Back from SHSMD Connections 2024 in Denver, CO, Jenny Bristow, Shelby Auer, Mark Brandes, and Taylor Fedderke from Hedy & Hopp share their key takeaways. They discuss the latest trends in AI and privacy, the strong audience engagement in Q&As, and why using data effectively remains a top priority in healthcare marketing.
They also highlight sessions on recruitment-focused marketing strategies, a basketball-themed initiative that improved KPIs like reducing harm events and patient stay times, and a creative healthcare heroes social media program.
From first-time attendees to catching up with old friends—and handing out fan favorite friendship bracelets and art prints at H&H’s booth—the team shares their favorite moments and insights from a successful conference!
Connect with Jenny:
- Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Mark:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbrandes/
Connect with Shelby:
Connect with Taylor:
SHSMD24 Speakers Mentioned:
- Maria Belli, Sheppard Pratt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-belli-773389143/
- Kristina Schiller Chaki, Sheppart Pratt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-schiller/
- Allison Vance, Regional One Health: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allisonvance/
- Jani Radhakrishhnan, Regional One Health: https://www.linkedin.com/in/janirad/
- Carley Cori (Weinstein), Stony Brook Medicine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carleypweinstein/
- Breanne Taylor, The Kids Mental Health Foundation: https://www.linkedin.com/in/breanne-taylor-932403b/
- Donna Teach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnawteach/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
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. We’re a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We are very jazzed to come to you today to chat more about SHSMD24. My fabulous team that I have on the podcast with me today traveled out to Denver on Sunday, and we attended three awesome days of SHSMD.
It was an amazing conference, so many highlights. And so we thought we would hop on and just record a summary of some of the key takeaways for any of you that were unable to attend. So you can get a feel for what the vibe is at these industry events. So if you’re thinking about adding sessions or conferences to your budget for next year, you’ll have an idea of the benefit that you’ll receive.
So we’re going to jump right into it. Again I’m going to do a [00:01:00] brief highlight of my team that attended with me. Taylor is Hedy & Hopp’s Marketing Manager. Shelby is a fabulous Account Manager and Mark is the Director of Data and Technology. So first I want to talk a little bit about our overall experience.
At the conference, we spoke at two sessions, which we’re super proud of. We started with a pre conference workshop around AI. It was two and a half hours, which at first we were a little like, Ooh, how are we going to make something engaging for two and a half hours? Well, we did it. People stayed like 15 minutes after for Q&A. Mark tell everybody about our workshop.
Mark: Yeah, it went really well. You know, I think people really liked it because it was so engaging. So we not only kind of talked about AI and different tools, we kind of had more of a lecture style, the first half of it but then at the end, we really got into, hey, open up your laptops, bring out your phone, and we kind of had them go through prompts or Jenny, you had [00:02:00] them kind of, you know, take pictures of their notes and had those be transcribed, right?
Showing them some cool stuff that AI can help them with in their daily work. The other thing I liked is that we kind of went through how different tools, whether you have to log into them, whether you can use them kind of in your personal life to help them understand that, hey, it’s not just a tool to say, go write me an email or make me a, you know, a generative piece of content.
It was more about how can these tools actually help you in your daily work? How can you talk to your leadership team? So we gave them a list of tenants, right? So we have these six tenants and we pass those along to the users to kind of say, hey, these are things you can approach your leadership with to say, hey, we’re not going to use this to make deliverables, right?
We are going to make sure we stay skeptical about these things. And so you can have kind of, that conversation to help you maybe get that ChatGTP unblocked, right? Or get access to something like Copilot so that you don’t have to kind of [00:03:00] fight them because we gave them a stat that, you know, like, a lot of people, even though it’s blocked, they’re still going to be using, they’re going to be on their personal device or find another way to use it.
So, you know, it’s better to sometimes embrace these technologies and find ways to kind of put some safeguards in place. And that’s what our tenants are all about. So we had that conversation. I think people really appreciated that because that gave them a takeaway to really take home. And then, you know, they’ve already used the tool now, right?
They’ve already used the technology, the ChatGPT app on their phone, they’ve already gone into Copilot and done a prompt, they’ve already used Perplexity. And so having them already do that, I think really was made it impactful. And I think that’s why people thought it was a really good session.
Jenny: I totally agree. It was really fun hearing the buzz, the whole session about people that wish that they were able to attend that pre conference session. And then the other session that we did was actually one of the last sessions of the whole event. It was at 11 a. m. on the last day. Right before the closing keynote, and we did a 2024 version of [00:04:00] our HIPAA, FTC and state law, but this time we actually brought one of our clients Jenny Bradley from Quartz Health Benefits attended with us, and we talked about a client’s perspective of what it’s like to switch over to server-side Google Tag Manager right before Open Enrollment campaigns launched.
So it was super fun to have a client share their perspective and point of view on something technical like analytics. And she did such a great job. So it was really fun to have her presenting alongside us. Taylor, talk to us a little bit about our booth and what we did this year.
Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. Very exciting.
So as a lot of people know, typically when we show up, when Hedy & Hopp shows up to a conference, we have a very colorful booth. Easy to see. This year we did something a little bit more special even so usually we have an artist in residence, you know, each year that we’re bringing art prints to hand out, which is always really fun and people enjoy receiving those.
So, of course, we brought our 2024 Artist in Residence, Katie Mertz, art prints to bring and pass out, so that was great. But we also partnered with [00:05:00] two other artists. So for our backdrop this year we worked with our 2022 Artist in Residence, Jessica Hitchcock, and she created this beautiful backdrop, nice and colorful, kind of tying in our brand colors, and we had a perfect spot on there for our Hedy & Hopp sign, which actually, yes, behind Jenny, if you’re watching, we tied in there too.
And then also for our, outfits, we worked with an artist named Trent Colquitt. He customized our Nikes, painted them. They were super fun. And so kind of did a variety of things to make us stand out a bit more and have the color scheme that really goes with our brand. And then also of course had the friendship bracelets there too, to pass out.
And it’s always fun seeing people walk around having them on. Everybody’s kind of matching if they stop by our booth. And with that art piece there, a lot of systems, as we were talking to them at the booth mentioned that they are building art programs, which was really cool to have those conversations.
I know that’s kind of a separate piece to, you know, from the marketing that we’re usually chatting about. But it was really cool to kind of hear that side and further discuss, you know, the different artists we worked [00:06:00] with for the conference.
Jenny: Absolutely. Yeah. It was like you said, super fun to see our friendship bracelets all over the conference facility.
So let’s pivot and talk a little bit about some of the themes we saw at SHSMD this year. So one of the things that we did the week before SHSMD is we shared the 2023 podcast recording we did. So anybody could listen to it on the plane or on the way there to kind of remind themselves of what some of the topic themes were, because I find it very interesting to kind of pull up to that 10,000 foot view when you’re looking at annual conferences and kind of look at the pivoting and the shifting of topics.
What’s nobody talking about anymore? What is the trend? So let’s talk a little bit about that. Shelby, talk to me a little bit about some of the topic themes that we saw in 2024.
Shelby: Yes. So to no one’s surprise and goes right along with the sessions that we ran this year, AI just continues to be top of mind across the board.
There were many different sessions that focused on different ways that [00:07:00] organizations have been or can be using AI, whether it’s in their day to day or whether it’s larger opportunities to utilize that in their organization. So, it’s really interesting to see kind of year over year. I feel like the last couple of years.
That’s been a key theme, but that just continues to pop up honestly, even more and more. And privacy, it was really interesting. To see last year, compared to this year, how privacy is still being talked about in almost every session, whether it was really privacy focused or not, but really focusing and honing in on what organizations have been doing this last year because last year was a lot of here are all the different opportunities, things you can be doing to help in the privacy space and then.
Organizations were really sharing and talking amongst themselves about what they’ve been considering, what they’ve done, what they’re not sure about. So we just continue to see privacy be a huge theme going forward. And I [00:08:00] think we all know that’s likely not going to change in the years ahead and just a lot of organizations are talking about how they’re using data effectively.
Right? Kind of hand in hand with privacy. Okay. Based on what you’re doing in that space, what, how does that affect the data that you’re able to see and utilize and how are you usually using that to its fullest potential? So it was really interesting to see how organizations are taking advantage.
Mark: Yeah, as the resident data guy, I definitely jumped into a few of those, right? So there were some they were talking about using GIS right? Effectively. There was a lot of talk around some of those more locational data and using kind of 3D kind of views of data to help you understand your region and what the nation looks like, which is really cool.
There was also some talk about propensity models, which was kind of fun. That was super interesting. From a group at CAC at USC, it was very nice. And then in general, like I really enjoyed how people were talking about, you know, how they’re really developing [00:09:00] certain KPIs that are very effective.
It wasn’t just, hey, the standard KPIs. There was some conversation about, hey, how do we actually turn this KPI into something that’s meaningful? It’s something that drives our organization. Not just something we, a number we look at or something we track, but actually make it something impactful. And so there was a lot of discussion around that, which I personally appreciate it.
Jenny: Absolutely. I completely agree with you, Taylor. Talk to me about trends that we saw as far as the humans that attended the event.
Taylor: Yeah. So really a super interesting piece of this as people were coming up to the booth or just us making conversation at different sessions. A lot of them had mentioned that they were first year attendees at SHSMD which is very cool.
And kind of with that, even this one woman had mentioned she goes to a lot of local conferences in her state, but this is her 1st time really branching out and going to a larger conference. You know, that’s further away. And, you know, especially a bigger one at that, you know, there’s a very large event and you can get a lot about a lot out of it.
And so their [00:10:00] overall feedback or kind of thing I was hearing over and over again was that there’s a lot of first years, which is great to see. And then also kind of tying into that, a lot of people were new to healthcare as well. And so just trying to really understand, you know, privacy here. That was something very new to them. They haven’t really spoke too much with their team about. And so just by them attending to getting to hear more about what’s kind of going on in the space and learn about it, which was great.
Jenny: Absolutely. And then 2 other things I’ll add that I thought were really interesting is that every single session I was in had extremely strong Q and A. So people really participated and asked very meaty and sometimes difficult questions for the presenters, and they were handled very well by the presenters. So, there was, I was not in a single session where they said, are there questions and no one raised their hand.
So I think it was a great discussion. Just extremely impactful and really added to the overall experience for attendees. And then it was a busy last day. Like so often you see that the last day is kind of dead because people are catching their flights home. People go [00:11:00] hard day one and day two and day three, they’re like, meh, session attendance is pretty light.
That was not the case. At this year’s event, we did our, like I said, the last real session of the last day. And it was packed. Almost every chair was full in a lot, like probably a hundred or so attendees in this one session, which normally last session of the last day, I’ve been there in prior conferences and like eight people show up because everyone’s already at the airport.
And so, I will say that’s really strong. If you’re planning on attending this event in 2025, do not fly out early. Unless of course you have to for personal reasons, but like the content is strong all the way through the closing keynote on that note, let’s talk about actual sessions. We love attending sessions in order to call out people that are doing really cool things.
I think that’s one of my personal favorite reasons for going to these conferences is hearing about case studies and advancements happening. With providers and payers across the country that they perhaps aren’t like blasting out on the internet and sharing publicly, but they’re willing to talk about it, [00:12:00] conferences and share an inside peek around their processes and their strategy and their outcomes.
So let’s highlight a few of them. Shelby one session that you attended was beat the workforce blues, how to tackle your health systems. Biggest problem. Tell us about it.
Shelby: Yes. So Maria and Christina over at Shepherd Pratt, were sharing a little bit about how they tackled the issue of recruitment, right?
Organizations. Since even before COVID, but COVID and beyond are just struggling to recruit talent. So it was really interesting to hear how Shepard Pratt has tackled this difficulty. I loved one of the nuggets that they talked about was, you know, while recruitment isn’t necessarily marketing’s problem, when recruitment and marketing really joined forces, that’s really where you’re going to see.
A lot of benefit to those efforts. So, for example, they did this and they ended up creating templates for the recruitment team to use and [00:13:00] personalize when communicating to prospects to make sure things are more standard and used the same kind of language across the board. And they really focused on building.
A strong employer brand. So beyond even their own external branding, they work to create an employer brand with personas about their own employees to help them figure out. How should we be messaging? How should we be pushing this out? And they really trained their team on LinkedIn posts when they’re sharing about a new job opportunity, kind of key tips and things they should be including in those posts in order to really make the most of it.
And it was really amazing because they shared with us some stats that their vacancy volume has been at a year over year decrease of nearly 25%, which is huge. They were talking about the organization really hadn’t seen this in years. So shout out to them because it was really amazing to hear the great work that they’ve been doing in that space.
Jenny: Absolutely. We are big fans of Christina and [00:14:00] Maria and Shepherd Pratt overall as an organization. So, we will be sure and put their LinkedIn profiles in the show notes if anybody wants to connect with them. Mark, a session you attended was called Engaging Physicians and Leaders, Data Driven Specific Initiatives.
Tell us about it.
Mark: Yeah, I really enjoyed that one. It was run by Allison Vance and Jani Radhakrishhnan from Regional One Health. And it was great. So they had started talking about, you know, they have been trying to put certain strategic plans in place over the years. They’ve had certain metrics. They’re following what I talked about before.
They had not been seeing a whole lot of movement with those metrics, right? So they were tracking them. They were following them, but they weren’t really seeing anything effective. And so really, they started saying, well, how can we do this? And so I think when Allison and Jenny both kind of started, they were kind of tasked with, hey, let’s make this happen.
And so really, to get at the heart of this, they kind of had to rethink how they were doing their strategic planning. And so what they did is they got physicians involved. 1st of all, [00:15:00] they had administrative people and then they had, you know, the day to day workers, right? The nurses, the people from the food staff, right?
So, like, they would get multiple people from around and they made these kinds of cross functional teams. And then what they were going to do is basically have a break down all these different areas where they want to kind of address and they had certain KPIs tied to that. And then the best thing about this was they made it fun.
They turned it into a basketball theme. And so to get people on their team to go after these certain issues, they had a big draft. And so they had people up on stage and they called them up and there was high fiving. It was very cool. Right? They made some height videos with their clinicians.
Right? And so they had them in basketball gear and. Playing basketball and doing stuff, which is so cool. And then really, you know, they not only did they do that and kind of build the hype around that and have a lot of buy in, but they also then made these cool dashboards in Domo that actually made sure that it was aligned with what this team was trying to [00:16:00] accomplish.
And they realized that, hey, some of these people get this data every once in a while, or maybe somebody gets a monthly, somebody gets a daily, somebody else that gets it, you know, weekly. And so they realized, hey, we can’t have this because that’s really not leading to that change we want to see. And so they kind of identified some of those problems.
Then they turn these dashboards into daily dashboards, right? And now they get feedback when those things aren’t updated every day. They get feedback that it’s not updated, which is a good problem to have. Right. And so what was so great is that not only when they have these dashboards, they were actually able to show us data that, you know, harm events and we’re way down now that they have this in place, right?
Or they were looking at, you know, time of stay at the hospital that was way down, right? So they really, after doing this and getting so much buy in from people around, around the hospital, and then having data to back that up, they really saw some effect. And then the coolest thing was they had big celebrations, right?
So, when they had these wins, they really celebrated him [00:17:00] and then they gave out awards like buzzer beaters, right? Or they gave out the best assist, you know, or highest score, things like that. So staying in that basketball theme which was so cool. It seemed like a lot of fun and it was very effective.
So it was a great kind of session to attend.
Jenny: Yeah, I think that by far is the most engaging implementation of a data improvement strategy that I’ve ever heard of within an organization. So kudos to them. Regional One Health. Great job. Taylor. Tell me about the session you attended, Social Media + Healthcare Heroes, a Dynamic Duo.
Taylor: Yeah. So this was with Carly Cori. She’s the Director of Social Media and Creative Services at Stony Brook Medicine. I will say when I walked in that room was full, it was full to the gills, which was awesome to see. I was really excited for this session just to kind of hear some of their strategies around really working with their healthcare heroes and really promoting them on social media and telling their stories.
So yeah, tou know, showcasing those inspiring stories and how hard their staff is working. And I feel like with this, you know, while we’ve kind of heard some of this before, some organizations [00:18:00] already doing this, I feel like their approach was pretty innovative, which is why I wanted to share this.
But to just help determine who, when, and why they feature a hero, they really tap into their marketing team, SEO, social team, internal communication teams. It’s very collaborative, which is always great, no matter what you’re doing, but I feel like, especially in this space and in social media to kind of hear everybody’s strategy there and recommendations there to really highlight is great. But they create a variety of things. So written vignettes and photos, but they also have social first video clips, you know, which can be a bit more casual and longer form expert videos. And one thing I wanted to highlight here too, they had this like emotional, grateful patient video about his patient or this patient had an experience.
At Stony Brook’s Cancer Center and I could tell everybody was very impacted there in the room. It was very emotional. The patient was very emotional. So it was great that they had some, you know, examples included there too to kind of give people an idea to make you know, more of these social posts more impactful.
But really showcasing those patient outcomes, having everyday recognition programs is something they’re [00:19:00] doing to kind of tie into this strategy. But I really like that they also touched on the more challenging piece, a piece of this, which is getting your employees to really buy in and be willing to share this information.
And so a lot of times, you know, employees aren’t necessarily comfortable being on camera. You know, always that just limited in time piece to where, you know, maybe they can’t sit down to have this video created for a half day or whatever that looks like. And so they had some solutions there. You know, offering and creating a variety of content.
So whether they prefer to do a video or just take some images and do more of a written story and giving them also examples. So they know what to expect some. So from previous videos or anything like that to where they felt comfortable and, you know, kind of ready for whatever it was there or felt or to determine if they felt comfortable to do that.
You know, actually take care of that piece and help out there. Or also I think they kind of threw up this example as well, where one of their physicians didn’t necessarily know if she wanted to do this or was kind of feeling more uncomfortable, but they said, you know what let’s just try it out.
If you aren’t comfortable, we scrap it. But at least maybe we just give it a shot. And so I think that helped out knowing that like, hey, if it, maybe I’m not [00:20:00] feeling it as I’m actually doing it. We don’t necessarily have to move forward with it. And so throwing out some good options there.
Overall, I feel like it was a really great presentation, whith some really great, like actionable takeaways from it and a really great Q&A afterwards with marketers that I could tell were really focusing on like, okay, how do I implement this?
Jenny: Awesome. That’s awesome. It definitely sounds like a strong session.
And then last but not least, Shelby, talk to us about the session opportunities for child mental health within your integrated mark home strategy.
Shelby: Yes, talk about a session that was really special. Everyone that attended this session seem super passionate about children’s mental health. But Donna Teach, who’s the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Nationwide Children’s as well as Breanne Taylor, who’s the Administrative Director for Kids Mental Health Foundation, really talked about how as an organization at Nationwide they realized about 8 to 10 years ago, this looming crisis [00:21:00] that was on the rise. Right?
And they shared a lot of startling statistics about, you know, 1 in 5 kids having a mental health disorder before the age of 14 and how many teachers feel like they are ill equipped and how that impacts those students in the classroom.
And so. Nationwide Children’s ended up kind of making a five year commitment in their strategic plan that we want to focus on behavioral health. We see that this is a need not only in our community, but nationally. So let’s figure out how we kind of combat this. They wanted to partner with a national group that already existed to do this, but they couldn’t find one that was really focused on prevention and stigma breaking.
They found some that were very focused on kind of niche aspects. Specs, but not a little bit more higher level. So they talked to leadership and ended up deciding that, hey, this was something they were going to create. So they kind of started small with a local kind of call to action campaign. That was, [00:22:00] it was called on your on our sleeves and it was talking about how kids there’s a lot.
of stuff behind the surface that you can’t see that it’s not on their sleeves. The creative was really special. They put that out in the local marketplace and then COVID hit and they were like, oh, talk about a mental health crisis. Wow. What did we get ourselves into? So they had to pivot and really focus not only on kids, but the caregivers of the kids at this point. How do you help kids through this thing that we’re also trying to figure out ourselves? So they ended up pivoting by 2023 to a national cause organization called the Kids Mental Health Foundation. And they, guys, it’s been, it was so special to learn in this session, all of the partnerships that they’ve created and all of the material and content they’ve created.
And they’re able to have other organizations license some of that content and be able to co-brand and share it [00:23:00] to their patients and folks in their community. So they now have resources in all 50 states, and more than 18M people have interacted with their content. Huge. That rolled out in 2023, the National Cause Organization.
So, crazy stats of what they’ve been doing and the impact they’ve been able to have. So, spreading the word as much as I can to other children’s hospitals, organizations that want to get involved and partner with them. They’re doing some amazing work in that space.
Jenny: It’s a great case study about thinking about the bigger impact your content can have, right?
Because it’s one thing and it’s very impactful to create things for your local organization, but then licensing it for other hospitals that are like yours to leverage. Not only it gives you the monetization to then be able to perhaps create more content and feed that machine, but then also it spreads your impact.
So it’s a beautiful case study and a great job. Great job by the presenters. So, well, we had such a blast at this year’s SHSMD, we’re already looking forward [00:24:00] to 2025. I think it’s going to be in Dallas next October. So super jazzed about that for all of you that we saw again, this year, face to face our longtime friends.
It was great seeing you and it was fabulous meeting all of the first timers. Hopefully this recap was helpful if you’re thinking about attending SHSMD next year for the kinds of sessions that you can look forward to. And thanks for tuning in. Thanks for just being loyalists. It was really fun.
To be able to hear so many people approach us and say that they really look forward to each episode of this podcast and it made us feel really good that we’re doing a small part here at Hedy & Hopp to drive education throughout healthcare marketers across the country. So, thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy and we’ll see you soon.
Take care.
