We’re back from HMPS25 and ready to spill! In this episode, Taylor, Kristin, and Jenny recap their time at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit—from sunshine and friendship bracelets to standout sessions on privacy, AI, and proving ROI. H&H came prepared with art prints in hand and even swapped some friendship bracelets. The conference, hosted at the Omni Orlando, delivered with plenty of food, nonstop coffee breaks, and a crowd full of seasoned healthcare marketers from across the country. Plus, there were 70 sessions to choose from!
We’re sharing our favorite takeaways, including what it means to say “yes, however” when someone asks for a billboard, how hospital websites are becoming true transaction hubs, and why Cleveland Clinic shut down all marketing in a few markets.
Speakers Mentioned:
Christine Skiffington: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christineskiffington/
Sujal Raju: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sujalraju/
Celia Van Lenten: https://www.linkedin.com/in/celia-van-lenten-57a897a/
Gayle Sweitzer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gayle-sweitzer-63ab739/
Alexa Warner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexa-warner-33807059/
Christine Woolsey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinewoolsey/
Susan Alcorn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-alcorn-1b6b0670/
Ben Texter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamintexter/
Gerard Gober: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardgober/
Pam Landis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelalandis/
Lucky Rai: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukhvinderrai/
Jen Jenkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenjenkins/
Lacey Reichwald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laceyreichwald/
Chris Bevolo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbevolo/
Tanya Andreadis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanyaandreadis/
David Feinberg: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-feinberg-57746a5/
Paul Matsen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-matsen-b65b751/
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Further your understanding of what compliance means for healthcare marketing and get certified for it here: https://wearehipaasmart.com/
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: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I’m your host and the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be here with you today with two of my fabulous team members here at Hedy & Hopp to talk about our experience going to HMPS.
So HMPS stands for Healthcare Marketing and Physician Strategies Summit. It’s put on by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists. It’s an annual conference. They actually celebrated their 30th year this year. So huge shout out to the woman behind the conference, Judy Neiman. Congratulations. She’s absolutely a fabulous human in everything that she’s done to contribute to healthcare marketing and communications professionals.
We really, really appreciate you and want to give a just a shout out to Judy, but, we attended him for the first time this year. I know we’ve done lots of show coverage for other conferences, and we’ve been told time and time again, why aren’t y’all at HMPS? So we showed up this year and boy, are we happy that we did.
So joining me today is Taylor Fedderke. She’s a marketing manager here at Hedy & Hopp. And Kristin Weidman. She is a project management lead. So welcome ladies. Let’s chat a little bit about our experience.
Taylor: Yeah. Thanks for having me Jenny. Definitely jumping into some things here. Of course, we showed up nice and bright at HMPS with all things colorful art.
So of course, we had our backdrop from our Artist in Residence as well as our friendship bracelets. And some art to exchange with any of the individuals that showed up at our booth. So it was great to kind of show up with our usual setup, and share some fun goodies with those new attendees.
Kristin: And thanks for having me, Jenny.
And I agree with Taylor. We showed up bright and beautiful. The conference took place at Omni Orlando at Championsgate, and there were plenty of food options at the resort and then areas to soak up the sunny Florida sunshine, as well as outside of the conference.
Jenny: And I feel like it is my duty to report on the quality of food at conferences.
As a food driven human. That’s one of the things I always pay attention to. It was great. And I will say that they had so many coffee break sponsored by different organizations. There was never a moment where I thought, oh gosh, I could really use a coffee or a pick me up, diet Coke, and I wasn’t able to find one.
So kudos to that.
Kristin: Completely agree, Jenny, a very caffeinated experience. And then also the other attendees that were there were higher level marketing professionals from a large variety of organizations, plenty from Orlando area and Florida. But all across the US, you’ll hear about everyone that attended the, conference and also spoke as panelists, from across the US.
Taylor: Yeah. And with that, Kristin, a lot of them had mentioned they’ve been coming to HMPS for years, which is great. They’re all super excited to be there again this year, and a lot of them shared that this is one of their favorite conferences as well. They’ve been coming for years and will continue to come. So that was great to hear.
Jenny: Yeah, I was super excited to be asked to, lead a panel. So this was our first year attending HMPS, and I was so honored and appreciative of Judy for asking me to get involved in our first year there by leading a panel on privacy versus personalization. So, as you all know, we talk about privacy all the time over here at Hedy & Hopp.
So Judy asked me to lead this panel. There were three different folks on the panel that had very different perspectives. So Christine Skiffington was the provider point of view. She was from Inspira Health. Sujal Raju was the website vendor POV from Enqbator, and then Celia Van Lenten with Miles & Stockbridge was the lawyer’s point of view.
So we had a lot of fun digging in and asking their different perspectives of where we are as an industry right now, and the way that we are tackling privacy through the lens of personalization. How much of personalization are we actually accomplishing right now or is it mostly aspirational? And we had a really great conversation. I heard from quite a few folks afterwards.
They really liked the different points of view because, for example, let’s say, you know, Christine would mention something from a provider’s POV and then Celia would happen and say, yeah, from a legal perspective, here’s what I tell clients, you know? So it was really helpful to understand how all of these different forces work together. But let’s back up a little bit and talk a little bit about overall themes that we noticed.
So as you all know, we are, very accomplished conference goers. We go to a lot of them, and there were a couple of key themes that we noticed compared to other conferences that we go to. Taylor. Which one you noticed?
Taylor: Yeah, kind of piggybacking off of your session that you were just speaking about having a panel there.
There were so many sessions that involved a panel. And I will say that was something that I really enjoyed. I think you other two did as well, just because you get to hear the different perspectives. And some of the panels were like, you sat in on them, and they’re like, you know, make sure you don’t share this information with other individuals.
It’s kind of like a little trust circle and was really fun just to have it be, kind of all in the open. So yeah, I really enjoyed that structure for the session format.
Jenny: That’s great. How about you, Kristin?
Kristin: I really liked that. There were plenty of sessions to choose from, so they were back to back and they were even some were overlapping and they were very interesting. There were over 70 for this conference, so it was honestly hard to choose which to attend. It seems like we chose to divide and conquer, which was really helpful.
Jenny: I love that. And on that note, we’d love to highlight some of the key sessions and key to learnings from the sessions, because it we all know organizations can’t afford to send people to every conference.
So at the wrap of each event, what we love to do is highlight just a couple of conferences or, sessions at the conferences. But really, the key takeaway. So things for you to think about, and maybe glean from some of the knowledge that we were able to pull back from the conference. So I’ll start us off.
One of the sessions I attended was one of those trust circle sessions that Taylor mentioned where at the very beginning they said, do not record, do not repeat verbatim anything that is said here because folks are going to be really sharing, you know, some behind the scenes decisions and situations that they go through. And I will just say, as a senior marketer, I love that, I love when people are willing to be able to share, you know, what the conversations really look like at the executive level.
And so the session was called If We Only Had a Billboard and there were four fabulous women, Gayle Sweitzer from the University of Kansas Health System, Alexa Warner from Bon Secours Mercy Health, Christine Woolsey from Hospital Sisters Health System, and Susan Alcorn, she was actually the facilitator from Alcorn + Dean Strategic Communications. And we’re not going to say which of these fabulous women said each of these things, but I wanted to call out a couple of really good takeaways.
The first is when you’re having a conversation with leadership, oftentimes, and this was kind of the why the session was put together. Folks will say, we need a billboard at this location or at this event, and here’s what the creative should look like, right? Everybody can be a marketer in their own minds, right? But oftentimes it results in a lot of disparate tactics that don’t roll up to your overall strategic plan of your department or your organization.
So a couple of great pieces of advice that these women gave is number one, instead of saying no, say yes, however. So, for example, if they say we need a billboard here, say, you know, that’s a great idea. However, if you remember, according to our strategic plan, we aren’t pushing orthopedics right now. You know, we’re really focused on, you know, cardio and oncology.
So not shooting down their idea, but instead pulling it back to the overall strategy. One other thing was being the leader who takes a pause and is the voice of reason when you’re given a new tactical idea. So this takes trust building. You can’t do this on day one, but once you build the trust where those individual people get to the point where they trust you to say, you know, I’m going to go back to my team and talk about that idea.
I love where your head’s at. Let me go back and actually review our strategic plan and see where this fits into that versus giving them an immediate yes and what they need or want you to say on the call. The biggest takeaway was, you know, be comfortable sitting through the uncomfortable and slow your team down. You know, most marketers at their heart are people pleasers, right?
Like we feel good about helping other people. So you need to remember as a leader, part of your job is making sure that you stick to the strategy that you’ve outlined. So feel confident enough to take a pause, give affirmations that they’re thinking about marketing. But then always redirect to that overall strategic plan and use that as your true north.
Taylor: And with that to Jenny, just want to tie in that budget piece as well. Not only do we have that strategic plan, but what does that budget look like if it’s mapped out for your year already? Where are you going to pull from? So there’s definitely plenty to, you know, pause on and then circle back to after you’re able to kind of revisit that, reevaluate where those pieces have gone, to make sure you’re staying aligned.
Jenny: And all of these ladies shared some really wonderful, real examples of conversations that they had had internally where they’ve had to be kind of the bad guy, to be able to uphold marketing’s strategy and budget integrity. So kudos to the four of them for facilitating such a fun conversation.
Kristin: Jenny and Taylor I really loved learning about this session.
Coming from both of your perspectives, while you were both at that session, I was attending an open forum with panelists and a facilitator, and I attended It’s Not About the Web; It’s All About the Transaction. So at its core, this was about how you use your healthcare website and how that may be evolving. So it was facilitated by a gentleman named Ben Textor.
He is the Co-CEO of Digital Health Strategies Inc. and then there were three awesome panelists I really enjoyed all of the different perspectives. Kind of like you had mentioned, Taylor. The first was Gerard Gober, Head of Digital + Mobile Health Technology at Universal Health Services. The second panelist was Pam Landis, SVP at Hackensack Meridian Health.
And then the third panelist wasLucky Rai. He’s the VP of Digital Channel Experience, Memorial Hermann Health System. Plenty of different perspectives there. Essentially what the session touched on was that we’re moving away from using health care websites for their patient education libraries, all of this long form content about every single potential medical procedure that you could have, you know, just some light reading for your night time before you go to bed.
We’re moving away from that. And it does make sense with kind of the talk of moving from SEO to AIO and today is kind of a new age. What we are moving towards is using any of these healthcare websites to accomplish tasks. So what the three of them really summarized was the most common user tasks.
So somebody is going on to your website and they are either wanting to pay their bill. They’re wanting to log in as a current patient through your patient portal. They are wanting to find care, which is those that patient acquisition that we are so involved with. And then also the fourth is to find a job. And then the other thing that they talked about is if you if someone is not coming to your website to do one of those four things, what is the next best or closest closely related task that may not be on your site?
So they connected that to reading reviews and review sites, or searching social media for your brand name or your Google Business profiles, calling directly from one of those or finding your facility and getting directions to their next appointment via Apple Maps. So either they’re doing one of the four main user tasks, or they’re doing, finding user tasks, kind of some of those secondary locations.
So just emphasizing the importance of both your website and all of those kind of micro sites that you may not have built, but they are associated with your business and how they represent you. And then you need to reduce the number of clicks that it takes to get to this task. So can you make it easier, make sure that your Google business profile or you Apple Maps are up to date with the correct directions, the correct phone number, the correct specialties.
But then on your website, is it about a button that is really easy to see in your UI and UX? Is there about the phone number being nice and bright? Is the phone number correct, or do you need to, lead them to a locations page where they need to look up which facility they’re calling to talk to?
So many examples. But instead of that long form content, Pam Landis, I thought really said it best is your website is now your patient experience hub and how your patients come to experience your system. Yeah, that’s so true. I will say, first of all, shout out to Pam. Pam’s fabulous. I’ve seen her speak at a few other conferences and she’s a wonderful presenter.
But this really ties in with what we’re hearing at other conferences, right? Like you don’t need thousands of pages about all of these obscure symptoms and diagnoses. People are no longer, you know, with generative AI, you know, looking for hospitals to answer that on their websites anymore. So really helpful.
Taylor: Absolutely. Yeah. And to tie in, Kristin, I know you mentioned AI just a bit ago for that session.
Another session when you sat in on was Gen-AI Unplugged: 10 Real-World Healthcare Marketing Trials. And this one was with Jen Jenkins from University of Utah Health and Lacey Reichwald with Aha Media Group. So of course, I feel like I was kind of, throughout all the sessions, tied in somehow, just because it’s top of mind for so many of us.
And I know we had a few little nuggets we pulled out of this session, Kristin. And so one that really stood out to me that I found was unique was specifically using a ChatGPT, and creating GPT for personas. So when strategizing or writing copy, you know, a lot of times, you know, as we’re working through this process as healthcare marketers, we have those personas built out in a variety of places that we’re referencing going back to.
But you can actually build out GPT and ChatGPT for persona, which was new information to me. And so she was kind of explaining how she, for example, named one of her personas Chelsea. And when I say she, this was Lacey kind of going through all the details and how she’s done this on her own. But Chelsea is one of her personas, and so a lot of times she’ll just type in @ and it will pull up Chelsea, and then she can kind of use all that information to help her either maybe write copy or pull together the strategy and what that may look like. And so I know privacy’s still kind of all top of mind for us though. So maybe your organization doesn’t use ChatGPT there. I’m sure there will be some other options out there in the future, but this is just kind of a new way that we’re moving and utilizing AI to make sure that, you know, our content is accurate in terms of meeting that target audience.
And so that was just a really cool bit of information that I pulled. What about you, Kristin? What else did you find interesting?
Kristin: I also noted that, I really liked that, both of their kind of combined advice was that you create a base style guide and a base persona for any repeatable task that you do, or any repeatable client, repeatable voice, repeatable strategy that you’re doing on a day to day basis.
And then also, they were very complimentary of AI in creating those personas and helping create those style guides. So, that’s just what they emphasized. The AI was good at best at analyzing and comparing sites and comparing content. So go to creating those personas, even identifying content gaps. So they were just showing us some great examples of how I can be used using those different GPT and then really analyzing, what you should be targeting in your marketing.
Both women really provided a lot of SEO and content writing tips and tools that I will actually be bringing back and circulating with our entire SEO team, our insight, entire website team. So what’s really nice was this was not just, informational session. This was really actionable session for me and being able to bring it back to the team.
Jenny: And I do have to give a shout out to Suzie on the Hedy & Hopp team, because we actually have a couple of custom GPTs set up, with happy language. So she’s actually done a really good job, creating some and testing it for HIPAA-related information and language. And testing all of that out internally. So shout out to Suzie for that.
Kristin: Got to give her credit. And yeah, you should not be surprised.
Jenny: I know you’re right. Exactly, exactly. Awesome. Cool. Let’s shout out one more session. Kristin, what’s one more session you attended that we should talk on?
Kristin:I did attend on the I think technically it’s the third day of the Thursday, session with some, pretty big names in healthcare marketing.
And the session was called Defending Marketing ROI: What Works. So this was the facilitator was Chris Bevolo, from BPD, which is formerly Revive, I believe, another marketing agency, he’s the Chief Transformation Officer there. And then the panels were all CMO in their own right. So that was just a really cool, piece to be a part of.
And so it was, Tanya and I don’t remember how to pronounce her last name, but Andreadis, so she’s the, CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, and VP for patient engagement at Penn Medicine. And then, David Feinberg is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Mount Sinai Health System. And then, third but not least, was Paul Matsen,.
He’s the Chief Marketing Communications Officer at Cleveland Clinic. So, again, some really large notable health systems there, which was already impressive to start the session off with. The really focus of that was how to prove that marketing is helping, and maybe not just that marketing is helping with patient acquisition, but how marketing can help with some of those bigger business strategies.
So the C-suite doesn’t always care about just what was X number of patients that new patients that came in the door that day? They can care about anything from the brand and the name. They can care about the reputation of a certain portion of their institute or certain portion of their service line. They might care more about patient retention.
That might be more of their strategy that year. It’s really anything, so they might even be focusing on different service lines. So it might just not be about the generalized, oh, we just want new patients for the entirety of Cleveland Clinic. It’s no, they’re really focused on their heart and cardiology services since those are obviously top of mind top line where people come in with really acute symptoms and conditions.
And so that is basically what what Paul was saying was, is always part of their strategy every single year, which did not surprise me. And so how they talked about it was instead of just grabbing at different metrics and grabbing at fun things and trying to really present, I think they really all three took a nice step back and said, getting your strategy and your plan from your leadership.
So letting the business strategy inform the marketing strategy. And then another thing that they made a big point of was have them sign off on it. So not just say, oh, in floating, passing, we think that this is important. We think we should put up a billboard. Yes. However, what is the signed-off business strategy for Penn Medicine this year?
And then you let that inform your marketing strategy and then kind of to close the loop, you prove your usefulness based on agreed upon metrics. So again, instead of pulling things from we have a ton of data and analytics at our fingertips across any of these systems and across even between, there may be a marketing team. There may be a data and analytics team, there may be an actual strategy team, and then there may be data from the clinics as well.
So really focusing in on what leadership say are the metrics that they are looking at for success. And just one really specific thing that I thought was amazing. Paul from Cleveland Clinic, he called out that his C-suite also asked a really interesting question that he said, we probably all kind of get a lot is great. Love that you’re doing marketing, love that you say that you’re pulling in all of these new patients from these great areas on our agreed upon service plans and strategies.
But how do we know that we wouldn’t be getting these patients anyway, especially something as big of a name as a Cleveland Clinic? How do we know that we wouldn’t just get these patients anyway? So Paul kind of went on, a bit of a crusade there, and I was extremely impressed with, how he followed through on this hypothesis of that marketing still can bring in, these new patients.
And it is because we are marketing and not just because, the magic of the Cleveland Clinic mean. So they actually did a study where they went entirely dark in two different markets. So they were markets that were outside of their they do a, I think about a 300 mile radius from Cleveland in Ohio. They were separate, more, national and of specific markets.
They went entirely dark in those two markets for 15 months. And he wanted to say, fear not, because they did invest that exact same money into other emerging markets that he also knew would be successful. So he did a great job of balancing this out, where the Cleveland Clinic would not be losing patients by any means, and he would not be messing with his budget.
But that they were reinvesting that money somewhere else to then show the numbers in these two dark areas. They did this for 15 months. He didn’t say this explicitly, but they talked to other big, another large organization that may have done this from Minnesota, that, that is how he said it. I really loved that.
And, they said that it takes about three months for all of your marketing efforts to drop off. So they wanted to make a clean break and then get some entirety of almost a year of clean data of what does it mean when we’re not marketing in these areas? And they found a 20% drop in new patients. It’s pretty significant.
Nothing they did in that again, studied the areas enough where it wasn’t a drop in Cleveland Clinic’s overall, patients, but from those specific areas, they could pinpoint that they got 20% less. And what was even more fun is the clinicians were also really excited about all the new clients and the new patients that they were driving from these other areas.
So he kind of proved his point, but also helped the business. So really appreciate that. He definitely did not recommend that you try this at home. So we’re not just going to go running off to do that, but what it seemed like is they hope they already internally approved and published this study internally. And it sounds like they their hope is that they’re going to try and publish this study, in the next couple of years or so.
So this was a study that they just did. They just turned on back all of this advertising on January 1st of this year. So this is really recent data. I found it fascinating. And as, in healthcare marketing with love, our data obviously heady and hot. So to be able to do that and show the real impact, while also creating some joy with some new patient volume in other areas.
I really love that perspective. So I thought that was fascinating. It is. And kudos to him for having the guts to do that. We hear all the time that our clients are dealing with senior leadership asking that exact question, and I think it would be beneficial for all of us if Cleveland Clinic moved forward publishing that study. So Paul, make it happen. Friend, we are here for you.
Jenny: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And then one last thing before we wrap, I want to shout out we are very excited to have launched We Are, HIPAA Smart while we were at HMPS this year. So at a conference last year, we had a few different people ask us where additional training and certification could be found for the rest of their marketing team.
So perhaps one person attended one of my talks and they said, you know, I got 20 people back at the office that need to know this information. What can we do? Well, light bulb, anybody who was there may have literally seen a light bulb go off over my head, but I rushed back to the office, the virtual office afterwards, and we put together a little task force within our organization to repurpose all of the training materials we already had that we trained our current clients on.
Beefed them up a little bit and then stood up. We Are, HIPAA Smart came. It’s a great platform for those of you that require training for your internal marketing team members on HIPAA. This training is made for marketers by marketers. So it talks about the tools and technologies that we deal with. And it is not HIPAA from a clinician’s perspective, which is what a lot of folks experience within their organizations is going through HIPAA training, where none of it actually applies to their day-to-day.
So we’re very excited to have launched with a compliance fundamentals class, as well as a HIPAA-specific training. And then we have some advanced technology training, as well as, marketing training for lawyers. Do it to help them understand things like how and when pixels fire, how forms work, etc.. As well as one additional course for vendors that are being asked to sign Business Associates Agreement, so they can really understand what the legalities and consequences behind that mean.
So very excited. We had a lot of positive feedback. And lots of really fun engagement on it post conference. So if you’ve not yet checked it out, please do so again. It is we are HIPAA smart.com. And give us a shout. If you need a group rate give us a shout. We are happy to talk about training packages for your entire marketing team.
And on that note, thank you so much, Taylor and Kristin, for joining me today to share all of our wonderful insights about Hemp’s. We are absolutely going back next year. This is a show that’s now added to our regular conference rotation. And thank you for everybody that really made our first year so joyful. We made a lot of really fun new connections and really already cannot wait until next year.
So thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We’ll see you next week! Cheers!
