Straight off the plane from Wisconsin, Jenny is joined by Mark Brandes, Director of Data and Technology, to unpack insights from Epic’s first-ever marketing-focused event. As one of only four invited agencies, Hedy & Hopp had a front-row seat to how Epic is evolving to support health system marketing teams, with tools aimed at boosting engagement, elevating branding, and powering campaigns through privacy-safe data integration.
Jenny and Mark break down key updates, including MyChart Builder, which allows marketers to create real-time, branded microsites, Cheers campaigns that enable multichannel patient outreach, and new integrated analytics that track true ROI from campaign to appointment.
Connect with Mark:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbrandes
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
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Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host and the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I’m joined today by our very own Mark Brandes Mark is the Director of Data and Technology here at Hedy & Hopp.
And we are so excited because we just got back from Epic’s first-ever event focused on marketers that work with health systems. So only four agencies were invited to this event, and we were very excited to be one of the four. And my plane just landed about an hour ago to get me back home to St. Louis. But we wanted to hop on and record this episode right away so we can provide our listeners with a really good download of all of the exciting things coming out of Epic, focused on marketing teams.
Mark: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jenny. It was a great trip. We learned a lot and, I’m excited to talk about it.
Jenny: Awesome. So I think the first thing that I want to cover, because for those of you that you know, maybe are hearing about this for the first time, the question is going to be why? You know, why did Epic have this?
And it was really interesting. In our conversations with Epic, they stated, at the kickoff of the event, that they’re very much seeing marketers as being a new end user of Epic. So, traditionally, it’s the CIO, CTO, you know, they’re the ones doing the Epic implementation, making sure the technology is stood up and used appropriately by the clinical teams and for the operations.
But there is coming a point now where the marketing teams are needing to get in, or should be getting in to be able to make sure that the brand is represented appropriately, aesthetically, from a communication perspective. There’s lots of patient communications happening within Epic. And so they’re really recognizing that need. And so they chose to hold this one-day event with a few select agencies that they saw as really well connected and well understanding of health systems to help number one, educate us on all of the resources available for marketers.
But number two, to get our thoughts and points of view on what it would take for all of these different tools to truly be useful for marketers, what functionality exist today versus what should be on the roadmap as they’re building it out, you know, to be able to fit our needs?
Mark: Yeah, I really appreciate it. They’re kind of bringing that to the table because you’re right, historically, Epic has kind of been in the purview of the IT department.
Right. And lots of data. There are lots of things they need to make sure secure. And so it’s definitely advisable that they’re kind of in charge of that. But I think what we’ve seen in recent years is that all that data can also turn into marketing opportunities. And so when there’s questions around that usually it’s well how do we port this data into something else securely?
How do we put data into Epic that maybe is more marketing-focused. And so I think Epic understanding hearing those conversations realized there was an opportunity to say, hey, we can do this internally. We can actually have this built into the software. So then you’re still having the same kind of security and trustworthiness you’ve had Epic all these years.
And we can turn that into marketing solutions. And I think that’s a fantastic way to go. I think it’s opening up some conversations between those kind of marketing teams and the IT teams to help understand here’s how we can work together, and Epic is making that available to people. Right before it was this conversation of, well, do we let marketing in there?
And, you know, sometimes that conversation ended with absolutely not. And so I think they’re finding ways of letting marketing in in a safe way. And so that marketing can still do the job, can still bring the brand to the forefront of those conversations, still work on kind of user behavior and work on that. And it can still focus on the back end of Epic and making it as strong as possible.
Jenny: Yeah. Two key things that I took away from the conversations at the table at the very beginning of, you know, why marketing should have a seat at the table is, number one, all of the agencies that were there admitted that they have seen shadow IT groups beginning to form at all of these different marketing departments within health systems.
Right. Because if it won’t work with you, because they have different objectives or goals of their, you know, own teams, you got to get your job done. You have to accomplish your own objectives. So often CFOs will actually start building their own little mini shadow IT departments or analytics departments to be able to still accomplish their goals.
So they are seeing that happen. We are seeing that happen. And kind of the goal here is like, that’s not what’s best for the organizations. That’s certainly not what’s best for the patient. You know, really should be a seamless experience. So that definitely is one thing of note. And then another thing that somebody mentioned in the meeting is that, you know, marketers, our job is to influence behavior change, right?
If you think about the core of what marketing is, it’s behavior change. And so Epic at its core, when you think about the different platforms where patients can interact with it, it allows them to seek out care that they need, schedule those appointments, change appointments, pay bills online. Right. We’re trying to enable them to have a little bit of control over that.
And so that’s what marketers are best at, is making sure patients understand what is available and then helping them find and leverage those tools. So again, I definitely see this as a really strategic move from Epic’s part and very excited about it. Let’s dig into the actual tools that we talked about. So high level. We talked about MyChart Builder, Cheers Campaigns and Contact Management, Provider Finder, Online Scheduling, and Hello World Omnichannel Engagement.
So we’re going to start with MyChart Builder. And we’re going to go through each of these. And what I’m excited to do with Mark is just to share some of the big picture takeaways. What are these tools? You know, if you’re a marketer within an organization, maybe you’ve never even touched Epic. I know some of our clients, you know, we’ve gone in and there perhaps have been some Cheers campaigns running, and some of them have been running for like six years.
The person that set it up originally was no longer with the organization. Marketing didn’t know what was happening. So what we’re going to do on this episode is talk about each of these platforms briefly, and then we’re going to be actually publishing additional content about each of them with more of an in-depth example of how it rolls into marketing’s workflows, and that way that you can get a better understanding of how you can begin leveraging it.
So first, MyChart builder, MyChart Builder is basically a microsite builder to deliver personalized experiences. So all the way back in 2016, whenever 15 and 16, whenever Hedy & Hopp was first getting involved in healthcare marketing, we were beginning to useing Epic’s iframing capabilities to be able to iframe in the location finder, provider finder, or schedule appointment tools.
Not great, right? Like iframes aren’t great, but our goal was to try to, like, reduce the number of steps patients had to take to be able to find that care. Well, this is a huge leap forward where Epic is saying, you know, we want you to be able to create an entire landing page experience where it is native.
So to find a doctor, schedule an appointment, all of those steps you want a patient to take will be updated real time based off of real-time filtering and availability, based off of all of the, physicians and locations that are actually within your organization’s Epic instance, which is phenomenal. So no more data porting over to a third-party tool, not knowing if it is an up-to-date database through the lens of physician information, or location information or insurance information.
Everything again, has that same one source of truth. So that is something that I know I’m super excited about. It has a really interesting wizzy wig. Interface for those of us that, you know, perhaps they don’t want to code. They want to make it as easy as possible for marketers to be able to stand it up.
But you have the ability to set a lot of creative guardrails as far as fonts, formatting, colors, rounded corners, square corners, you know, really making sure that your brand visuals are coming to life on these microsites, or landing pages.
Mark: Yeah. And I feel like this is one of those areas. Jenny, you mentioned shadow IT teams. I think this is a great place.
Well, I said great, but this is one of the most, prolific places where this would come up. Right? Where I need this landing page for this specific thing. It, you know, for whatever reason, it can’t get that it’s not part of their kind of sprints moving forward. It’s going to take a while and we need this stood up, you know, within a couple of weeks.
And so you’d see kind of third-party tools come in to make these landing pages. And then you’d use iframes like you mentioned. And so that always caused kind of some friction there. Right. There are handoffs. There was concern around that, making sure that data stayed private. And what’s going on between all those, those changes.
And so I think this tool having it already built in the Epic platform is huge because a lot of those security things go away. And I think even from a conversation from a, you know, internal standpoint with health systems now, it’s not that, you know, the marketer has to go talk to the CIO and explain we’re using this tool, it’s going to do this.
And there’s got to be all that conversation. Now that conversation is, hey, we want to use Epic. And the IT person says, oh, we know Epic. Yeah, obviously we use Epic. That sounds great. And it’s just so much easier to get these things done. And to your point, I think the tool that they’re building is definitely getting more robust.
And the type of features it has, they took us through a demo and the idea that, you know, you can kind of have this widget and you just pulled straight from these variables, like, I can pull appointment times and visit types and boom, my widgets are ready to go. And we’re lining it up. And so I loved that ability to give kind of marketers the ability to do that because again, IT teams can help there.
But sometimes that’s not their bread and butter. Especially depending on the kind of organization you’re in. So giving marketing the access and the tools to do those things and work directly with the same tool that it’s comfortable with, I think is huge. So I really appreciated that. The other part, they showed us a lot of analytics that Jenny and I feel like with builder specifically, it’s getting to the heart of, you know, I made a comment, to the team at the time that so often with all of our clients, we kind of lose them from a marketing perspective once they go over to MyChart.
So once they click on that provider, once they click on that login to my chat button, we kind of lose them. And so this gives us one more ability to like look at that and see, oh, now I can actually see the people are using that. And Epic allows me because it’s all on their back end. It’s all secure.
I can see that. Hey, not only did this person click on that appointment time, but I actually can find out that they actually did their appointment later. And it’s done all in a secure, anonymous way because you’re basing it off Epic’s data, but you never have to see any of that data. It’s just providing kind of the data that you need to run your campaigns to understand ROI at a better level.
Your ROI isn’t stopped at, you know. Well, they left the website. And so I think those things are huge. You know, they had included UTM parameters. They thought through those kinds of things. And I think that’s great. Gives us a level of attribution there, which I think we all are looking for. So, really exciting product. Yeah.
Mark: I agree, and I actually have to do a little shout out for us because they actually chatted with you and I Mark like eight months ago, and we’re chatting a little bit about the roadmap of MyChart Builder.
And one of the first things you said is please start with the black box, use a UTM parameter, and then we can pass variables through and they listen. That’s the best thing I think about Epic is that they actually listen and say, oh, I understand now why that’s valuable to you as an end user. I will incorporate that into our roadmap.
So really positive.
Mark: Shout out to Nick at Epic. He’s fantastic. We had some conversations around that. It was it was really fun.
Jenny: I love it I love it. And one other very important thing that I want to call out is, this isn’t just for talking to existing audiences or existing patients. So this isn’t just emailing cardiology patients and saying, you know, hey, you have your annual screening coming up.
No, you can actually use this for prospective campaigns, because whenever somebody submits a form, if the form is your call to action or begins actually booking an appointment, they can actually be created as a prospective patient in your database. So they are not labeled as a patient, but they’re labeled as a prospect within your database. And I know a lot of our clients leveraging Epic do not leverage this functionality.
You are only in Epic if you are a known patient. So just knowing that they’ve actually expanded their database from a, you know, human perspective, that it can be prospective and existing patients.
Mark: Yeah, I love that too. Jenny. And I loved they they had kind of really thought through the kind of use cases there. And, and they made it clear that, hey, we’re not using this for, say, donor prospecting or something like that.
You know, this is a very specific use case, but I think we run into a lot of health systems where, okay, not only do we have to have Epic for our patient records, but how are we going to actually do outreach? So we need like a CRM in place to do that. And the epic was very clear. Hey, this isn’t a full scale CRM that’s going to do all your CRM stuff, but if you’re the type of system that only has, you know, a few resources running around and you have to kind of make decisions, Epic is a great solution there because it does give you the ability to gain those prospects.
Still, to message out to them. So to have those kind of, building exercises with those prospects, and I think that’s fantastic because, you know, so often health services don’t have the resources or the team or the skills to build out a whole CRM and another tool. You also run into privacy issues there, right? There aren’t a whole lot of CRM is running around that are HIPAA compliant.
And, you know, at a really satisfactory level, you know, you get a tool like a Salesforce, but do organizations have the resources to not only pay for Salesforce but set it up? And so the fact that Epic has these tools built on and you can kind of jump in and start using them, that made them easy to use.
I think is really great. So yeah, I was really excited about the forms for sure.
Jenny: Yeah. And I think that goes directly into the next category. You’re talking about Cheers with the contact management and campaigns. Right. Because that is what we’re doing is outreach. And one of the really fun conversations we had with the four agencies, along with the Epic team, is Salesforce versus Cheers.
Right. And so, they again, like you said, made it very clear. Look, we’re not looking to replace Salesforce. We’re not going to be tackling donor communications, any of that stuff. Like we’re here to better serve the patient. And so I love that they have a singular focus on that. I think that results in a much better output, for serving the patient instead of trying to serve all of these disparate audiences.
And so there were a couple of really exciting things that they are rolling out. I’m going to tie in the one of the other ones we talked about, Hello World, because it’s kind of interesting and difficult to understand when we first hear about it. Cheers campaigns are sent out through Hello World. Hello World is a functionality that really allows each patient to be communicated with on the platform of their choice.
So if they often want to have email or SMS, or a phone call, it really allows you to be able to manage that real time per patient but you set the campaigns up actually within Cheers and then send it out that way. So as I’m thinking about all of our patients, some of the things we’re really excited that we’re working on with them is figuring out what’s the low hanging fruit here.
Right? Like if somebody goes for a specialty appointment and they don’t have a primary care doc on file for your organization, you should be sending a follow-up email. You know, a couple of days after the appointment, saying, hey, you had just had this appointment. We noticed you don’t have a primary. Here’s a way to be able to book with three doctors, you know, within ten miles of your location, that have appointments in the next two weeks open.
Right? That is an amazing patient experience. And so really thinking through those patient journeys and how you can help them do what’s called the next best action for them, and really setting it up through those automations within Cheers.
Mark: Yeah, that type of automation we’ve seen in CRM types of tools, Hubspot’s the Salesforces of the world, and the fact that, yeah, this functionality is brought in to Cheers, I think is great.
I think everybody in the room is like, wow. I mean, like, we should probably be using this, right? And it’s like, yeah, we should be, because to your point, I think those types of workflows and that kind of automation just it’s always kind of aspirational for people to want to do that because but there’s always such a learning curve.
We got to learn a whole new software. We’ve got to make it compliant. We’ve got to bring it in. We’ve got to find somebody to actually run it with the skills and the knowledge and the interest there. And so this is just taking some of those barriers away, which I think is great. And to your point, and they showed us lots of stats that, man, this can make huge impacts even with a simple after, you know, appointment follow up.
Right. Something like that is huge for, for a client or the ability to kind of change their appointments. Right. And allow them to do it. They showed us with Hello World, specifically being able to, in your kind of text message, say, no, that time doesn’t work for me anymore. Do you have other times available?
It will send you back some time options. You get to pick one of those and hey, we’ve already checked it out. You know, we’ve already set you up with that new appointment time. I thought stuff like that was just really innovative on their side, thinking through those kinds of things and, and the fact that all that, again, is tied in with your Epic data and you don’t have to worry about putting something in and moving something over the fact that it’s all right there available to you.
I think it was a really big and smart move for them.
Jenny: That feature you just mentioned, it’s called, they’re calling it Conversational SMS for that actually will respond to you real time, and feel human like sometimes it actually does go over to your real support desk. At other times, they actually have the ability for some AI chatbots to be able to begin leaning into the technology.
They’re leveraging AI and a bunch of really smart ways, which is exciting. And you know, something I want to step back for, for just a moment is a lot of the things we’re talking about kind of delve into the a little bit into the side of, patient experience and some of it’s marketing. Right. So I think within each organization, sometimes patient experience lives under marketing.
Sometimes it live side by side. An ideal scenario is you’re working together regardless of if you’re actually underneath one umbrella or not. So leveraging the same communication platform to ensure that patients aren’t being inundated with communications, and that communications are consistent across your organization is really beneficial. So leveraging these same tools, you know, definitely will help accomplish that.
Mark: Yeah I agree. And I thought that was really great from Epic. And I was going to say our listeners, be prepared. If you have a conversation with Epic, they’re going to come in and they’re going to say, okay, who’s going to own this? Do we have a person from marketing here? Do we have a person from patient experience, a person from IT?
And they’re going to want to make sure everybody’s kind of involved in those conversations, because I think they’re seeing that you have to have that kind of collaboration in a health system to have these things be successful. And I don’t think Epic is interested in kind of helping you set this up, just to kind of get another sale out there.
They want you to be successful. They want your patients to have a great experience. And I think they know those teams working together. So I think that’s a great point. And I think that’s why them opening things up to marketing in the patient experience, people to get in there and see what’s going on and be able to change things to see kind of, hey, they’re going through these workflows and we always see people drop off at this point.
Well, that’s because we’re asking them way too many questions. So now we have patient experience in there that can help that. Or maybe it’s the way we’re messaging to them. So marketing’s in the same conversation. Understanding maybe we change the messaging here, what we’re saying. So I think those are always collaborative decisions. And the fact that Epic is kind of enabling that space to have all those conversations is really good.
Jenny: And before we wrap up, Mark, I want to talk about a topic that is your favorite is analytics and measurement. So, we are doing a follow-up session with them, digging more into analytics and KPIs. But they gave a little bit of insight around additional capabilities for marketing teams to be able to pull out full ROI.
So really understanding revenue per conversion based off of billing codes, based off of campaigns, a lot of information that again, whenever we were talking to the other agencies in the room, everybody admitted that honestly, nobody in healthcares actually got this automated. Even if somebody says, oh, you know, we do all of these fancy things within our marketing technology tech stack.
We have Salesforce, we have all of these things. If you peel it back and start asking the difficult questions, it’s actually a lot of manual stuff happening behind the scenes, but they are actually allowing marketers to be able to get to the heart of the data that they need in an easier way, and it’s going to just keep getting better and better over the next, you know, six months to a year as they roll out some of these new features.
Mark: Yeah, I agree, and I think it comes down to the touchpoints right? For me so often those touchpoints always exist on the website. So we got to find a provider, find a location, set up an appointment. And those things were always usually part of your website, but then would always drive to my chart like kind of I mentioned before.
And it was always that step you couldn’t take. And I think Epic has done a real good job. Shout out to Morgan, who is sitting by me too. She was great, explaining kind of how they have things like On My Way available now that you can actually have right there on your builder site on your other website.
And since that’s already connected to all your Epic data, you can start to actually then once those, those kind of important moments happen, somebody finding a provider, somebody, doing an on my way, right click that since that’s already contact with Epic, you can then follow that patient all the way through. And again, what’s available to the marketer, to the analyst isn’t all to the person’s name.
Any of that information. It’s, hey, did we accomplish what we wanted to accomplish? We put this in front of the client. We use this message. Did they end up actually going through with the appointment? If so, we’re seeing a success. So much of that before was that I hope they did it. We think they probably will. But as they kind of pointed out to us after that point, there’s still all kinds of stuff.
There’s hey, my appointment time was wrong. I need to change it. There’s so many points of failure that patient can have and the ability for epic that they’re already kind of tracking all that, that stuff. Then the fact that some of that data is available to marketing now is huge. And being able to strategize, how do we change that behavior of this patient?
How would you meet the patient where they are? I think that was just really cool to see.
Jenny: I agree, and we’re going to wrap this episode today. I feel like we could talk about this literally for hours. We are so excited about everything that we’re going to begin rolling out with our clients to better help their patient access the care that they need with tools.
In many situations, they’re already licensed and paying for. So if you are an Epic-based organization, which most systems and groups are at this point, and you’re looking for a partner to be able to help you really leverage the marketing functionality that exists and is going to be coming soon within Epic, give us a shout! We are very excited and passionate about this, and would love to be your partner to make sure that you’re leveraging all of those features and functionalities.
So thank you so much for joining us today. We look forward to seeing you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
