Epic Certified Agency

Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to this very special episode of We Are, Marketing Happy –  A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m Jenny Bristow, and I am your host and the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am joined today by three Hedy & Hopp team members. We have Mark Brandes, our Director of Data and Technology, Lindsey Brown, our director of activation, and Cassie Haxton, a Marketing Analyst on our team. 

And we are here to talk about the fact that Hedy & Hopp is the first ever marketing agency to begin the Epic certification process. Yay! Such a huge deal. We are so, so excited. 

So we are recording this podcast fresh from getting back from the Epic headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin. We had an amazing three days of in-person training and we wanted to kind of pause, freeze this moment in time and really create a podcast that talks about how we got here, our experiences, and create an opportunity for other marketers in the space to understand the why behind us getting Epic certified, and understand if it’s something that might be valuable for your organization to pursue, as well.

So let’s get right into it. I want to jump first into: How did we get here? I’ve received this message no fewer than about two dozen times through LinkedIn inbox messages, of how and why, Jenny? I need to know more. Well, there’s quite a history around that. So the cliff notes—if you’re old enough to know a cliff notes are—is that three years ago, we met Epic and some representatives from Epic at, about four years ago, actually, at a health care marketing conference.

I believe it was, SHSMD. And we saw them again at HCIC, and we began fostering a relationship. We understood Epic is the largest EHR in the world. And with our passion of improving patients’ access to care, EHRs fit in there somehow. But we didn’t really know what the future would look like. Well, that really has evolved over the last four years as our relationship has deepened with them.

And they began expressing to us their interest in welcoming marketers to the table. So for anybody who is listening to this and you’re an Epic-run system, you may be saying, wait, but I’m a marketer and I’ve never talked to Epic before. That doesn’t feel right. They’re not there yet with you, but they’re working on it. So in general, Epic has figured out that having just IT teams implement Epic is not ideal for the patient experience.

So there’s been a concerted effort within the organization to get marketers to the table. Any new Epic implementations, they’re requiring somebody with a marketing POV to be part of that workgroup. And they are trying to get systems that have been on Epic to add people to those work groups, because they know that, you know, the way that you word a message makes a big difference. And they really see the value in that. 

One quick sidebar they shared an anecdote that a system was implementing Epic, and there was an IT person that was in charge of turning on all of the pre-appointment reminders, and they found out after the fact that each patient was receiving over 40 text message and message notifications because they just turned on all of them.

So that’s a great example, tangibly, of why marketing needs to be at the table. So they began this big transformation a couple of years ago. In April, they welcomed Hedy & Hopp, as well as three other agencies, to the Epic campus to really educate us around all the different tools and functionalities within Epic that they believe could be valuable for marketers.

We’ve had a lot of sidebar conversations with Epic, sharing our POV around the value of adding things like UTM parameters to capture data whenever people actually schedule an appointment or find a doctor using their tools and they’ve been receptive and implemented those solutions. So it’s been a really beautiful back-and-forth relationship where they’re hearing what marketers need, and they’re taking action on it.

So with that, we began talking to our system clients about being their partner in making their, or using epic as a patient acquisition platform. And we kept running into the same roadblock that their teams wanted us to be Epic certified in order to get into their systems, both to implement Cheers campaigns, or to pull data, to be able to do full ROI reporting.

And so it was a natural next step. It was not natural to go through that process to sign up on Epic. They did not have a system in place yet. They made one for us. And now, they are excited to welcome additional marketers, even talking about potentially creating some additional training material specifically for marketers, which we’re sharing our POVs on, to make sure that it is very beneficial for folks to be able to go through the training and then jump in and make it impactful.

So I’d love to chat with the team a little bit. Let’s start with you, Lindsey. Marketing tools. So for anybody who, perhaps, isn’t super familiar with Epic’s technical infrastructure or is just high-level aware, what is your perspective of why and how Epic can be a useful tool in a marketer’s toolbox? 

Lindsey: So I think there’s a few different things. One is, you know, how we are communicating with patients really is part of marketing. It’s absolutely part of how a physician communicates. And anyone on the physician’s team is communicating with patients for medical information, things like that. Super important. But how that is communicated, when that’s communicated, in other ways, to ensure that that patient is getting all of the information that they need and they have it at their fingertips is really important.

I think something that’s really special about the whole MyChart ecosystem is that it really allows the patients to be in full control of the information about their health and allows them to communicate with a variety of people, however they want to communicate with it. So it’s a really important tool from a patient experience, which we can learn a lot from that as marketers, and just how those are being used to better communicate with potential patients and ensure when they do become a patient, that they have an optimal experience and they continue being a patient with us and having a positive experience not only with our communication, but also with the people that they meet in person at their facilities. 

So a couple things that I think marketers could really think about, are things like your KPIs. So something that we learned is there’s a lot there’s a lot of little things that you have to turn on within Epic to make sure things are running smoothly. So as a marketing team, if you’ve set a KPI that you know you want to make sure people are booking appointments, you have to make sure that functionality is available in Epic, it’s been turned on, and that it is, in the correct sequence so that folks are actually, able to do the thing that you need them to do from a marketing perspective, so that you can again show that ROI. But if they can’t even do the thing, you can’t get the, you can’t get any of those kinds of results you have to rely on, on probably less technical ways of measuring those results.

The other thing, I was thinking about just in terms of marketing, is there’s a feature within my chart where there are things like announcements that you can use, which is really cool. And I was thinking about, one of our system clients that was running a cancer screening campaign or colon cancer screening campaign, and it was literally for anyone above a certain age.

And something you can do within Epic is make sure there is some kind of an announcement banner. So as soon as they’re logging into MyChart to get that communication that, you know, they’re getting from their physician or looking at their lab results, what have you, they have that reminder and they can go and get a screening right away.

Again, you want to make sure that that kind of functionality is built in before you have those announcements. But those are the kinds of things that you can use from at least a marketing perspective. And then just other ways to engage with your patients outside of the digital space because so much of what happens in a patient experience happens in person.

Make sure that we’re getting people signed up for a MyChart account. Something I didn’t realize is if you’re a patient, you don’t automatically get a MyChart account. You have the ability to access information, but you don’t automatically get a login and a password like you have to actually do that as a patient and get involved. So something we could do as marketers is just help encourage that so that we can, again improve that communication, improve that patient experience, and allow them to have access to all those great tools, as well.

Jenny: Absolutely. And that the exciting part is really just MyChart scratches, just the tip of the iceberg, right? We have Cheers, Hello World, like, there’s, MyChart Builder, which has landing pages which are available for non-patients. So a lot of—a misnomer I’ve heard quite often is that it’s only available to communicate with patients. That’s not true. You actually can run campaigns and capture prospective patient information and nurture them using Epic tools as well. So, a lot more to come on that information at a later date. 

Mark, share with us a little bit through the lens of marketing analytics. What’s the value for marketers or analysts to get access to that data?

Mark: Yeah, I mean, there is so much data inside of Epic, as I’m sure most of our listeners understand. And I think part of going through this training is we were able to really see where those data connections are, and, oh, we should be able to report on this. To Lindsey’s point, you can make those announcements. 

There’s also ways to say, are people engaging with those announcements? Can we see that information, right? And so there’s ways to make sure you can report on all of it. There’s so much reporting already available, just by default inside of Epic. But I think without, kind of a marketer’s viewpoint on that, some of those reports just kind of go by the wayside. I know we’ve talked to some of our clients and yeah, some of that reporting is available, but sometimes our marketing teams don’t even see it. So they can see right now how many people, how many of their customers are signed up for MyChart, right? How many have accounts? How many have signed up for this? Some of that’s available in just standard reporting and it just doesn’t make its way to marketing. 

So that’s another reason why it’s such a push to get marketers involved. Because while you know IT teams are great. Sometimes those reports come a little utilitarian to them. Right? It’s just kind of the standard stuff that just kind of push out. Whereas I think when a marketer gets that information, there’s a sense of we need to disseminate this, we need to really make this actionable. And there’s just that next step that comes with, with the kind of marketing mindset involved there, which I think is great.

The other big thing is that with what Epic is trying to do now, you can really look at your marketing tactics and look and see, did they turn into customers? Did those customers sign up for appointments? Did they go through with that appointment? You can see all the way down that line to really understand—yeah, my marketing really actually did make a huge impact because look at all these actual patients.

You can even get to an ROI at a certain point because you can say, this appointment brought in this much funds, we can compare that to the amount we kind of used in marketing. So there’s a lot of connectivity there. Some of that’s still being worked on. Epic still have some things in place to make sure that when somebody gets to the site, we can actually track them, but there are ways to do that now.

And I think with our training and our conversations with Epic, we’ve learned some of those ways, which is great. So we can kind of help some customers hopefully get that to happen. And then, yeah, I mean, I think that just unlocks a whole new level of reporting. I think so many marketers are stuck in just being able to look at platform metrics, maybe they look at traffic on their website, but sometimes it stops there, and it’s so tough to kind of say, yeah, our marketing was very impactful because we got this much traffic on the site. You got to go to that next level to really start feeling that impact. And I think this relationship with Epic and what they’re trying to do is going to make that very, available to us and possible.

Jenny: Yeah, such great points, Mark. And I think about all of those systems that got in trouble for putting Google Analytics for tracking in MyChart. Don’t—why? The data is already there, right? You just have to be able to have access to the correct people on your team, have the correct backend reporting set up within Epic to then be able to export it.

So when we think about the lens of like privacy and compliance, all of this data is accessible in an appropriate way. 

Mark: That’s right. Exactly. 

Jenny: Perfect. So let’s talk a little bit about the actual training. So we were there three full days. The first area that we got certified in the beginning of our train track was MyChart. So we went through patient experience training, two days of MyChart, and then we have a few virtual days afterwards that include things like Cheers training, we’re doing, the find a doctor, physician finder training.

There’s a couple of additional badges and training that we’re going to be going through, as well as, Cogito training, as well, for our analytics team, for Mark and Cassie. 

Cassie, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the training. So you come to us, you come into the conversation with kind of a business intelligence, heavy data analyst perspective. Was the training, what you expected? What was your big takeaways? If you were more of a comms- or PR-oriented marketer, how would you have felt about it? I’d love to kind of hear your big takeaway through those lens.

Cassie: Well, when I, when I walked into the text software platform, I was like, oh, God, I’ve stepped back into the 90s.

It’s definitely, you know, the interface is, you know, you think of the doctor’s office and you think of it being a little bit outdated. So it’s a little outdated. The structure behind it is not. And, the depth and you know, that you can get to in granularity with setting up how you set up a patient that’s not either that’s it’s very, structured. And they clearly put it together over many, many decades of figuring out patient experience and doctor experience and how to, you know, stitch it together so that they have a good experience on the front end. I think, it was interesting. 

I think the most valuable part of the training for us was just getting in there and getting our hands wet and our hands dirty, and understanding, okay, this is the interface of Hyperspace, which is what the doctors and the nurses use. And then this is the, text, which is what, you know, the builder or the IT person might use and understanding that there’s a difference and that there’s tons of toggles on the front end and there’s tons of pages to shift through on the back end. And it’s not as easy, it’s not just something you can turn on. I mean, you can, but you have to turn on many layers and many details. And so I think it was really valuable for us just to even understand what we’re dealing with. And I think there’s, there’s more to go and there’s more ways to go for a marketing perspective. And for it to be truly valuable for marketers,

I think there were moments where we were kind of looking at each other like, I don’t know if we need to know this part or, you know, we might not go into this place again. But I think and it sounds like Epic’s kind of working with how can we make this more, you know, package it a little bit differently and, and different, maybe combine certain tracks or, you know, shift them a little bit.

But, I think just getting trained and, and certified in it is valuable to be able to understand what all is in there. And then you likely will have someone on your team that, you know, whether it’s if it’s not you, there will be someone on your team that probably will go in and set up everything. But if you have a better understanding of what they should set up and why, and how and how that might affect, you know, kind of that unrolling of a patient experience, unrolling of a marketing journey. Then I think that, you know, that’s going to help everybody in the end. 

Jenny: That’s such great points, Cassie. I feel like whenever we went into this and when we started, like for ad agency day for Epic, for example, it very much seemed like a bunch of wizzy wigs. They were beautiful drag and drop and it’s so easy and beautiful. That isn’t actually how a lot of it is. And that’s okay, right? But I think it’s really important for marketers, if we’re going to go down this journey, if we’re going to take this hike, right? Using an analogy, I want to know it’s a ten mile hike. So I prepare myself versus thinking it’s a one mile out and back, and I don’t necessarily need to bring a bottle of water with me. Right? It’s a different mindset. So it’s not that it’s not achievable. It’s absolutely achievable. And it’s very, very beneficial. But it is definitely a bigger lift, and understanding that and respecting that within your organization, I think, will result in much more meaningful conversations. 

Sort of like the privacy space, right? It’s so much more layered and intense than you would think just, oh, it’s easy. Just to stop collecting the data. Well, there’s a lot more to it than that. Same thing over here on the epic side. So definitely takes a lot of thought and consideration. And I definitely agree going through training, even if it was components that we may never use again, was really helpful.

And kudos to Cassie! She’s the first one out of our group to actually successfully pass the post-class project build. So, yay, Cassie!

Cassie: A little more time, then you guys.

Jenny: No, you did it though. I’m very proud of you. Very exciting. 

So, we have some big takeaways, lots of exciting things in the future. If you’re listening to this and you’re saying, wow, I want to keep learning more, we have two opportunities for you.

First, we are doing an in-person Learning Lab on Epic and the marketing and marketing analytics opportunities at HCIC. So if you’re going to HCIC, grab a spot. We absolutely anticipate that it’s going to be a full room. I believe you could register your spot in advance. So if you’re going and want to tune in, grab it. 

If you’re not going, we are going to be repeating that session at a virtual environment, shortly after HCIC. So you can go to HedyandHopp.com/EpicWebinar. And go ahead and grab your spot. Now, there’s no cost to this. It will be virtual with some really great Q&A at the end. So we’re going to put both of those links in the show notes so you can follow along. But if you’re interested in this topic, definitely grab your seat on the webinar.

It’s going to be a much more robust where we dig into each of the individual topics, and should be a really great learning opportunity. 

So again, group, thank you so much for joining me and being the first ever marketers to go through Epic certification. It was a really fun hill to climb, and I cannot wait to see all of the fun work we do for systems.

So with that, thank you for tuning in today, on our episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Be sure to share this episode with somebody on your team that you think would value the information and give us a like and a follow to be notified of future episodes. And with that, we’ll see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!