See You at SHSMD (And Meet Sarah Cutcliffe!)

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 and founder at Hedy and Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have with me Sarah Cutcliffe. Sarah is Hedy and Hopp’s new Director of Epic Services. We are so excited to have her join us, and she’s going to be joining us at SHSMD this coming weekend.

So we wanted to do a quick little podcast episode for those of you that are attending SHSMD, it’ll give you a little bit of context about who we are, who Sarah is, what we’re going to be talking about so you can come prepared and excited. And if you’re going to, unfortunately, miss SHSMD, you’ll get a little bit of an understanding about what is happening and be able to connect with us.

If there’s anything that we’re going to be talking about that you won’t be able to hear in person. So first of all, Sarah welcome so much. We are so excited to have you join Hedy and Hopp. You’ve been here for a few months now. Really enjoyed having you integrate with the team. Let’s kick off by having you talk a little bit about your background and how you fell into this world of Epic expertise.

Sarah: Yeah, well, the excitement is the same on my side. I’m super jazzed to have joined Hedy and Hopp. I’m excited to be meeting everybody, both from our team here at Hedy and Hopp, as well as all of our friends at SHSMD and beyond. My Epic background, when you say I fell into this, it literally was that.  I’m going to date myself.

I put my resume on Monster.com after grad school. And Epic reached out to me the next day and said, hey, would you like to apply? And I had no idea what Epic was at that time. I did know that I had friends who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, so I took the interview. And now I’m looking back almost 20 years later and can’t believe that this has turned into my career.

But I started at Epic as a revenue cycle trainer, so I got to teach people how to use the software. It was an incredible experience. Once I left Epic, I ended up in healthcare consulting, and it really gave me a great new perspective of understanding how Epic customers actually use Epic. There’s a big difference, and Jenny.

I think you know what this difference feels like, between this is a software and how can we use it? And then looking at how customers actually use it, what is functional, how do we achieve our goals using this incredibly powerful tool? So I was able to work for several healthcare systems across the country, both as a trainer.

And then I moved into the analyst space. So I was doing the build and working with my internal operational teams to make sure that Epic did the things that they needed. And my most recent role was at Hospital for Special Surgery. I was the Director of Performance and Optimization, and I was able to take really complex projects and bring them to life in Epic.

So across many different teams, I was able to bring people together and execute on like pretty hard and, not always the most fun, stuff but we were able to put together some really, wonderful and impactful projects, like enabled paperless billing for the hospital. We were able to retool, our we had no, “no show late cancellation” policy, for example, and we were able to execute on that.

So my background is really understanding Epic, being able to talk to operational teams, marketing teams, understand what they need and then be able to translate that in how it can be executed using Epic. And anybody who’s dipped their toe in the Epic world, you know that it has its own language, its own teams, its own processes.

I’m very familiar with what those are, and I think that I’ll be able to bring that knowledge to Hedy and Hopp and be able to help us, be able to support clients as they navigate using this new tool in the marketing space.

Jenny: You already have, Sarah. Teams and clients have already spoken so highly about working with you. At this point we’re working with systems across the country, helping them leverage and understand marketing analytics and marketing automation tools that are available. And so being able to have somebody that actually understands the vocabulary, terminology, how to ask for something, using the right language, it’s really a gamechanger in helping our clients move a lot faster and more confidently navigating those conversations.

So, so excited to have you on board. We are very excited about SHSMD. We are doing an hour and a half long lunch session on Sunday. The title of the session is from Access to Action Turning Epic into a Growth Engine for Health Care Marketing. And if you are not yet registered, I am sorry to say it is sold out.

This was a registration required event and it sold out very, very early. So that’s really exciting. We are in the works of planning a webinar repeat. So if you are attending SHSMD and aren’t able to go, or if you are not going to SHSMD and you’re having FOMO, keep an eye on our socials will be announcing a link to be able to register for a free webinar for a repeat, but we’re really going to be about all of the different analytics and data tools that exist within the Epic tool suite, and how to use that to be able to measure and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way.

So very excited to dig into it. One of the things that I’m most excited about is we’re leaving about 30 minutes for Q&A, because whenever we did our Summer School Webinar Series, there were so many questions submitted, we had to do follow up emails to respond to all of the questions because we just ran out of time. So with this session, we’re really allowing a lot of time for folks to be able to dig in, ask questions, really understand the material in a meaningful way before they head home.

So, should be pretty fun.

Sarah: So I’m excited that it is on Sunday, because that gives us an opportunity to be able to talk through those questions over the next few days of SHSMD as well.

Jenny: I completely agree. I, one of my favorite things about presenting at conferences in the first day or two, is being able to have folks be able to come to our booth, schedule lunches, coffee. So we’ll just have one-on-one and talk about their implementation questions or their tactical questions related to the content that we presented.

So I completely agree. It should be fun. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about, kind of what you are excited about with SHSMD, what you’re looking forward to. This is the first time you have gone to SHSMD, right? So yes, I’ve not gone to an industry event that is focused on marketing before, so this will be new to you.

So what are you interested in?

Sarah: I’m really excited to learn more about how Epic can fit into this space overall, and meet needs of our, like, future clients or any health care systems. I’m also excited to meet people. I’m a people-person I like really feed off of getting to know people. And because this is my first like marketing for a, I get to meet a lot of new people, which I, I know I’m really gonna enjoy, but I also am excited to see, what health care systems are there because I have a pretty wide experience.

I have a suspicion that I’m going to actually meet people that we’re connected based on where I’ve already been before, or people that I know who work at different systems. So really jazzed for people. Also, I went to grad school in Maryland, so crab cakes, baby. I’m jazzed to grab some good seafood when we’re in the Baltimore area.

Jenny: Same. I am so excited. That will definitely be a highlight. Yeah, so. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. We are very much looking forward to SHSMD. Sarah, we are so excited to have you join us in person. So clients will be able to meet you in person. And then folks in the industry can start chatting with you about your POV and how we are bringing all of these tools to life for systems.

Sarah: Yeah. Can’t wait.

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy! Share this episode with anyone you know that will be attending SHSMD. Be sure and stop by our booth. We have a very uniquely handmade backdrop this year as Hedy and Hopp often does, we’re bringing the vibes. So swing by to be able to check it out, as well as some super fun swag that we are known for that you will love wearing around the conference.

So thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next week on another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers. Bye.