AI Usage in Healthcare Marketing: Case Study

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m Jenny Bristow, and I am your host, and I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be back with y’all! After a little short hiatus, we took a little bit of a break from producing new podcasts at the beginning of this year, and we’re excited to be back online and sharing some fresh content with you.

And with that, I’m really excited to welcome our very own Suzie Schmitt. Suzie is our Senior Digital Producer here at Hedy & Hopp, and she does a lot of the magic behind the scenes in the work that we produce. So welcome Suzie. 

Suzie: Thanks, Jenny. So happy to be back. 

Jenny: So what we’re going to talk about today is an example of AI in action.

So, so many organizations, so many podcasts, so many blog posts are out there talking about how you got to use AI in marketing. And at this point, it just kind of feels like noise, right? They all are kind of saying the same thing. None of them are giving real world examples besides really basic prompts, you know, that are having you kind of have the the platform do the things that we believe humans should be doing.

So we take a very different approach about how we think about and leverage AI and automations and we really want them to enhance the human output. Right? We don’t want them to replace it. We want to keep humanity at the center. So we built a tool called Hoppywriter. Leave it to Suzie to always have really fun names for the tools that we produce.

But Suzie, walk us through what the copywriter is and why we felt last year that it was something important for us to build. 

Suzie: I would love to. So the Hoppywriter was born from a couple of issues. One of them was just the ridiculously intense nature of producing health care content. When you’re producing healthcare marketing blogs, they are held to a much higher standard of factuality than most other industries, so we have to be really careful about that.

It’s, if you’re working with like an orthopedic clinic, for example, it can be hard not to get repetitive about a specific joint replacement or something like that, and it can just be kind of difficult to continue to brainstorm fresh content and also come at it from the viewpoint of somebody actually experiencing those two conditions or symptoms. So what we did is we created a tool that—what it does, is it streamlines the delivery process of our blogs by empowering our writers to have everything they need in one spot at their fingertips.

So it’s built in a Google Sheet, with using a Google App script as the full back end, which is just kind of a different flavor of JavaScript. But it also integrates several of our other tools. So when we were talking last year about how we could be more efficient in writing our blogs, how we could increase the quality, how we could make sure that we are keeping all the topics to be the best interest of the client, both in what they’re currently offering and and what can boost their SEO the best, we realized that we were spending a lot of time just getting the writers the information that they needed just to get started. So hey, here’s your focus keyword and here’s some other areas we want to touch on. Here’s some specific requests from the client. And we realized that we could be a lot more systematic about that. And so we were.

So essentially what the Hoppywriter does is it integrates several tools. The first thing it does is it pulls in all of the keywords that we have flagged as needing work for our clients, for our SEO retainer clients, so that we can make sure we’re focusing on the most high-value keywords possible. Then the writer has those right there in the spreadsheet with all their other, all the other information about that client, the voice they like to use, the doctors who do the specific treatments, the different awards they’ve won, what sets their clinic apart from others.

Everything is right there in one spot. You can reference with that real time data. And then we have different templates within our project management system, Wrike, that are for different approval processes and different clients have different, you know, everybody’s different. There is no one size fits all. So by setting all of that up at the front end and just being very organized, we can then pull in additional information for our writers and then push it to our project management software with an already fleshed out brief for the writer.

So then what we’re getting is we’ve got lots of human touchpoints that all of this, which is something I want to always stress, is that this is something that it’s not a button we push and it just happens. It’s you push a button and something happens. You do something with that, and then you push a button and that gets pushed somewhere else.

So it’s really much more of an efficiency pipeline than anything else. But, it’s cut down our time that it takes to edit and to write our blogs. It has resulted in content that our clients have been happier with, and that’s been even more effective in SEO, because we’re able to take a pretty prescriptive approach with the way that we’re structuring the content.

Our incredible SEO specialist, Yenny Rojas, I’ve gotten to work with her extensively on how we can set this up to give you the best outputs possible when it comes to, suggesting topics for the writers and then the content within that. And it’s been a really fun tool to work on, with, our creative writing team, who I normally don’t get to spend a lot of time with.

And it’s been great to hear from them what’s going wrong, and then say, hey, I built something that I think might be able to help you out with that, and then to see those real results, both for us and our clients. 

Jenny: Yeah, I love it, Suzie. What I was so proud about when y’all have been going through this process is that at no point did we try to replace the brilliance of human interactions with AI.

It was all about efficiencies. Making less clicks for the humans, getting the information the humans needed front and center. So it’s really a beautiful way to make sure that we’re never thinking that human work could be or should be replaced by AI or automations. On that: Talk about the guardrails as you were thinking about in building this tool. What are some guardrails that you had to keep in mind as we were fleshing it out? 

Suzie: Absolutely. So AI is one of the tools that’s used in the Hoppywriter. And we just evaluated it the same way we use all of our tools. So we stress tested it. We used edge cases. We gave it crazy prompts to see how it would react. We gave it every different situation we could think of to make sure we weren’t going to get any weird, crazy, unexpected results. And we also made sure that our data was completely safe and the data of our clients. So as we’ve talked about, we have a nice little Gemini ecosystem that’s in our Google Cloud account, covered by a BAA, and is never used to improve the models, and it never leaves our data silo.

So that’s a specific thing about AI that I, that made me feel comfortable using this for, where I would not feel comfortable using something where our information is not siloed. 

Jenny: I completely agree. And just for full clarity, of course, PII and PHI is never put into the Hoppywriter even though we have a BAA, right? 

Suzie: No.

Jenny: We’re not talking about any patient specific information here, but we still want to make sure that we have that legal agreement in place just to make sure that we’re as covered as possible with all of our information.

So let’s talk a little bit—

Suzie: We own all our data:

Jenny: Yes, exactly. Let’s talk a little bit about the Jaccard Index. 

Suzie: I would love to talk about the Jaccard index. So the Jaccard index is a metric of similarity between objects. And it’s been used a lot in machine vision actually. So detecting stop signs is one of the most blatant examples of the Jaccard Index for, cars that can see those.

But what we’re using it for is another to treat another symptom of writing content for health care, which is it can get pretty repetitive. As you may imagine, an orthopedic clinic that offers three different types of joint surgeries, that content might start to feel a little bit same after a little bit. So what we’ve done is we’ve introduced a Jaccard Index threshold for each client, and sometimes even each campaign.

We have a lot of control that we do to again, none of our clients are one size fits all, so we want to make sure we can tweak it and make sure everybody’s getting the best outlook and output. But what it does is it compares how similar two objects are. And it works perfectly with something like text, because it takes the size of the content as well as the count, the actual content itself, into regard when it compares those two objects.

And so we have a system in place for that automatically flags any topics that are too similar to anything we’ve written about in the past. And then even further beyond that, if we have something on this blog that hey, this paragraph, we basically said something, it’s basically paraphrased from something four months ago. That’s something we want to be aware of, and that normally it would be so time consumptive to have a copy editor or somebody, you know, go back through months of medical blog posts to make sure we’re keeping it fresh, so we’ve also …

Jenny: If it’s even possible, right? 

Suzie: It really, it’s not sustainable. So it’s something that’s given us a much better insight to our and just the way our copy needs to be while staying excellent for humans and excellent for search engines. And it’s been a really fun tool to use, to make sure everybody’s getting fresh content that resonates with their audiences.

Jenny: I love it. So it’s been a huge win for our SEO and GEO clients. We work with hundreds of providers across the country, helping them optimize their digital ecosystems with fresh content, more structured content, etc. For other organizations that may be thinking about embarking on their own sort of initiative, what are, what should they be thinking about as they go down that road?

Suzie: Think about the tools you already have. So most of these tools, all of them, we already had them. We didn’t purchase any software for this project. I, I will always say that the power of a Google App script is much more in reach than it might seem, and if you watch a couple tutorials, you might be surprised by how much you can start cleaning stuff up and how much you can start connecting stuff.

Always keep your API keys in the secrets—don’t ever put those out there. Somebody else will find it and rack up an enormous bill in your account. And just make sure that you’re approaching these all with the same lens. I think it’s really important, the way that we approach AI is the same way we approach a web hosting provider, a antivirus software, they all have to meet the same fundamental requirements for it to be an acceptable tool for us to use in our work. And if you can’t find a way to do that, then it’s probably just not quite there yet. But also it’s growing fast and it probably will get there. Yeah, I’d say the power of integrating your softwares together—huge. An absolute force multiplier. And for me, it it’s just great to keep our writers writing and not waiting for dashboards to load. So …

Jenny: Exactly, exactly. Humans center. Right? I would really encourage anybody, as you’re thinking about incorporating additional technologies or AI technologies, please continue to keep the humans center, to all of this, because that’s really, you know, we’re in the business of human connection and health care. So making sure that we’re continuing to advocate for that is really important. 

Suzie: 100%. And again, this is not replacing our copywriters. We have full time copywriters that write beautiful copy. And …

Jenny: Exactly. 

Suzie: So grateful for them to teach me from a technical standpoint, all of the incredible thought that goes into the content they create, it’s really amazing. Thank you.

Jenny: Totally agree. Thank you so much for joining us today, Suzie. For our listeners, I hope this gave you maybe some fresh ideas about ways you could incorporate AI automations and process improvement into your marketing technology stack and the way that your team operates. Whether you’re an in-house team or a fellow agency, there are really smart ways that you could incorporate and the technology like Susie said, is just continuing to rapidly accelerate. And if you ever want to nerd out and just talk about potential solutions, or ideas, give us a call. We love talking about this stuff and ways that we can make everybody in the healthcare marketing space thrive, so. And with that, thank you so much for joining us today.

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