Epic Marketing Services

Jenny: Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am very excited today to have Hedy & Hopp’s very own Brandon Hallman. Brandon is our new director of Epic Services.

So as many of you have been following along over the last couple of months, maybe you saw us speak at, you know, HCIC, maybe you’ve attended one of our webinars. We are very, very excited about the ways that health systems can now begin leveraging Epic functionality to be able to lean in and really make an impact for their marketing and marketing analytics goals.

So, Brandon, welcome to Hedy & Hopp. I’d love for you to start off by telling our audience a little bit about your background. 

Brandon: Yeah. Thanks, Jenny. So, I started at Epic around 20 years ago, started as an analyst on the ambulatory side, bridged over into more of the population health side, and then more recently started learning the patient experience side, and most recently held a position as a, Director of Patient Experience and Integrations for a federally qualified health center.

Jenny: Yeah. So, I will say that I very much felt like you were a unicorn as we were walking through this journey of building out our Epic Services Division. It was so interesting because the candidates we were talking to, you were very much a reflection of the ecosystem today. As it exists. Right? So marketing using Epic’s functionality is net new. 

This is a brand new thing that is going on. And so the vast majority of candidates that we talked to didn’t have a lot of patient experience understanding, didn’t have a lot of Cheers strategy experience. And those are two areas where your background was just really exciting for us. And I think it’s going to be a really exciting.

It already is an exciting addition to the work that we’re doing for our clients. So I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about kind of your, POV about the ecosystem since you’ve been involved in it over the last 20 years and kind of the shifts you have seen both just broadly and the work that you’re doing through the lens of patient experience and specifically thinking about tools like Hello World and Cheers.

Brandon: Yeah, it’s come so far. You know, Epic. When they first started, they had MyDhart. And that was kind of the bulk of patient experience. And then as we’ve gone through the years, I realized that, oh gosh, we need to integrate our patients more into one singular platform. It’s always been kind of fragmented and piecemeal. Then it was up to each organization to kind of put together their own strategy and own software and own tech stack.

Epic’s now done a really nice job of giving us more tools to kind of layer on top of each other, and make it one true data source and one source of truth. So now as organizations are looking at this, IT and marketing can create a synergy to really kind of bring that together, to look at the overall tech stack, look at their overall organizational goals, and then capture that data for the patients that they already have in that system.

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I’d love to hear a little bit kind of from your POV about, kind of the evolution of Cheers over the last few years because you have been, you know, knee deep and walking through, watching it evolve. There’s been a lot of conversations. I don’t wanna use the word criticisms, but conversations in the industry about the sophistication or lack thereof of Cheers.

I’d love to hear your POV. Like, where is it today compared to where it was a few years ago, and where do you think it’s going? 

Brandon: Yeah, I think when cheers came out, epic thought, hey, this is a great way for us to start reaching our target populations of patients that already exist. I think access as it is evolved.

You know, they introduced Cheers CRM and Call Hub. And so now they’re taking it beyond just a way to communicate to their existing patients, to an overall client relationship platform where they’re able to manage that not only as a patient but as a customer of the organization. And I think as tools like Hello World Omnichannel or Multi-Channel, as it’s been called, as well as that evolves, as that becomes more sophisticated and ties in with yours, I think it’s only going to make that tool more powerful when you layered on with the other tools.

I think Cheers, like any of the other Epic platforms, they start out slow. Epic hears feedback from their customers. They continue to build and develop and develop and develop until it is a truly finished product. And I feel like we’re almost there with Cheers. I totally agree, I feel like we’ve seen, you know, over the last year since, you know, Hedy & Hopp is really big and diving in to creating this division and this go to market strategy to be able to help health systems.

There really have been, I think, three different categorizations of systems. We’ve talked to. So those that are not on Cheers do not have CRM of any kind, but want to those that are on Cheers, that is their only CRM and marketing automation that they have access to, but they don’t believe that they’re leveraging it appropriately. And the third and the one that we’re seeing the most often are those that are actually currently paying for Salesforce.

And they have been given the directive by it that that budget is being removed and they have to move everything over to Cheers. So whether they like it or not, they’re be giving, you know, the order that by, you know, 2027 or whatever time frame it is they’ll be sunsetting Salesforce. So, you know, I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts and perspective on that as far as, you know, what the user experience is moving from either, you know, Salesforce or, what’s the other one, WebMD Ignite.

Yes. Over the years and like the pros and cons, right about maybe what Cheers can do today versus what the other ones may have some strengths in still. 

Brandon: Yeah. You know, I think that’s kind of it. Right? So a lot of organizations have that Epic-first mentality. I mean that was the organization I came from, Epic first when it made sense.

And then we could look for other tools if it didn’t make sense. And I think, so many organizations are now looking at that going, oh, wait a minute, we’re paying all this money to these third-party vendors, but we’re already investing in Epic. And so, you know, obviously there’s a little bit of a licensing cost with Cheers on a little bit of a maintenance cost.

But when you factor it all together, they’re still saving exponential amounts of money. But also on the soft side of that, the ROI is much greater because now you’re not having to provide exports to Salesforce or WebMD Ignite. You’re not having to make those connections. You’re able to just simply understand your populations, build the campaigns appropriately, and then have them run autonomously.

The other thing is, marketers can be given access to Epic. If the organization so deems to go in and build off of these templates to kind of align with their paid media campaigns or various other campaigns that they have going to make sure that marketing and IT are really operating in a synergistic way, because a lot of times, what organizations are realizing is, well, marketing’s got Salesforce or WebMD Ignite, and they’re just kind of running the show on that side.

But then in Cheers and Hello World, where messaging a totally different message or something, that’s not aligning, you know, via the MyDhart landing page, via announcements to the patient, via text messaging. There’s just so many automations that can occur on both sides. And so bringing that into one system, we can view everything right there. We can set up those campaigns for the patient and be using that data as the patient comes in.

Or rather than a weekly export, now you can do a daily campaign and a daily processing of anyone whose care gaps became overdue. So you get much more timely communications to those patients as well. 

Jenny: Yeah, I love that. Brandon, I’d love for you to chat a little bit about, kind of how we’re viewing Hedy & Hopp as helping bridge that gap between marketing and it.

Right. You talk a little bit about how marketing can use the templates that have been created to be able to activate campaigns. A lot of marketers really don’t understand much about how Cheers actually functions on the back end, because there hasn’t been a lot of non-analyst training available to marketers yet. I’m very excited to announce that we are starting a series going into each of the different platforms and kind of what you need to know as marketers about ways that these tools can be helpful for you.

So look for announcement for that soon to be able to sign up. It’s a free series. Very excited. Brandon and I are going to be leading it, and I think it’ll be extremely helpful for folks to wrap their brains around it. But for now, right now, what is happening based off of all the folks that we’ve been talking to at various systems, is, you know, IT wants to own the entire ecosystem in many situations because they don’t believe that marketing really understands all of the different technical constraints and the security and compliance concerns about actually giving them access to the system.

So, they’ve been very reassured whenever you’ve been on the call and you’d be like, no, no, no, I’m one of you. I’m an IT guy, like, I understand what we’re talking about. So I’d love for you just to kind of like shine a light on that. A little bit of like when we say that. Like, what does that mean?

Brandon: Yeah. You know, one of the biggest things when I came to Hedy & Hopp was like, hey guys, I am not a marketer, I am an IT guy. So like, I’m going to need your help to teach me how to be a marketer, right? To help me understand that landscape. And in the same, you know, the heady and hot times and very gracious to say, hey, we don’t understand Epic IT necessarily.

So like let’s work together. And I think that really what our clients that we have talked to have seen us do that, then they kind of go, oh, wait, there’s a natural synergy that can occur there. And some of the IT leaders that I’ve talked to as a part of my role at Hedy & Hopp, it’s like, hey guys, I am one of you.

I don’t understand this marketing stuff fully either. And then in fact, Epics checklists even call for certain implementation items to involve marketing, right? So yes, IT should absolutely own the infrastructure. It should absolutely be able to run it through their governance process. But marketing has to be at the table because nobody understands the needs and the populations of the organization.

And the strategy for how to either attract more patients, build a service line, etc., than the marketing team. So I think rather than creating those silos of like, hey, we’re IT, we’re going to own every piece of this, or hey, we’re marketing and we’re going to tell you exactly what we need. Just come to the table with an open mind and have those conversations of like, we truly are serving the same thing, right?

We want what’s best for our patients. We want to acquire more patients because that’s good for our ecosystem as a health system. And so I think when we do that and when we as Hedy & Hopp can kind of guide that, it really makes it a synergistic relationship for the hospital and health system as well. 

Jenny: Absolutely. Good tangible example of that is workshops that we facilitate.

So we are going in a couple of weeks onsite to a health system, and we’re facilitating a Epic marketing and analytics workshop with marketing and IT in the room. And we’re walking through and helping them align on the prioritization of populations and campaigns when their Cheers goes live, as well as measurement strategy and then very important roles and responsibilities throughout the process as the project timeline is being created.

So getting everybody in one room and then us being able to facilitate it as people that kind of understand what needs to happen during a rollout to make sure that marketing understands when they need to be plugged in. They’re working earlier, you know, upstream to create that, Persona, messaging strategy. So that way, when IT is ready to be able to create that component, it’s all ready to go, right?

We’re working parallel path to make sure that it’s a success and timely. So on that note, the areas that we are really focusing on working with health systems really fall under two buckets. We have marketing and then marketing analytics. So for those of you that listen to our podcast regularly, we’ve done a couple of episodes about UTM Connect, which is the tool that Hedy & Hopp built that basically sits on top of the Epic ecosystem in your website, and it helps pull in all of your UTM parameters from your campaigns and puts them in the patient records.

You can do a full ROI reporting of, you know, this cardiology campaign that we were running on Google spent X dollars on Google. Here’s the actual number of patient appointments and the revenue that was driven. Very excited about that work. But it really can go a lot deeper than that. That really is the tip of the spear for a lot of that.

And the way that we’re kind of categorizing it right now within marketing and marketing analytics is really thinking about three buckets: audit, strategy, and implementation. Right. There’s three distinct ways that we can lean in to be able to help organizations, whether you’re upstream and still kind of figuring it all out, and you need us to come in and develop that strategy, or maybe you have Cheers and Hello world.

And it’s been running, but marketing hasn’t been involved. Do you have no idea what’s even going out the door? We are happy to come in to do an audit, either on your messaging or on the technology that you have licensed that maybe you don’t even know is licensed, because marketing hasn’t been in the room for those conversations yet.

We can really be that, you know, positive, joyful middleman that brings people together to be able to develop a go-forward strategy. So, we’re very excited about all of this, Brandon, and we’re very excited to have you on board. We are actually presenting on our Epic Marketing Services at HMPS next month. So if you’re going to be at HMPS, I am speaking alongside Amanda Bowie from Bayhealth.

We’re going to be talking about some of the work that we have been doing with them to be able to help them develop a go-to-market strategy for Epic, and leveraging all of the tools and technologies they have available. On that. Brandon, to wrap us up, I would love to hear, you know, if you have one piece of advice for marketers that have not yet really been able to understand the Epic ecosystem, have not had a positive or any sort of working relationship with their IT, what would you tell them to focus on over the next couple of weeks to kind of give them some positive momentum to move in that direction? 

Brandon:Yeah, I think, you know, it’s quite simple, right? Communicate, right. Just communicate with your IT department. Let them know. Hey, these are our goals as marketing. And certainly, you know, we as Hedy & Hopp are very happy to kind of jump in and help out where that makes sense. And kind of work with those marketers as well and, and even talk to the IT folks, because a lot of times it’s a little bit of translation.

Right? So marketing has these ideas, they have these thoughts that they really want to kind of bring to fruition. But IT struggles sometimes to translate those into the IT side of it. And so I think just open communication. Work together early and often. I think that’s been the most successful thing that I’ve seen in my past experiences as well.

That’s awesome. Well, listeners, if you are interested in chatting with us about Epic Marketing Services, we are currently booking out for summer and fall, so give us a call. We would love to chat with you and even just have a brainstorming session, an intro session, and kind of chat a little bit more about what your goals or eject goals and objectives are, and we’d be happy to share with you some insight that we have gleaned over the last years.

We’ve been building out this business unit, so if this episode has been helpful for you, please like it. Share it with your colleagues that are perhaps, working with you, collaborating with you, you know, on building out your marketing strategy in this space. And we look forward to seeing you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.