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Top Takeaways from HCIC 2023

Back from their final conference of the year, Jenny Bristow, Shelby Auer and Julia Pitlyk of Hedy & Hopp share their highlights from the 2023 HCIC conference in Los Angeles. They discuss various sessions and speakers, including the patient privacy masterclass with Hedy & Hopp and Cincinnati Children’s, several sessions on new marketing channels for hospitals and health systems (like TikTok!), what they learned about marketing technology stacks to enable personalized patient experiences, and ways healthcare marketers can better collaborate cross-functionally. They also speak to the importance for healthcare marketers to lean into each others’ experiences, share their learnings, and work together to help healthcare marketing advance and innovate as an industry.

Connect with Jenny:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Shelby:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-wanne/

Connect with Julia:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpitlyk

Connect with our favorite HCIC 2023 speakers and resources:

Houston Methodist “Find A Doctor” Tool
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/find-a-doctor/ 

Aaron Williams, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-williams-969a4b11/

Steve Coates, Hartford HealthCare
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-coates-9565449/ 

Jody Ganschinietz, Nationwide Children’s
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganschinietzj/ 

Callista Dammann, Nationwide Children’s
https://www.linkedin.com/in/callistaconzett/ 

Matthew Mader, Broward Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-mader-4092423/ 

Carla Rivera, Broward Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-rivera/ 

Val Lopez, Baptist Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vallopez/ 

Kier Bradshaw, MERGE
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keirbradshaw/ 

Linda Ho, UCLA Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindavho/ 

Priya Sreedharan, UCLA Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/psreedharan/ 

Cristal Herrera Woodley, Renown Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristalherrera/ 

Alex Nason, Frederick Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-nason-b47b462/ 

Alec Endara, Baptist Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecendara/ 

Mary Kay Boitano-Nelson, Houston Methodist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marykayboitanonelson/ 

Tom Price, Houston Methodist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprice/ 

David Feinberg, Mount Sinai Health System
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-feinberg-57746a5/ 

Chloe Politis, Mount Sinai Health System
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloepolitis/ 

Tara Nooteboom, UCI Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarajnooteboom/ 

Episode Transcript

Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I am Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be joined again today by Julia Pitlyk, Hedy & Hopp’s Director of Marketing and Shelby Auer, one of our account managers.

Welcome ladies. So we just got back from a super, super, super fun HCIC. It was in LA this year. It was super jam packed and I’m excited to do a fun recap episode with y’all. 

Julia: Yeah, absolutely. Had such a good time. So many learnings. It’s been hard to cram them all into a short little episode, but we’re going to do our best.

Jenny: Perfect. So let’s start with a brief chat about the masterclass that I did along with one of our dear clients, Aaron Williams of Cincinnati Children’s. It was a 90 minute presentation masterclass [00:01:00] specifically on HIPAA, FTC, and state laws, what you need to know now. And I feel like this is the end of our 2023 road show on privacy, but it was again, standing room only.

We had phenomenal attendance and I’m so proud of Aaron as a co-presenter about the level of technical detail he got into during not only the presentation itself, but also in the Q&A at the end. We had some really specific, technical questions that folks got into as far as the laws and how they actually were interpreted from a technical perspective and then implementation options, but he killed it.

Julia: Couldn’t agree more. You both did an amazing job. I think what’s funny about the roadshow comment, before we get to Aaron, is that we’ve been on this roadshow and the title has been what you need to know now, and the content has changed and evolved every time because this topic is changing and evolving week over week.

So I think that’s been a [00:02:00] really, it’s been fun. It’s also been crazy to continuously update that deck, I know, for you and your talking points as new points of view, as new sorts of policies and perspectives come out regarding all of these changes. So I think it’s just, it’s very interesting how much we’ve had to update this over the past couple months.

But yes, I think this is probably the session, probably because of the masterclass nature, where we had such a good Q&A, and you’re right, really, really specific questions and also really specific answers from the both of you. I love sessions where you don’t get answers that are “it depends,” which it often does depend, but Aaron, because he has gone through this journey with us, has been implementing server side Google Tag Manager, has been was able to really get specific on pros, cons roadblocks, watch outs when it comes to implementing and also provided some really great sort of philosophy on how they’re navigating privacy as a whole.

Shelby: Yeah, and I thought it was, as we were walking into the session, I know [00:03:00] that Jenny, you and Aaron were even talking about new pieces to the equation as of a week ago. And so I agree with the content constantly evolving. It just, it goes to show, even after we talked about a similar topic at the conversations that we were having with folks this time around and where they’re at in the journey even differs from just a couple months ago. And so being able to have those more in depth conversations with folks that are in, in the thick of things and trying to figure out where to go from here. Yeah. Lots of good conversation and yeah, you and Aaron did such a good job. 

Jenny: Well, thank you. I think for me, it was particularly entertaining.

We had a couple of people come up to our booth afterwards later in the day or the next day and say, I feel like I finally understand technically why this is a problem and how to solve it. But then they went to another session right after and they said they could still do what a lot of the things that we [00:04:00] said you couldn’t do!

And so, I think it’s really interesting how the education and information and understanding within the industry is still evolving so quickly. And so I’m glad that we’re able to be a beacon of education, if nothing else, within the industry to help folks understand how it’s all working.

Julia: Agreed. We did a roundtable on this topic, too, during lunch, I think on Tuesday, and same, same thing. People were so grateful for just the clarity and the education and yeah, session by session, some of that clarity was becoming murky again. But, that’s where we were really able to have some rich conversations on both analytics set up, tagging and tactics.

From an activation standpoint, you had so many good questions in your masterclass around how this impacts creative. We heard a lot around: if we’re doing contextual advertising in the platform, can we put out some creative about a mammogram or a certain type of service line?

So it’s been cool to see how – cool is maybe not the right word – but how much [00:05:00] this is impacting the different aspects of marketing. I guess it’s cool to see once people get it, how they’re starting to ask deeper level questions to figure out where their guardrails are within their organization. 

Shelby: And I loved there were certain individuals like digital strategists or folks who aren’t necessarily in the weeds of these conversations that attended the masterclass and were able to be like, okay, I feel like I have a better understanding and I hear what my colleagues are dealing with and I can have an educated conversation and understand why we’re going through this process.

So it was really neat to see how that education was impacting, hopefully, the future conversation teams are having. 

Jenny: Absolutely. Well, let’s talk a little bit about some of the other favorite sessions that we attended. So we did a divide and conquer strategy like we do at all conferences that we attend. So, we attended a bunch, but we want to highlight a few of our favorites.

So Shelby, I know you attended the session around innovative channels for health systems, specifically talking about podcasts and TikTok [00:06:00], which is a conversation we have so often with clients and prospects. Tell me a little bit about what you learned. 

Shelby: Yeah, so, honestly, I ended up attending, like, three different sessions on all of these different topics, and it was really, really interesting, one, talking about the power of podcast ads.

So, Steve, who’s the Senior Director of Marketing at Hartford HealthCare, he actually used to be a radio host back in a different life. And so he was very passionate about radio even before he got into his current role. But talked a lot about the intimacy that we’re able to achieve with radio because folks are listening to this in their homes while they’re doing chores around their house, walking, running, in their intimate time.

So you have that captive audience and that opportunity to really break through to individuals when they’re having their kind of me time. But it was interesting to hear about how podcast ads are not really being utilized to their full potential. So they [00:07:00] talked about how individuals are spending 31 percent of their media consumption time with audio, but only marketers are only spending about 9 percent of their media budget on audio on average.

So there’s a big opportunity, kind of missed opportunity there with a lot of marketing strategies to include audio in some way, shape, or form. And they also really hit on the fact that consumers trust the platform. They have some data that, like, 25 percent of consumers, if they hear an ad on a platform, on an audio platform, they’re more likely to take an action than other platforms.

And I think that’s really important because, yeah, we have our podcast hosts that we know, and we’ve learned from them, we trust them. So when they’re reading off some ads about certain products, I’m going to be more likely to go, go ahead and, and take an action or, or do some education. And they talked specifically [00:08:00] about two ways that they’ve seen this be successful for them.

One, when it becomes, when it’s, when it comes down to specific service lines. So for them, orthopedics, they’ve seen a lot of success. And they did some testing with different service lines to decide where they really should do their focus. But also when it comes to geographically, there’s a lot of opportunities to get really targeted when it comes to podcast ads.

And so if they’re launching a new service center or a new emergency department, really honing in on that geotargeting and seeing a lot of success there. So it was exciting to see what they’re doing in the podcast ad space. 

Jenny: That’s super interesting. Like, I think as even, as a consumer, whenever I hear one of my favorite podcast hosts specifically talking about a product or service in my head, I just feel so there’s more vetting going through that I don’t ever see in an ad on Facebook, right?

Like the hurdle to get to that point of advertising and communication is bigger than just throwing a digital ad up online on other [00:09:00] platforms. So it’d be interesting if that is one of the sources of why there’s more trust or it’s a combination of that with the podcast host trust themselves.

Shelby: Totally. And the other big topic that was discussed again in multiple sessions was TikTok, right? TikTok and healthcare, we talk about, as marketers that like, oh, healthcare needs to get up with the times, we’re a little bit behind. And so it was really exciting to hear what different health systems are doing in the TikTok space.

And I sat in on a session with Jody and Callista with Nationwide Children talking about some of the great organic TikTok work that they’ve been doing, because specifically for them in the children’s hospital space, young parents, young moms are on TikTok, like the data is there. And so this is such an important platform for them to be on.

And in gaining trust with leadership to get buy in, it’s like if we’re not going to be there, one of our competitors will be. So we need to step up [00:10:00] and figure out how to be on the platform in an impactful way. And they took, they did this, I think, in a couple of really smart ways. One was, let’s answer, let’s figure out ways to do an Ask a Doc series.

What are the questions that parents are asking us all the time? Let’s get those questions answered in 15 to 30 seconds and roll those out. And so that’s been their bread and butter as they’ve gotten more traction has been taking that, that, patient focus of how can we get those answers to those parents that are doing research and again, becoming, earning their trust, right?

As they’re scrolling on TikTok, they’re learning, they’re, they’re being calmed by the information that they’re receiving from Nationwide Children’s. So I think that was really, really impactful. But the biggest learning I think that they shared was when it comes to TikTok, there’s opportunity to take content that performs well on another channel and move that [00:11:00] content to TikTok.

So for example, in hospitals, we’re having conversations with different systems that struggle with this, to where there’s negative perception out there. There’s negativity talking about the emergency department, right? So during a time where they were receiving a lot of negativity, they put out on Facebook, different symptoms that people are experiencing.

And should you go to urgent care? Should you go to the emergency room? Or should you see your doctor? That post on Facebook went viral, and they were not expecting it to. So they decided, okay, how do we repurpose this for TikTok? And I know you guys listening and you guys on the team have probably seen these TikToks where there’s a word above someone’s head.

And if you go in one direction… Or the other direction based on whatever it is. So for them, they were like, okay, let’s help educate on whether you should go to the emergency room or urgent care. So they had doctors in their scrubs where it’s severe [00:12:00] burn and they’re like, Oh, you gotta go to the emergency room or urgent care.

And they did this a couple of times. The first time over a million views. Second time 2.9 million views. They were like, Oh my gosh, we’re seeing such good traction from this. And so they’ve even iterated and done warm weather versions where, you know, broken bones in the summer and again, severe sunburns and They’ve just seen a lot of great success, but really spoke to also the challenges as they’ve been trying to get in a new platform, so really appreciated what they had to share.

Julia: I think that’s such a good actionable nugget of: take a topic that people need or want to know about and then adapt it to the channel, right? Like putting that exact same creative from Facebook on TikTok clearly wouldn’t have worked for many reasons, but adapting it and sort of applying a TikTok meme or motif to the same facts and things that were approved but applying them in a different creative medium and seeing that success is such a [00:13:00] cool insight.

Shelby: Yeah, and a similar thing that Broward Health, Matthew and Carla on their team are talking about TikTok. They really have some actionable insights on partnering with your video production teams when they’re working on commercials, right? You might have patients, families, staff members that have so much downtime during a full day of shooting.

And so really shadowing the video production team, getting those organic nuggets throughout the day that support the commercial efforts. So their oncology group were doing this “I Beat Cancer” series and they ended up just getting the patient to either dance or, have like the, the strong arms with just the, I beat cancer with Broward Health on TikTok.

And they, they showed it to us during the session. It was so impactful. There were, there were tears coming from the group as they were sharing these videos, but. again, just getting creative with how you’re [00:14:00] getting content. And if you’re putting a bunch of money and time into certain video production, where, how can you pull organic content from that as well?

Jenny: That is such an actionable nugget for all of us that have been on a production shoots, there is a lot of downtime, so that is such an easy, actionable thing to do. I love that. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about marketing technology. I know both of you went to a lot of sessions around that.

Julia, why don’t you start? 

Julia: Yeah, so I’ll start the first session I went to after your masterclass. I want to read the title of it. It was with Val Lopez of Baptist health and Kier Bradshaw with MERGE. It was “CRM and DXP and CDP, OMG: How Baptist Health effectively integrated technology to enable personalization.”

Like, how many buzzy, exciting words can you fit into one title? And this was a session where I felt like I was late to school because I got in like right at the last minute and could not find a seat. It was like sitting outside the door trying to hear. Some wonderful gentleman wound up giving [00:15:00] me his seat so I could actually see the slides.

So needless to say, a very, very well attended session to help marketers understand what, what are all of these different technology solutions? How do they go to work together to ultimately bring to hospitals and health systems the capability to do personalization, which is something that I think everyone aspires to achieve?

We hear that the consumer and or the patient, I’ll say those distinctively and separately, are expecting it. But how do you put all of the pieces together? Because achieving personalization, especially at scale is such a technology and data driven effort. You can put all of the right creative ideas on the table, but you cannot bring them to life in a feasible way without the right tech solutions at play.

So this was a really just a deep dive into their journey across, many, many years, really, where they started with their initial web presence, how they evolved to a digital front door, and then really this deep tech stack, [00:16:00] a lot of Salesforce technology, which we know is right for some size organizations and budgets and capabilities, not necessarily achievable for some, but they really talked about what they put together to do some of that data and behavioral driven, behavioral-driven personalization.

So, I think that my main takeaways in addition to just seeing really, for the first time, a really robustly implemented stack to drive personalization was really seeing how they were bringing things together, like call center, digital front door data, website data, CRM data, to drive that personalization.

So they were pretty particular about how they defined something like the phrase omni-channel, which we all like to throw around a lot, but it means 10 different things to 10 different people, they were really precise about how they defined that. And I think it’s, it’s cool to see what they were able to do, what they are able to do with the technology, but they also gave some great examples for how they [00:17:00] took such a big behemoth of a topic and broke it down into, the crawl walk run use cases to prioritize those use cases, sold them into leadership and started to execute. So not only was this a really good sort of technical deep dive, but also a good, strategy and stakeholder management type of discussion. 

Jenny: That’s super smart. We’ve seen so many organizations try to implement CRMs and they try to fix everything at one time. And having specific use cases for sure is a way to be able to be focused in that implementation. I love it. 

Julia: Yeah, absolutely. They did a great job, too. And I am sometimes guilty of this when I’m talking about a technology implementation. I want to show the back end. I want to show how the data is going to flow and do the lovely sort of Visio or Lucidcharts. They found a great learning that I want to share with our listeners is that they took the use cases that they were trying to show to support getting this technology implemented and they made them really visual and creative, almost took what that end goal was that they wanted to [00:18:00] execute.

What would a mammogram outreach campaign look like to an existing patient versus a prospective one and brought that to life. So they looked much less like technology flow charts and a lot more like creative marketing campaigns. And that they said was a big takeaway in terms of getting people to understand what the heck they were trying to do and then get that executive sponsorship.

Jenny: Oh, that is so smart. I love it. Shelby, you attended a couple as well that you had some really great takeaways. What do you have to share? 

Shelby: Yeah. So I sat in a session with a couple of folks on the UCLA Health team, Linda and Priya, and they talked about a lot of similar things as the session you just described Julia, and really went in a deep dive on their tech stack, how everything is flowing, what different governance they have in place to make sure that the data is being kept safely, but they gave some very specific examples on how they have these.

always-on [00:19:00] audience journeys, one of those being something as simple as birthday emails that they send out about 2,000 a day to different folks in their system. And they get patients responding, saying, thanks so much. Like, and they, they’ve gotten really good, like about 30 percent unique open rate on those emails.

And really, again, trying to figure out ways to not only be there in an emergency for their patients, but how can we really show that we’re there for them in the everyday, in those celebratory moments, just like their birthday. But they gave a pretty in depth walkthrough of one of their audience journeys, specifically for anybody who has given birth at a UCLA Health facility.

And they really built this journey as a series of touchpoints and they treated them like the true moments that they are. So for example, they do a congrats message with also some information about [00:20:00] setting up your first peds appointment. What does that look like? The questions that parents have and they saw based on data that many parents when they left after giving birth hadn’t had their pediatrician picked out yet.

So they use that data to help build that audience journey what to expect videos that differ based on the type of birth, birth experience that you had because they realize why are we giving paper discharge instructions to these parents when they’re leaving. Like, how can we deliver that in a timely manner and in a medium that’s going to be easier for them to keep and save and share and look back on.

But again, even things like if they knew that that parent had another child at home, sending a text tip. How do you play with newborns? How do you introduce your newborn to your children at home? So really made it super personal based on again all of the work that they did in their data stack to be able to pull in information from certain [00:21:00] places and partnering with these different departments to help build out these journeys.

So they really talk to their team that is on the ground every day with these parents of what are the questions that they’re having? What are they calling and asking about? So it’s really neat to see how they built that. 

Jenny: That’s awesome. I love that. So what about chatbots? I know we talked a little bit in the booth about some of the information you were hearing in sessions.

Let’s talk about chatbots. 

Shelby: Yes. So there was a wonderful panel with three different folks talking about their experience with chatbots and it was very different across the board. Cristal, who was with Renown Health, talked a lot about how they first got their chatbots, a chatbot up and running and it was to help answer questions about COVID and to help fix some misinformation struggles that they were having in their community, but they’ve seen it be incredibly effective when sharing information about where to park.

Again, what are those [00:22:00] questions that individuals are calling about, asking about, and they’re having a hard time finding it on the site. Let’s make it easy for them and have it easily available in the chatbot. Alex, who’s with Frederick Health, talked a lot about how the chatbot has been effective when utilizing it to push forward new branding or messaging efforts. So incorporating the language that you’re utilizing in the chatbot to help it push forward any new kind of larger branding efforts, which I thought was a really interesting takeaway. And Alec, who’s with Baptist Health in South Florida, they have seen a lot of success in their kind of consistent iteration of their chat bot.

They’re at a 98% recognition rate with their chat bot being able to answer questions, which is amazing. And so they’re constantly looking at what unanswered questions are left trending and on the table, and how can we modify our chat bot to help really reach our patients where they’re at.[00:23:00] 

Jenny: That’s awesome.

That’s is really interesting. I feel like telehealth and chatbots are two things that really came alive during COVID and now folks are really optimizing them and figuring out how to make the most out of those technologies. Julia, let’s talk about find a doc tools. 

Julia: Oh, yes. So Houston Methodist, Mary Kay Boitano-Nelson and Tom Price at Houston Methodist, they gave an amazing session called How to Survive Upgrading Your Find A Doc Tool.

I heard Jackie Effenson from Houston Methodist speak about this tool a little bit at Becker’s, but this was really a deep dive, start to finish journey of them redesigning their tool. So I would say any, anybody listening that’s doing some semblance of find a doc, find a provider, anything, go to Houston Methodist, look at their tool, because the amount of user insights and the agile consumer centric approach that they took to building this really, really shines. I think it’s one of the best in class in terms of seeing how they brought insights to life to really meet, meet consumers, they said, specifically, they want new [00:24:00] patients. So they decidedly phrase them as consumers to really meet them where they are and pull them into their, to their system to find a provider, either a primary care or a specialist.

They gave a really great nugget that: sometimes where you start off with a project isn’t where you end. And they actually started off this project by taking an initiative to redesign the mobile app. And as they were doing some insights and some user research on that, it really popped that they needed to be focusing on finding a doctor first.

So I think that, that, I just, I love primary research. I love insights. And I think that that’s such a testament that if you don’t go get those insights early, you may be barking up the wrong tree or the not the best tree at this point in time. So they really carried that insight driven approach through and through.

This was a completely internally driven project, so between marketing, design and IT teams. So they spoke a lot to how they got that cross functional collaboration to really, to really hum a lot of that [00:25:00] through not treating this as they’re throwing requirements over the fence to IT, but really sitting and having a consistent steer co to drive all of these decisions they have.

Let me get my stat right. They have already seen, they’ve launched this a couple months ago, a 51 percent increase in new patient scheduling from this tool again, just in a few months of being live. So I could see how proud they were of their work. I’m so proud of it. I think it’s amazing. Amazing. And going back to Becker’s, I remember Jackie even saying that this tool is designed so well that they’re even seeing their own providers in their system using it to do referrals and fix some of that physician leakage.

So I asked some follow up questions about that. It’s definitely something that they’re, that they’re looking at from a provider referral journey and how it may be able to be replicated to serve that need, which I think is just such a wonderful testament to building something right, getting that foundation right, and then letting it scale and expand from a strong foundation. So bravo to them. I’m like a Houston Methodist [00:26:00] fan girl. I think they’re doing such a great job. I love it.

Jenny: I love it. And we’ve all done find a doc implementations and know how oftentimes within an organization, you’re just trying to do the bare minimum, right?

An organization needs one stood up. So I love that they’re at the point of organizational growth where it’s beyond that. It’s really thinking larger and bigger scale impact across the organization, but speaking of cross functional collaboration, Shelby, I know you have a couple of key takeaways on that topic.

Shelby: Yes. Yes. I sat in a wonderful session with the Mount Sinai Health System, David and Chloe on their digital marketing and social media teams talked a lot about team trust and how much they’ve had some difficulties, right? With leadership being suspicious of social media marketing, harboring doubts about the credibility and the actual impact that it has on the business.

And I love David said, this quote of “Change happens at the speed of trust.” And if you don’t have trust, your ability [00:27:00] to innovate and move and change is going to be hindered. And so that’s gotta be, if that’s not there, that’s where we need to start, right? How do we build that trust with higher leadership?

And so they talked a lot about kind of this roadmap to establish trust. But two of the big things that I think to take away or one obviously to be transparent, right, but not just about the positive, but what didn’t work, not being afraid to share with executive leadership, We tried this. It didn’t work.

This is what we’ve learned. This is how we’re adjusting. That’s how you’re going to build that trust and making sure you’re not just data dumping, right? Because data is information, but what does it mean? What point are you trying to make? Don’t just be sending over these, these numbers to higher leadership with no actual story alongside it.

So they really took that to heart. And we’re able, they developed this whole social media HQ for the internal team on Mount Sinai that talks about [00:28:00] trainings and resources about the different social media platforms that they’re utilizing, they even have courses that the teams can take and receive a certificate that’s signed by the social media team at Mount Sinai.

And so when Threads came out recently, they ended up putting together a deck that described the tool, their plan to use it, how they’re going to track it, and how they plan on iterating moving forward. And that’s how they’ve approached gaining this trust with executive leadership. But they’ve really seen this trust open doors for them.

Chloe’s team grew from just a team of one to a team of four in just a few years. They’ve really gotten that trust and it’s really, they’ve been given the opportunity to really grow and fly in averaging about 1.2 thousand social posts a month, uh, now with their team. And so they’re able to really expand the work that we’re doing, that they’re doing again, because of that trust that they’ve built with leadership.

Jenny: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. [00:29:00] And then Julia you have some insight around digital prioritization when it comes to cross functional collaboration. 

Julia: Yeah. So this was a session with Tara Nooteboom of UCI Health. Love Tara. She’s a former classmate of mine, so I’m going to keep it brief because I could sing her praises for a very long time, but she gave, it wasn’t technically an HCIC masterclass, but it should have been.

She gave a complete masterclass in stakeholder management and essentially, how do you prioritize a lot of competing digital initiatives and focus on the ones that can really make an impact and bring them to life, especially in a pretty cross functional type of organization? So she’s head of consumer digital strategy at UCI Health.

Newly created role, and she mentioned a cute analogy that I think we can all relate to where, her scope is anything consumer anything digital, which is quite broad. So she said she has a lot of trick or treaters that will come knock on the door and say, Hey, can we get a chat bot? Hey, can we get [00:30:00] an XYZ pick digital thing du jour, right?

And so how, she talked to us about how did she create some structure around that to make sure that things could be prioritized in a way that wasn’t just her prioritizing, everybody could really be aligned to and they could bring the right things to life. So she gave some quick, simple tips on collaborating internally.  

Define your space. So with consumer and digital, she had to get a little more specific about some of those things. She can cover anything from digital front doors to what is the right tablet to have when people are checking it, right? So she wanted to define some structure around that. Create some structure in terms of a forum.

She called them her own parties or decision groups inviting everybody. She actually emphasized over invite, make sure that you have as many people there as possible rather than having to spend the energy chasing people and back office kind of conversations. And then leveraging existing structures.

So they [00:31:00] had some internal innovation and technology resourcing practices, and she made sure that what she was building plugged into those. So it was complementary versus counterproductive. And I could go on and on. She’s just, she’s a gem. She’s awesome at what she does. So I highly recommend connecting with her, but I’ll keep it short because I know we’re pressed for time.

Jenny: And on that, I will just say for all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I know it’s way longer than our normal episodes, but there was so much valuable content shared at HCIC we just really felt it was important to give you some meaty highlights in case you were not able to attend this year.

And I will say, please check out the show notes because we are going to be linking all of the individuals that we mentioned as well as any resources, such as the find a doctor tool that we were singing praises of. So check out the show notes. And then I’ll leave you with a closing comment. One of the things that Aaron from Cincinnati Children’s mentioned at the end of our masterclass was, it’s time within healthcare to really start developing your own network of [00:32:00] folks that you can go to to do experience shares and really help lift everybody. We are not competing with each other. Many of us are in completely or many of you are in completely different geographies, different specialty service areas.

The odds of you actually competing for the same patient are relatively low. Start getting comfortable with the idea of sharing your best practices at, in a forum like mindset where you can keep in touch on an ongoing basis. I know Aaron opened up to all of the attendees and I’m sure he’d be happy to do it for all the listeners of the show.

If you’re chatting, for example, in this, it’s a specific scenario, if you’re chatting with your legal team and they have questions about why server-side tag manager works, call Aaron, give him an email, ask him about what his case was whenever he was chatting with his legal team and why it was okay. We have the ability to help healthcare leapfrog ahead if we work together in a smart [00:33:00] and strategic way.

So let’s all stop gatekeeping. All of us are in this for the greater good of the patient. So use these show recaps as a way to identify people that you want to reach out to and build a relationship with, cause I assure you all of them will be happy to accept the phone call and develop a relationship.

And that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you soon.

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About the Author

Jenny Bristow is the CEO and Founder of Hedy & Hopp. Prior to starting Hedy & Hopp, Jenny launched, grew and sold a digital agency in Seattle and worked at Amazon. She was named one of St. Louis Business Journal’s 30 under 30, won a Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018 and speaks regularly at healthcare marketing industry events.

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