understand not only how many folks did you send messages to that needed to get that breast cancer screening completed. But then also, how many folks scheduled a mammogram, how many folks completed it, and then finally, how many of those individuals had a clinical [00:05:00] diagnosis of a malignant neoplasm of breast because of that outreach.
And this is where marketers can start showing their true value to the organization and the clinical impact that their operations are having.
Jenny: Yeah. I mean, when I talk to, it’s one of the reasons I love being in healthcare marketing so much is whenever you go to conferences and talk to all of the marketing directors, managers, CMOs, whatever position they’re in for providers across the country, their number one passion is helping patients access care and helping their community and giving back, being able to access the number of people that actually were diagnosed or receive treatment as a result of your marketing campaign.
I mean, talk about making it real.
Sam: Oh yeah.
Jenny: Right. Right. I mean, that’s where it really becomes emotional. Yeah. So one of the things that I think is interesting whenever we were kind of doing some pre work about this, you’re breaking down all the different ways that marketing attribution can work within your platform is you talk about two different ways to create attribution, right?
So there’s different [00:06:00] ways that you can integrate the data to be able to get it. Analytics as an output. One you said was standard analytics. What was the data extraction suite? Can you talk a little bit about those different pathways so that way marketers could really understand based off of their Epic implementation of the package they have?
Kind of what, how they would access that?
Sam: Absolutely. So in some instances, there is going to be direct analytics that is out of the box ready to go. So when I was talking through each of those touch points of that mammography journey that we were that I was just chatting about, every one of those is a discrete metric that shows up on a dashboard that you can go and look at every single day and drill into the details.
We’ve had organizations that then pull out actual individuals that had that full journey. And then they reach out to them to say, Hey, would you be willing to be part of all their marketing initiatives that we have? So that they can help really promote that brand and that more broader [00:07:00] identity of the organization.
However, there’s definitely instances where you may want to merge the data that you’re seeing through the Epic capabilities with other data. I think a great example of this is if you are doing a search engine marketing campaign, being able to see how many impressions occurred and what was your actual spend then linked to the number of appointments.
And so that’s where, for my example earlier of scheduling an appointment online, you can take that data, which is extracted out to a SQL database, getting a little bit technical, but being able to take that data, and then marry that either in an Epic native warehouse solution, or if you want to bring that into another business intelligence tool, you would have that capability to do so.
So all of the information that we are calculating, both the appointments as well as the campaign activity, is then available in that raw format that you can then take and merge [00:08:00] that with other information as necessary.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a lot of systems that we have worked with, for example, that have their own data warehouses and they have their own in house data teams.
And so knowing that data is extractable and able to live in their own warehouses is extremely helpful. And one thing that I’ll point out here for all of our listeners, when they know that I am the queen that doesn’t want to be the queen of data privacy of marketing, is that the good news about this is that Epic is an organization you already have a BAA with.
So all of this data sharing back and forth is absolutely allowed. And it is absolutely in the best interest of the patient. So just to make sure that we state that everything is done in a safe and compliant fashion.
Sam: Yes, absolutely. And we’re more than happy to talk with organizations that we’ve seen about best practices around that message personalization and segmentation because that’s a powerful thing of having your marketing technology natively integrated with your core electronic health record with an Epic.
That [00:09:00] you have a massive opportunity to get hyper personalized in your messaging. But because of that hyper personalization, you want to make sure that you’re doing it in an appropriate fashion and not exposing information through unsecure channels.
Jenny: Absolutely. Or coming across as creepy because you’re sharing it at an inappropriate time.
I think that’s a fine line that we all have to walk as marketers. How am I helpful, but not making, you know, somebody feel as though I know too much about them, which again, luckily, since hopefully you’ve fostered a positive relationship with your patient you have kind of the benefit of the doubt based on the channel that you’re using.
So. So that’s good. You know, one thing I’d love to hear about is you guys are continuously improving, developing new ways to be able to help marketers and the way that they are able to leverage this data and the marketing automation tools. What’s coming next? What can people look forward to?
Sam: Yeah, two things, Jenny, I think are particularly important for marketers to understand as they’re looking [00:10:00] to grow their native capabilities within Epic.
One is that for the marketing automation that’ll be going through the Cheers platform, we’ve recently added our first version to be able to associate direct revenue with the campaigns that you are running. So now not only just the clinical outcomes that are occurring, But what are the true transactions that are happening?
What’s being billed to insurance and being collected? What’s going through self pay so that you can start actually talking with your finance team and with your revenue cycle team about the broader business impact, not even just the clinical impact that you’re having as a marketer. And we’re really excited to continue to expand that capability in the coming years.
Of being able to tie additional types of revenue as well as bringing in third party data for things like contribution margin to even be able to improve those numbers further. The other piece that we’ve heard from the community [00:11:00] is it’s great. We know our initiatives, but we don’t always have capacity in order to actually get patients in for that care.
And I don’t want to have to know as a marketer that I’m going to go talk with the leader of this clinic to say, all right, now I need to turn on the spigot to increase the volume because they have unexpectedly available capacity. And so a piece that we’re going to be making available in November for organizations is what we’re calling capacity based marketing.
And this is as part of your outreach and as part of your configuration. You define what is the type of appointment that you’re actually asking individuals to schedule. And so, before the system starts sending out those messages, it checks to say, is there actual capacity and then find individuals that live near that location or work near that location so that we’re providing access at the points that are most [00:12:00] convenient to the patient.
I think everybody can has had one experience where they get an email from a health system and I get engaged. Maybe it’s allergy season. You should schedule a consultation with an allergist and you click through and then the next appointment is nine months in the future. It’s a terrible patient experience because you as a health system, you as a marketer, you had me engaged.
But then when I went there wasn’t actually anything for me to do. And so now I’m less likely to engage with your content in the future. And so that’s where we’re going to be incredibly excited for organizations to simply have this always on behind the scenes capability. So that only when there is available capacity, you then are sending out information to the most prioritized individuals so that you’re both filling the slots from a business perspective, but then also providing a great patient experience.
Jenny: Both of those updates, I personally am super jazzed about as a [00:13:00] marketer. I mean, really understanding the true revenue per appointment is the holy grail. Right. I mean, marketers forever have had to create just estimates or averages of what each appointment was likely worth. So that is a game changer.
And then we have manual capacity feedback loops with most of our clients for the different service line campaigns we’re running, where we, like you said, have a text exchange or a message exchange every Monday and turn campaigns on or off. So again, this is going to be a game changer. So it’s exciting that your organization prioritizes these two different areas. So awesome.
Well, Sam, thank you so much for coming on today. It was really a joy to have you. And I think this conversation was really important to have because we continue to talk to systems across the country that are still just now starting to get to basic marketing metrics to be able to understand the ROI for the service line.
Our brand level campaigns they’re doing. So helping them understand really what is possible, bigger picture [00:14:00] as they’re building out their, you know, three to four year strategic roadmap for their marketing organization, they know what’s possible with the technology that they leverage. So thank you for being on today.
It was a joy to have you.
Sam: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Jenny.
Jenny: So I’m going to put Sam’s LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So if you’d like to connect with him, you’ll have his information. And for listeners please like, and subscribe. We would love to hear feedback about what you’d like for us to cover in a future episode.
You can reach out to me directly, jenny@hedyandhopp. We always usually respond to requests by recording a show relatively quickly. If it’s a request, we usually prioritize that because that means it’s something people are really interested in. So would love to get your requests.
Otherwise, thanks for tuning in today. And we’ll look forward to seeing you next week on another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
