Epic UTM Connect

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m joined today with our very own Mark Brandes. He is our VP of Data & Technology, and we are going to talk a little bit about a product and offering that we have developed called Epic UTM Connect.

Mark, tell us a little bit about this. First let’s start with a little bit of the problem we were trying to solve. Why, why did we spend time kind of investigating and looking in to a UTM connect sort of solution? 

Mark: Yeah. Jenny. So, part of this, I mean, it’s been, it’s been a problem since I’ve been in digital marketing, right?

Like, it’s been a thing. And we consistently run into inside of, a tool like a Google Analytics, web analytics, you’re going to have all that data. So you’re going to have UTMs that come in from your paid platforms and it’s going to be great. You’re going to be able to say certain things that happened on your website. So your lead forms or, or other types of engagement, you’re going to be able to break those down by those UTM parameters. But then inevitably, when you start having conversations about business impact, what happens is, okay, well, which one of those things is going to show our business impact? And so often the conversation came back to, well, none of them really show business impact.

We’re going to need something from our EHR or from our CRM, something that’s closer to the level of the business. So the leads you’re getting in or patient appointments. And so when you get to that level, you find that, oh, well, we don’t have a connection, right? It was this break that happened, kind of this brick wall that was always there to say, okay, we can get you data up to this point, but then after that we’re kind of just on, you know, in the dark, more or less. And so, after our kind of training with Epic and our starting to understand how does it work and getting closer with those teams and learning more from clients, it kind of was understood that, oh, we might have some other opportunities now.

Jenny: Absolutely. So backing up a little bit for folks that do use Epic as their EHR, there are some we’ll call them the OG data integration tools, right? They have something called Link Source, and that allows you to share some campaign information into Epic from some scenarios and some pages of your site, right? There’s very much a lot of framework and controls.

They also have the ability with MyChart Builder to be able to put some UTM parameters in to the patient record, if, again, the campaign is set up using that framework. So UTM Connect, we’re really trying to we’re trying to solve that broader problem. So, walk us through a little bit about what UTM connect is. 

Mark: Yeah. So it’s a tool we came up with. We had some clients who were kind of interested in breaking past through that brick wall, right? And so, with our like I mentioned, with our training with Epic, now, there was a sense with clients that, hey, you know, we can have these types of conversations. So as we got into it, it was, oh, well, we have things like Link Source that have us at least give us some sort of a bridge.

And so talking with Epic, talking with our client teams, we realized, oh, well, we can come up with a way to get those UTM parameters, package them together, and still get them into, Epic, right? And so once they’re in there, then you actually now have those Epic records, those patient records are going to have those UTM parameters attached to them.

So then we have the ability to say, okay, yeah, this record came in, this patient application came in, for paid search, right? Or this appointment was set up through Facebook. And so we’d actually had that ability to look at the attribution for each one of those. So now you can actually track that person all the way through appointment and through fulfillment.

And then you’re actually going to be able to look at the cost and the spend and the actual amount of revenue you got from those appointments, and then be able to put those together to get an actual ROI, right? Which is kind of the holy grail we always talk about. And so we saw that opportunity. And so we worked with some teams, we worked with our development team to really come up with: How can we capture these parameters? How can we use them? How can we package them together? How can then we make sure they get into Epic? And so we worked out a system that kind of can do all those bits and pieces. And so we figured out how to do that, and now we’re trying to package it up and make sure that we can bring it to other customers.

Jenny: Yeah. And it’s something that I’m really excited about because as anybody, as anybody who has ever tried to do anything with your own instance of Epic knows everything takes a long time, right? It takes a long time to get access. It takes a long time to talk to teams about implementing a specific Cheers campaign, for example. The great thing about the way that your team structured UTM connect is that it is relatively lightweight and fast to implement, right?

Like our team doesn’t need analyst access to your Epic instance. We have the ability to be able to implement this tool by simply getting access to your website analytics. And your, CRM, sorry, your CMS on the back end of your website. And your IT team could actually take the code and implement it on our behalf in order to implement these things.

So it’s able to be done really quick, really lightweight. And we’re excited with the groups that we’re working with right now, because a lot of them really want to have, it’s our gathering that data. And even if they aren’t quite yet sure what they’re going to do to visualize that data down the road, they want to start getting that conversion data into the patient records.

So once they’re ready to visualize, they’ll have more of a historic tale to understand what has worked and hasn’t worked for, the different performance campaigns? 

Mark: Yeah. It’s so funny. Throughout my career, I’ve run into so many times where we start having conversations and people want to show, how did this perform, how did this campaign do? Or I want to start tracking this, or can we report on that?

And the conversation will be okay. Do we have tracking in place? Have we been collecting that data? And it’ll be like, nope. And then okay, well we can put that in place, but we can only report from the time we actually started collecting moving forward, right? And so to your point, that’s what’s so great about this is that we can get in there really quick, start adding that data, make sure it’s you know, we’ll test it and look how it’s coming through. Make sure everything’s working correctly. But then that data is there. So even if you’re not ready to act on it, even if you want to have conversations with the rest of your team—can be months down the road. Well, now we can look all the way back to that point we put in place instead of having to start whenever, you know, we kind of get around to looking at, what do we want to look at for performance?

Jenny: Absolutely. And just a quick, kind of go to the bullets and benefits. It, of course, is HIPAA compliance, HIPAA compliant. From a solution perspective, it is secure. There’s already a BAA with your organization in place with Epic. So we’re just passing additional variables into that database where we already know that data is being secure. So it really is a great way to be able to leverage the technology stacks that you’re already using.

But it isn’t …

Mark: And and the other night I was just going to say, Jenny, real quick you that sparked something in me. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Google Analytics or, or Site Improve or Adobe Analytics, we can actually use this with any of those. Right? Because it actually kind of takes that data straight from your website and puts it into Epic, so you don’t actually have to work through those other softwares. You can go around them to basically have that information already in Epic, which is great. 

Jenny: That’s great. And an excellent point. It is not, however, you know, going to work in all scenarios. So it is a great solution. I wish there was some sort of tracking methodology that would capture the source of every single patient conversion on your website. That isn’t going to happen, unfortunately, ever for general privacy concerns on behalf of the patient.

So talk to us about some use cases where perhaps this would not track conversions or perhaps in scenarios where it may not be a good solution for an organization. 

Mark: Yeah for sure. And like I think it’s still based upon some of the standard things we’ve been doing in digital marketing.

And so UTM parameters is one of them. If you aren’t currently using them, it’s that’s not something that you’re putting in place, then this wouldn’t be something that would kind of address any kind of help for you. But if you’re using UTM parameters, that can also be a standard of you need to have a UTM strategy in place overall, because you’re only going to get what’s in Epic, what you’re putting into those UTM parameters.

So if those are kind of inconsistent or don’t give you good information, then that’s just going to come through. And so then you’re still going to be stuck in the same place of not being able to understand what those UTM parameters are. So there are times where if a client isn’t to that level of sophistication or hasn’t been doing those things, then maybe this is not the right step at now. But I think even in those cases, there can be a conversation about, okay, how do we get you on to UTM parameters? Because in today’s world of, you know, privacy, you know, being privacy forward and having concerns there, using UTM parameters has really come back into style to make sure that you’re having that information in your web analytics platform.

And so our team can help with that to get you up, set up for a good UTM strategy, make sure that’s put across not only your paid digital stuff, but also the emails you’re sending out, or if you’re doing direct mails or if you have QR codes, right? We can have that conversation. And then once that’s in place, yeah.

Then we get that UTM Connect in place. And now you have really data flowing through. The other place, I would say is that, you know, for those of my, my data nerds out there listening to this, you’re going to have, you know, mainly just last touch attribution here, right? So it’s going to come through. You’re going to be able to see that, hey, this tactic led to that appointment.

But as we know, not everyone’s going to come through on that. So what we’ve seen with our client is that, you know, you’ll have data come through, but it won’t be as voluminous as we thought. But they’re still getting a lot of leads. And so there’s still going to be that conversation of, okay, well that person went to Facebook, but they didn’t necessarily put their appointment and they actually came back and did it through paid search.

So there’s still going to be gaps there. And how you do the analysis and how you kind of understand, but you are going to get that immediate kind of last attribution, which is really great. Going to see a lot of the paid search come through, which is always great. But then you’ll see the other platforms come through as well.

And so I think those are things people should keep in mind, right? This isn’t like the, the, golden arrow that’s going to fix everything. But it will really help you get a better leg up on that data and bridge that gap that we’ve had for so many years. 

Jenny: All excellent points, Mark. Thank you so much.

And listeners, if you are curious if this would work for your organization, if this would allow you to be able to get a tighter understanding of ROI measurement, give us a call. We are happy to hop on and talk with, chat with you about your implementation of Epic, the different tools that you use. You do not have to be using Cheers or any of their, you know, campaigns or CRM modules to be able to do this. You can just be pulling in UTMs from existing marketing campaigns that your team or your agency may be using. So really think of this as a standalone, one-time implementation to your Epic instance to improve visibility—not that you have to do anything else with Epic marketing tools in order to make it valuable and worth the insight that it would provide. 

Mark: For sure. And the other note that I was just thinking of January you were talking about that is that, you know, along with what epic implementation they have currently, there may be some people that are using MyChart Builder or some using the standalone tool, or some that are using the built-in widgets.

And so there could be times where, hey, we get in there and we look and say, okay, this is more complicated than we thought, and maybe we have to rethink things. But with our friends at Epic, they really have some good tools and some insights and how we can make this work across those different implementations. So, I definitely don’t want anybody out there to say, oh, well, we do this a really different way, probably won’t work. We’re up for a chat at least, right? It can’t hurt to kind of see if that data can be passed through. Because I think, you know, the juice is worth the squeeze here, right? Like getting that data is so important. And, you know, it really is the holy grail of the measurement that we’re trying to get to, so.

Jenny: It is. Well, thank you for joining us today, Mark. Listeners, we’re going to put some links in the show notes to learn additional information and to reach out to be able to schedule a call with us if you’re interested in chatting more. I think this is the beginning of a really big evolution about ways that people are using Epic to be smarter marketers in the healthcare space, and we’re really excited to play a small part in it.

Mark: Exactly. 

Jenny: So thank you for tuning in. Please like and share this episode with any of your coworkers or colleagues that you think may find it valuable. And we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!