Data and Dashboards Within Epic

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 & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to join you. I just finished doing our very last session, so session four, of our four-week Summer School, Epic for Marketers webinar series.

We had phenomenal attendance from leaders and marketers within health systems across the country, and really just phenomenal feedback from all of the attendees about what they learned. So I wanted to do today, just a brief little summary of a couple of the analytics tools and reporting options that are available to you within Epic today. So if you’re a marketer that uses an Epic system, first of all, you should absolutely go back and sign up for our Summer School series.

We will send you a link to watch the four episodes, the recording of each of the weekly episodes, and then, you will have all the information that you need to get a deep dive. But today, what we’re going to do is I just want to talk a little bit about the different names of the tools and the databases and the reports that are available within Epic.

So if you are a marketer on a health system that uses Epic, all of these tools already exist. One of the cool things about Epic’s marketing tool suite today is that you have the ability to put data into Epic and pull data out of Epic to be able to do your marketing campaign reporting. So what does that mean?

That means, let’s say that you’re doing a campaign for mammographies on paid media, and you can put a UTM parameter, which your marketing teams use for all campaigns already, on the ad when they click on it, and then go to your website and then schedule an appointment, that UTM parameter will actually be added to their patient record. And then you can actually do an export from that patient or from that database to be able to do a dashboard to show your marketing campaign ROI.

So you can show we spent X dollars on, say, this Google campaign. Here’s the number of clicks it received. So that’s campaign data. It lives within Google, right? And then here’s the number of landing page visitors that we received. Here’s the number that booked an appointment. Here’s the number of folks that actually completed that appointment. And then here’s the downstream revenue associated with it.

So that information all lives in different places, right. So what you have to do is put data into Epic and then pull data out of Epic to use your own data visualization tool. So a couple of different names of tools and terminology that you should know, is first Chronicles. That is a real time live transactional database. So it runs Reporting Workbench which is where a lot of pre-built tools, or sorry, reports live that you could access.

And it’s a great tool to answer questions such as “did our campaign today spike my chart activations today”? Otherwise, what you’re going to be looking at is Clarity, which is a relational database that does nightly data extracts, and Caboodle, which is the data warehouse that lives within Epic. So this is really great. If you want deep campaign analysis, this is where you actually want to see how many appointments were scheduled yesterday, what the downstream revenue is for the last 90 days after your campaign was launched, etc..

So LinkSource is the tool that Epic uses and it’s a native Epic tool. Again, you don’t pay for this. It just comes with Epic and whatever you send out. So you get that mammography campaign either it’s a Cheers campaign or maybe it’s a media campaign when somebody goes to the landing page for mammography service line and they schedule an appointment, that UTM parameter is appended to their patient record, along with the appointment ID, and then you can pull it out to be able to visualize it within your own data visualization tool, to be able to see all that information.

So you have the ability to put some information into Epic, but you don’t have the ability to visualize the data within Epic like most groups will want to see it. So we want to figure out exactly what data fields can we put in, and then how do we pull them out? One of the really interesting things, and some benefits that we’re seeing right now is whenever you manage your marketing teams and partners, really cohesively, you have the ability to be much smarter about media spend and patient acquisition approaches.

So for some of our clients, for example, if you’re able to manage paid media and Epic Cheers campaigns, let’s say again that mammography campaign will have an understanding of the amount of access that is available, and then we can actually send out a Cheers campaign to try to try to drive demand with our current patients, get them those appointments that we know they are up for, that they need to be scheduling to be able to stay on schedule with the proactive care.

And then also, we could do a paid media campaign to try to bring net new patients in. And if you have a centralized ability to be able to view access and availability, then you have the ability to understand, hey, we have more current patients responding to our Cheers campaigns. We’re actually going to pull back on our media budget a little bit until more appointments open up, and then we’re going to ramp it up again.

So there are some great dashboards that are already available within Epic. You can go to it’s called the Analytics Catalog. And that’s like a search engine for existing reports. Otherwise you can use SlicerDicer or the Reporting Workbench as other tools to be able to pull up data to be able to understand what’s happening as far as appointment scheduling and campaign response within your organization.

So this is just the tip of the iceberg. If what you’re hearing on this podcast all sounds like a foreign language to you, but you are with a system that uses Epic, please, please, please sign up for our Summer School series. It’s free. We’ll immediately send you the links to all four episodes. The first covered MyChart and Hello World.

The second episode dug into Cheers. The third episode talked about how you and your IT teams need to collaborate to be able to get all of this technology rocking and rolling and some different considerations of things that IT wished you understood about how their processes worked. And then the fourth was all around analytics data and dashboards. So again, it’s free.

The link will be in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining. Hopefully this gave you a little bit to think about. If you’re already on Epic as your system, there’s lots of data that it really is at your fingertips and just waiting for you to begin leveraging to be smarter about the way you’re conducting outreach and the way that you’re measuring performance of campaigns.

Thank you for joining us today on this episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. I will see you next week. Cheers!