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 & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m joined today with our very own Mark Brandes. He is our VP of Data & Technology, and we are going to talk a little bit about a product and offering that we have developed called Epic UTM Connect.

Mark, tell us a little bit about this. First let’s start with a little bit of the problem we were trying to solve. Why, why did we spend time kind of investigating and looking in to a UTM connect sort of solution? 

Mark: Yeah. Jenny. So, part of this, I mean, it’s been, it’s been a problem since I’ve been in digital marketing, right?

Like, it’s been a thing. And we consistently run into inside of, a tool like a Google Analytics, web analytics, you’re going to have all that data. So you’re going to have UTMs that come in from your paid platforms and it’s going to be great. You’re going to be able to say certain things that happened on your website. So your lead forms or, or other types of engagement, you’re going to be able to break those down by those UTM parameters. But then inevitably, when you start having conversations about business impact, what happens is, okay, well, which one of those things is going to show our business impact? And so often the conversation came back to, well, none of them really show business impact.

We’re going to need something from our EHR or from our CRM, something that’s closer to the level of the business. So the leads you’re getting in or patient appointments. And so when you get to that level, you find that, oh, well, we don’t have a connection, right? It was this break that happened, kind of this brick wall that was always there to say, okay, we can get you data up to this point, but then after that we’re kind of just on, you know, in the dark, more or less. And so, after our kind of training with Epic and our starting to understand how does it work and getting closer with those teams and learning more from clients, it kind of was understood that, oh, we might have some other opportunities now.

Jenny: Absolutely. So backing up a little bit for folks that do use Epic as their EHR, there are some we’ll call them the OG data integration tools, right? They have something called Link Source, and that allows you to share some campaign information into Epic from some scenarios and some pages of your site, right? There’s very much a lot of framework and controls.

They also have the ability with MyChart Builder to be able to put some UTM parameters in to the patient record, if, again, the campaign is set up using that framework. So UTM Connect, we’re really trying to we’re trying to solve that broader problem. So, walk us through a little bit about what UTM connect is. 

Mark: Yeah. So it’s a tool we came up with. We had some clients who were kind of interested in breaking past through that brick wall, right? And so, with our like I mentioned, with our training with Epic, now, there was a sense with clients that, hey, you know, we can have these types of conversations. So as we got into it, it was, oh, well, we have things like Link Source that have us at least give us some sort of a bridge.

And so talking with Epic, talking with our client teams, we realized, oh, well, we can come up with a way to get those UTM parameters, package them together, and still get them into, Epic, right? And so once they’re in there, then you actually now have those Epic records, those patient records are going to have those UTM parameters attached to them.

So then we have the ability to say, okay, yeah, this record came in, this patient application came in, for paid search, right? Or this appointment was set up through Facebook. And so we’d actually had that ability to look at the attribution for each one of those. So now you can actually track that person all the way through appointment and through fulfillment.

And then you’re actually going to be able to look at the cost and the spend and the actual amount of revenue you got from those appointments, and then be able to put those together to get an actual ROI, right? Which is kind of the holy grail we always talk about. And so we saw that opportunity. And so we worked with some teams, we worked with our development team to really come up with: How can we capture these parameters? How can we use them? How can we package them together? How can then we make sure they get into Epic? And so we worked out a system that kind of can do all those bits and pieces. And so we figured out how to do that, and now we’re trying to package it up and make sure that we can bring it to other customers.

Jenny: Yeah. And it’s something that I’m really excited about because as anybody, as anybody who has ever tried to do anything with your own instance of Epic knows everything takes a long time, right? It takes a long time to get access. It takes a long time to talk to teams about implementing a specific Cheers campaign, for example. The great thing about the way that your team structured UTM connect is that it is relatively lightweight and fast to implement, right?

Like our team doesn’t need analyst access to your Epic instance. We have the ability to be able to implement this tool by simply getting access to your website analytics. And your, CRM, sorry, your CMS on the back end of your website. And your IT team could actually take the code and implement it on our behalf in order to implement these things.

So it’s able to be done really quick, really lightweight. And we’re excited with the groups that we’re working with right now, because a lot of them really want to have, it’s our gathering that data. And even if they aren’t quite yet sure what they’re going to do to visualize that data down the road, they want to start getting that conversion data into the patient records.

So once they’re ready to visualize, they’ll have more of a historic tale to understand what has worked and hasn’t worked for, the different performance campaigns? 

Mark: Yeah. It’s so funny. Throughout my career, I’ve run into so many times where we start having conversations and people want to show, how did this perform, how did this campaign do? Or I want to start tracking this, or can we report on that?

And the conversation will be okay. Do we have tracking in place? Have we been collecting that data? And it’ll be like, nope. And then okay, well we can put that in place, but we can only report from the time we actually started collecting moving forward, right? And so to your point, that’s what’s so great about this is that we can get in there really quick, start adding that data, make sure it’s you know, we’ll test it and look how it’s coming through. Make sure everything’s working correctly. But then that data is there. So even if you’re not ready to act on it, even if you want to have conversations with the rest of your team—can be months down the road. Well, now we can look all the way back to that point we put in place instead of having to start whenever, you know, we kind of get around to looking at, what do we want to look at for performance?

Jenny: Absolutely. And just a quick, kind of go to the bullets and benefits. It, of course, is HIPAA compliance, HIPAA compliant. From a solution perspective, it is secure. There’s already a BAA with your organization in place with Epic. So we’re just passing additional variables into that database where we already know that data is being secure. So it really is a great way to be able to leverage the technology stacks that you’re already using.

But it isn’t …

Mark: And and the other night I was just going to say, Jenny, real quick you that sparked something in me. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Google Analytics or, or Site Improve or Adobe Analytics, we can actually use this with any of those. Right? Because it actually kind of takes that data straight from your website and puts it into Epic, so you don’t actually have to work through those other softwares. You can go around them to basically have that information already in Epic, which is great. 

Jenny: That’s great. And an excellent point. It is not, however, you know, going to work in all scenarios. So it is a great solution. I wish there was some sort of tracking methodology that would capture the source of every single patient conversion on your website. That isn’t going to happen, unfortunately, ever for general privacy concerns on behalf of the patient.

So talk to us about some use cases where perhaps this would not track conversions or perhaps in scenarios where it may not be a good solution for an organization. 

Mark: Yeah for sure. And like I think it’s still based upon some of the standard things we’ve been doing in digital marketing.

And so UTM parameters is one of them. If you aren’t currently using them, it’s that’s not something that you’re putting in place, then this wouldn’t be something that would kind of address any kind of help for you. But if you’re using UTM parameters, that can also be a standard of you need to have a UTM strategy in place overall, because you’re only going to get what’s in Epic, what you’re putting into those UTM parameters.

So if those are kind of inconsistent or don’t give you good information, then that’s just going to come through. And so then you’re still going to be stuck in the same place of not being able to understand what those UTM parameters are. So there are times where if a client isn’t to that level of sophistication or hasn’t been doing those things, then maybe this is not the right step at now. But I think even in those cases, there can be a conversation about, okay, how do we get you on to UTM parameters? Because in today’s world of, you know, privacy, you know, being privacy forward and having concerns there, using UTM parameters has really come back into style to make sure that you’re having that information in your web analytics platform.

And so our team can help with that to get you up, set up for a good UTM strategy, make sure that’s put across not only your paid digital stuff, but also the emails you’re sending out, or if you’re doing direct mails or if you have QR codes, right? We can have that conversation. And then once that’s in place, yeah.

Then we get that UTM Connect in place. And now you have really data flowing through. The other place, I would say is that, you know, for those of my, my data nerds out there listening to this, you’re going to have, you know, mainly just last touch attribution here, right? So it’s going to come through. You’re going to be able to see that, hey, this tactic led to that appointment.

But as we know, not everyone’s going to come through on that. So what we’ve seen with our client is that, you know, you’ll have data come through, but it won’t be as voluminous as we thought. But they’re still getting a lot of leads. And so there’s still going to be that conversation of, okay, well that person went to Facebook, but they didn’t necessarily put their appointment and they actually came back and did it through paid search.

So there’s still going to be gaps there. And how you do the analysis and how you kind of understand, but you are going to get that immediate kind of last attribution, which is really great. Going to see a lot of the paid search come through, which is always great. But then you’ll see the other platforms come through as well.

And so I think those are things people should keep in mind, right? This isn’t like the, the, golden arrow that’s going to fix everything. But it will really help you get a better leg up on that data and bridge that gap that we’ve had for so many years. 

Jenny: All excellent points, Mark. Thank you so much.

And listeners, if you are curious if this would work for your organization, if this would allow you to be able to get a tighter understanding of ROI measurement, give us a call. We are happy to hop on and talk with, chat with you about your implementation of Epic, the different tools that you use. You do not have to be using Cheers or any of their, you know, campaigns or CRM modules to be able to do this. You can just be pulling in UTMs from existing marketing campaigns that your team or your agency may be using. So really think of this as a standalone, one-time implementation to your Epic instance to improve visibility—not that you have to do anything else with Epic marketing tools in order to make it valuable and worth the insight that it would provide. 

Mark: For sure. And the other note that I was just thinking of January you were talking about that is that, you know, along with what epic implementation they have currently, there may be some people that are using MyChart Builder or some using the standalone tool, or some that are using the built-in widgets.

And so there could be times where, hey, we get in there and we look and say, okay, this is more complicated than we thought, and maybe we have to rethink things. But with our friends at Epic, they really have some good tools and some insights and how we can make this work across those different implementations. So, I definitely don’t want anybody out there to say, oh, well, we do this a really different way, probably won’t work. We’re up for a chat at least, right? It can’t hurt to kind of see if that data can be passed through. Because I think, you know, the juice is worth the squeeze here, right? Like getting that data is so important. And, you know, it really is the holy grail of the measurement that we’re trying to get to, so.

Jenny: It is. Well, thank you for joining us today, Mark. Listeners, we’re going to put some links in the show notes to learn additional information and to reach out to be able to schedule a call with us if you’re interested in chatting more. I think this is the beginning of a really big evolution about ways that people are using Epic to be smarter marketers in the healthcare space, and we’re really excited to play a small part in it.

Mark: Exactly. 

Jenny: So thank you for tuning in. Please like and share this episode with any of your coworkers or colleagues that you think may find it valuable. And we will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!

 

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy–A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I am your host. And I’m the founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m here today joined by a Senior Digital Producer at Hedy & Hopp, our very own Suzie Schmitt. Suzie, welcome. 

Suzie: Thanks, Jenny. Glad to be here. 

Jenny: We today are going to be talking about something that most marketers have been frustrated with over the last year, but most of them don’t have a solid tech understanding of the whys, either through the lens of, why is this happening? Or, what can I do to help us, our organization, moving forward? And that is: tech dependencies. And the Jenga tower, that is the internet that holds up all of our, ecosystems in not only health care, but really across the web. I mean, all of us have been burned by the recent Cloudflare or AWS outages over the last year. It took down the entire internet, it felt like, for quite a long period of time.

So, Suzie, give us an overview, kind of as marketers, you know, see something like AWS go down or Cloudflare go down and everything stops working. Why is that happening? 

Suzie: That’s a great question. And it’s one that I’ve been asked increasingly from our clients, given those outages you’re talking about. And really what’s happening is that when we are clicking around in the internet and we’re browsing what we see as the web, we are abstracted so many layers away from the underlying infrastructure, and we’re really just only seeing that tiny little tip of the iceberg of everything else that’s behind that.

So we’ve got a whole bunch of things going on, which is one, we have enormous monopolies that own giant chunks of the internet. So that’s why when AWS goes down, it feels like the entire internet has gone down. Because even if a website doesn’t use AWS as its hosting provider, it probably has something on the site that runs on AWS.

And generally, people don’t even know all of the dependencies they have. You know, a website can have hundreds or even thousands of dependencies, and you might have a plug in and that plug in itself, you might think, well, that’s one dependency. That plug in itself probably has 50 dependencies all by itself. So if one of one tiny thing breaks across the internet, it can have enormous butterfly effects and like a ripple consequence throughout the entire internet, with Cloudflare being out, we noticed that not only was everything unreachable, but also so much of the security wasn’t able to be authenticated, so people weren’t being able to browse to web properties even if they could connect to them, which most people couldn’t. 

So the reason this impacts us more in healthcare is that unlike other industries, we’re held to uptime and other SLAs by CMS. So we have to be really diligent about planning for not if, but when these things go down and how to mitigate that risk. 

Jenny: Yeah, really great point. Let’s make this real with a real world example. It’s been nearly a decade since the left pad incident. Suzie, what is the left pad incident? 

Suzie: Jenny, I’m so glad you asked. I could talk about the left pad incident. All day. The left pad incident was in 2016, there was a copyright dispute between an independent developer out of Turkey and the messaging platform Kik. This developer had released a software package on NPM, which is the node package manager, which essentially, if you’re building any software, you’re going to be using that to say, well, I don’t want to build a whole framework to said, put a table in my website, I’m going to use this prebuilt module of this table and then be able to fill it out. It’s basically a library of basic functionalities. Anyway, he had made left pad, which all it does is add padding to the left side of text. It’s 11 lines, but theoretically like very minor, but it was built into so much of the internet as a dependency or a dependency of the dependency that when he got mad at the copyright situation and simply unpublished his package, it took down thousands of websites, including enterprise websites like Netflix and Spotify. They went down, all because of one open source, volunteer, unpaid developer in Turkey. So in that instance, NPM actually did something completely unprecedented and they republished his package. 

But ever since then, it’s been a little bit more top of mind to if you’re going to use something as a dependency, like maybe make your own fork of it, or make sure that you know how it works. If it’s something really simple, have your own copy. But it really does highlight how one tiny little spoke holding up the rest of the system can just be taken away, and it can really go a lot of problems. 

Jenny: So I want to talk about this in two lens. First, I want to talk about cloud monopoly risks. Then I want to talk about open source devs.

So let’s start talking about clouds. There’s really just three companies that host most of the web. Right? Let’s talk about that. What does that mean?

Suzie: Absolutely. So AWS which is Amazon Web Services, they host over a third of the internet. I believe last time I checked it was about 33%. Azure’s lower than that. And then GCP is a little bit lower than that. But together those companies host the majority of websites. And also the majority of enterprise websites. And what’s really scary there is generally when you choose a hosting environment, that’s also the hosting environment that your backups are created in. So you know, and I know here at Hedy & Hopp that we have a third party disaster recovery backup system that is hosted on a completely different infrastructure than our day-to-day production environment. But if you are hosting on AWS, for example, chances are that if you make a dev site or a backup site or any of those images of your website, they’re probably also hosted on AWS. So therefore, when AWS goes down, everything goes down. You don’t have a backup because your backup is also down. So the smartest thing to do is to keep a backup somewhere that’s completely isolated from wherever your production environment is, just to not keep all your eggs in one basket. And to make sure that those backups stay up to date. 

Jenny: Yep, that’s wonderful. What about Suzie—explain, in non-technical terms, what Cloudflare is and how that impacts accessibility of sites. 

Suzie: Definitely. So Cloudflare is something in between the website and the user. It’s like a little layer. If you think of a website as the moon, this is a satellite somewhere in between Earth and the moon, and you’re not actually connecting to that website in the moon, you’re talking to that satellite because the satellite says, hey, we’ve already got a copy of this website that’s recent, it’s closer to your location, and we can authenticate that you’re a secure user. So we’re going to go ahead and feed you this cached version. And generally what that results in is a more secure and faster internet. And when it works as designed, it works fantastically.

But when it doesn’t work well, what that means is not only can nobody reach the moon, but also that copy on the satellite is gone. And also whenever the moon is back up and running, the satellite has to rebuild all of its copies. So if you noticed that the internet was running slowly, not just during, but after the AWS outages, it wasn’t just you. That’s because all of those caches had to be rebuilt. All of these systems depend on each other, and when one breaks, it has a domino effect. 

Jenny: Yeah. So there’s really multiple potential single point of failures. Whenever you think about the marketing tech stack in the digital ecosystem that, you know, we’re creating here in the healthcare space. Let’s talk about open source devs and how they are essentially holding up the internet for free.

Suzie: That is correct. And it’s an unsustainable position we found ourselves in. So as we all know, the internet kind of started and then, like most great sandboxes for innovation, it just exploded with no real rules or guardrails. And what that is resulted in is a foundation that’s made of, out-of-date, fundamentally insecure programing languages like things built on C at the infrastructure level, that then that means that everything built on top of that is just a piece of duct tape to try to patch the infrastructure.

It’s like if you had a foundation from the 1800s and you tried to build a modern house on top of it. It’s—the plumbing doesn’t match, the electric doesn’t match, everything shorts out, things aren’t compatible. So we’re dealing with that every day. And we’re also relying on people who are working on it as a hobby in their spare time, unpaid, with no real motivation other than a self-felt sense of satisfaction to maintain really fundamental things that then billion dollar enterprises depend on every day. 

So it’s a really interesting dynamic where nobody’s really responsible to fix it. And it’s an enormous issue that would take an incredible amount of resources to truly resolve. So everybody is just kind of building their own duct tape towers, essentially. And we are just going to find out what happens. 

Jenny: So, really great analogies, by the way, making it very easy to understand for our non-technical listeners. So thank you, Suzie. Let’s now make it actionable, right? I hate ending podcasts or sharing a bunch of scary information and then saying, have a good day. So we’re in healthcare. We have very specific rules around compliance and security. So really what folks need to do is make sure that their organization has a disaster plan. So, Suzie, what advice would you give to internal teams to create and then be prepared to execute a disaster plan?

Suzie: Definitely. I mean, with all of these systems out of your control, it’s irresponsible not to have a disaster plan. You have to assume that one of these vendors is going to fail you eventually. And when that happens, it’s better if you just can follow your guidelines and react calmly instead of trying to build the plane while you’re flying it through a fire.

So the first thing I’d say is make sure that you’ve set all these internal rules and that everybody’s aware of their role and feels comfortable supporting that. You don’t want to say, oh, well, we’re going to have Jenny handle that. And then when it comes to pass, Jenny’s like, oh, I don’t know what that means or I don’t—I’m not comfortable speaking to that. So you want to make sure that you have all those roles and your SMEs organized and a chain of command and a chain of communication. It’s always important to make sure that you keep those notifications going. So if something is wrong and you’re a covered entity, it’s important to say that something is wrong, even if it’s not your fault, even if it’s a global outage that you had nothing to do with. And it’s important just to communicate something, even if you don’t have all the details like, “We are down. This portal is inaccessible. To our knowledge, your data is safe. We will keep you updated. Our next update will be at this time.” People are generally pretty understanding as long as you give them something to work with and provide a reasonable amount of transparency.

So I’d say make your plan and, stick to it. Maybe even do a test run, you know, see how it lands, how the language lands with your account managers. I’ve done that, to say, do you think this would be acceptable or should we maybe explain this a little bit more? So it really just depends on the services you offer. But gotta have that disaster plan. 

Jenny: Yeah, disaster plan is great. I want to reiterate your key point about making sure your backup is on a different, server or ecosystem cloud provider than production. Super important, right? One thing that we need to remember for folks that are covered entities is with HIPAA. Breach notification timeline starts ticking when the outage happens, even if it’s not your fault.

So you need to make sure that you have a really clear documentation of timeline of events, and then work with your security or privacy officers to make sure that you really understand the next steps. But you have all the documentation covered. And then finally, I love your, understanding and like the explanation of roles, but also making sure that the messaging is super clear, right? Have drafts ready to go, you know, for some of these scenarios that, you know, are likely to happen at some point. That way you can execute upon it really quickly. 

And then finally, if somebody wanted to and they should, right? How would they go about documenting their dependencies? A lot of organizations don’t even know, you know, what all their dependencies are. How would they go about trying to create, you know, that documentation to layer into a disaster plan? 

Suzie: That’s a great question, where you’re really going to want to start is the services you support in-house versus the ones that you outsource to a vendor. And anything you support in-house, you should be able to list all the dependencies, or if you don’t, the only acceptable reason is that you have a third-party vendor that supports something that has a proprietary system, but you have a clear understanding of who is your point-of-contact on their end in case of a disaster. 

But beyond that, you should be looking at let’s just start with maybe your website that you manage in-house. Take a look at every plugin on that site. If it’s WordPress (It probably is. Most of them are.) And then you can go ahead and you can look at that plugin. Most of them have really robust documentation. Most softwares have the requirements and dependencies file. Read the read me file. I’m one of the very few people that does that, but it’s almost always very helpful and you can get a pretty good list. I would say it’s tedious, but not technically difficult. And it’s something that you should have because if you see one of these common vulnerability exploits go out, you need to be able to answer the question very definitively of whether or not it affects you. Because if it does, to your point, that breach notification timeline, the clock is ticking. 

Jenny: Yeah. And I just want to remind marketers that, you know, many of you may be thinking in your head, oh, this is something IT will handle. Well, should they handle it? Maybe. But just like all of the things around compliance and security, it’s now another hat that marketers are having to wear. So definitely, if you think your team is handling this, make sure that you meet with them, confirm, get copies of all the documentation that they’ve created to make sure that you are aligned with the plan and you understand what will happen next. Because honestly, the communication should fall to the marketing communications team, not IT. So make sure that you’re working in lockstep with them.

Suzie: And I will say that when we made our disaster recovery plan, we learned right there a lot of the roles. So a lot of the questions that you might say, I don’t even really know where to start. Go find a good example of one and start following it. And before you know it, you’ll be adapting it to your unique products and systems. It just, it happens. So and I will say also, that made us realize how many roles we actually needed. So it’s important to know the, the lift. You know something should it happen. It’s better to know ahead of time. So.

Jenny: Absolutely. So awesome. Well, Suzie, thank you so much. This hopefully will answer a lot of questions and help all of our listeners be prepared for the inevitable next outage that will happen in the internet.

And thank you, as always, for tuning in. Share this episode with a team member that you think may find value and like and subscribe. We drop episodes almost every Friday. That is our goal. And if you have a topic you’d like for us to cover, shoot us a note: hello@hedyandhopp.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Until next time, thanks for joining us on this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Stay safe, friends.

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 & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully health care marketing agency. And as you can hear from my voice, I am coming to you fresh off the plane from HCIC 2025. It was in Las Vegas.

 

So much fun. I will say I’m an old lady. I did not go out partying every night. My voice sounds like I did, but this is just for being in the conference areas with all the cigarette smoke. So I’m going to have my trusted colleagues actually lean in and do most of the talking today. We’re going to be doing a recap of the best of the best.

 

What happened at HCIC? If you weren’t able to go, what were the key trends? What were the sessions that everybody was buzzing about? And Marissa is going to share some details on if you wish you were there, there’s an opportunity next week to sit in on a session virtually to get some of the information. 

 

So I’m going to go ahead and kick it off, and hand it over to Marissa Gurrister, our Director of Growth. Marissa, what was your favorite part and some key takeaways?

 

Marissa: Yeah. It was wonderful, honestly. So this was my first HCIC, which was exciting to go, and see, folks. Vegas was fun. I am happy to be home. Vegas for three days is a lot of Vegas. But it was really great. 

 

I will say, I feel like there was so much buzz around Epic. Just like everywhere you go and everyone you chatted with, folks are wanting to know about all of these new tools and systems within Epic that we can be using for marketing and tracking ROI and connecting with patients. I feel like there was definitely a buzz in the air. I mean, you would like, stand in line for coffee and you were like overhearing folks talk about it or like, going to a happy hour, and folks from different organizations were chatting about what they are doing or what they want to be doing. I also think there was a lot of buzz around your Epic session, Jenny. A lot of folks were talking about it, which was really exciting to hear that it was a useful session for so many folks and that, they really got a lot out of it. So that was great. 

 

And as Jenny mentioned, we will be doing that session again virtually for those who were not able to attend. So next Thursday on the 20th, we are doing a webinar. You can sign up and register for that. We’ll put links in the comments so that you can register for that. But we will be replaying that session virtually for any who weren’t able to attend, or maybe colleagues of those who were, from systems that were at HCIC.

 

So that was really exciting. We had a beautiful booth, too. I know we, kind of teased it a little bit at SHSMD but Annie Kuhn came back again with us to HCIC and did all of the florals for the booth. We had our beautiful earrings, which was so fun. It’s just like a joyful moment.

 

Everything was beautiful. And so shout out to her. Thank you so much, Annie. 

 

But really, I think that was like my big takeaway. It was a great few days. I really enjoyed it. It was great to be with the team. 

 

We went to several sessions. I will say there was a few sessions that stood out to me.

 

I attended the CMO panel that they had on Tuesday, which was really fun. I got to hear some insights from several industry leaders specifically. Though I’m looking over here at my notes so I don’t forget anything. But specifically, I know Stuart Dill presented from Vanderbilt. He was one that had starred on my schedule. I really wanted to attend and hear what they were doing. He had a lot of great overviews on, like, brand preference and brand awareness and brand consideration and how, as marketers, we need to be positioning our campaigns in different ways for each of those phases and really focusing on like what we can actually control and the rest will like kind of fall into place, which was a very fresh perspective. I enjoyed that. He also had a really interesting analogy for like marketing versus branding and how our brand is the sailboat and the sails and marketing is the wind that propels it. So, it was kind of like a fresh way to think about it. My favorite part, though, is he sneak peeked their new brand campaign that is launching next week.

 

It is beautiful. I loved it, I like tear up a little bit. It was. I cannot wait for you all to see it. It’s so good. So, excited to see that market for him. Kudos to their team. It looks wonderful. But yeah, it was a great session. 

 

Jenny: Very nice, I love it. Shelby, let’s pass it over to you. So Shelby is a Senior Account Manager at Hedy & Hopp. This is your second year at HCIC, I believe? 

 

Shelby: Second, maybe third? 

 

Jenny: Yes, third! I love it.

 

Shelby: I think the third! Yeah! Crazy. Time goes by fast. 

 

Yes. It was such a great time to get to connect with some familiar faces and new faces. But one of my favorite sessions that I attended that also I had heard people chatting about around the conference, was Mount Sinai’s session around “The Camera-Ready Physician.” We all know how hard it is to get physicians behind the camera, one, and when they’re behind the camera, to make it a productive useful time. It’s hard. They’re great at what they do. Being behind a camera is not, you know, their zone of genius. So the Mount Sinai social media team, the social media manager Brian, and social media coordinator Suzy did such a fun job making this session different.

 

They had a fun video intro. That then they kind of walked in, together in theme. So, you know, very Vegas, very, very showy. It was so fun. But they had some really great takeaways around what they’re doing that’s making coaching physicians easier, because we know short form content that looks organic, real, not staged, not scripted is what folks are wanting to see, what they’re reacting to.

 

So they created this kind of boot camp that they bring their physicians through where they just have them ramble freely. They’re just like, talk to us about this topic. Let’s just get you comfortable talking, talking to them about random topics that they’re passionate about. They love to cook at home, talk to me about that, get them comfortable. 

 

And their social media team does a lot of passive and active listening to kind of identify: Where do they light up when they’re just rambling on this topic? Where is their personality starting to come out? And then they do follow up questions to really dig deeper in those areas. And then their team and post-production kind of uses clips to create the snappiest little tidbits that feel more natural, more organic. They showed us some more examples and it was just really impressive. They even did a real life example in the session where they had someone come up from the audience and they kind of walked through how they would do it with them.

 

So kudos to you guys for really making this a session that stood out, was different. But also had a lot of actionable ways that systems can be utilizing that same process themselves. 

 

Marissa: I love that you mentioned that, Shelby. I feel like there was a lot of great presenters at HCIC. There was just some, like innovative, exciting ways that they delivered content.

 

I know, one of our colleagues, also went to Nicklaus Children’s session. And Kevin, their CMO, came out and I think he and a few other presenters had on like, superhero capes, which was so fun. So there was like a lot of kind of cool moments like that, which I think really brought some excitement and buzz around the content.

 

Jenny: I totally agree. I want to give a shout out to Vanessa Hill from BILH, Beth Israel Lahey Health. They spoke with Writer Girl, Reba Thompson. They had a really cute choose your own adventure in the way that they told their story. It was so well done. So they had a massive project where they went and wanted to replatform, it turned out to be 17 websites within their system on to a new platform. And so they experienced lots of hurdles and obstacles along the way. But they had a really cute way that they said, choose your own adventure. Like at this pivot point, what would you have done? And they had the audience vote. So it was a very great way to have folks be engaged throughout the entire session and the outcome was really phenomenal. So kudos to them, both Writer Girl and Beth Israel Lahey health on the outcome of that project.

 

Abby, share more about your perspective. So you’re an OG, right? Boomerang team member. You were with Hedy & Hopp, almost from the very beginning. Went to HCIC back in like, 2017, 18, and 19. Left us for a short time and then came back. How was it being at HCIC again? Tell me a little bit about some of the key takeaways from your perspective. 

 

Abby: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, as you mentioned, I started going to HCIC with Hedy & Hopp, several years ago. And then unfortunately, it got disrupted by the pandemic. So we had a couple of years off.

 

And then I also took a couple years off, which was nice. So being back to HCIC for my first time, it was so exciting. Super excited to see everybody again. I saw lots of old faces, which was so great. I mean, it’s just being back in that space with people who have a passion for health care was just really special to see friends and connections that I’ve made over the years and then made lots of new connections. So great time there. 

 

Obviously, I’m also a foodie, so we ate lots of good food while we were there, and I can’t forget to call out the fact that Jenny is having a birthday this week and so is Hedy & Hopp. So we are turning ten years old. It’s so exciting to see how we’ve just grown and had such a fantastic time over the last ten years. So, myself, I didn’t get to attend a whole lot of sessions because I’m on the floor a lot talking to folks, and, you know, introducing them to Hedy & Hopp and learning, you know, where they are in their journey in marketing. And you know, that where, you know, the successes they’re having, the gaps that they’re seeing. And one thing that really stood out a lot to me was the importance of just having a partner that understands the complexity of patient privacy. 

 

First of all, number one topic that comes up all the time when folks come by and say hi to us and, you know, come to us basically saying, “Please help me, we’re flying blind here. How do we navigate this, patient privacy and compliance?” Especially when so many folks and so many organizations work kind of siloed. So you have your own marketing team, you have your compliance team, you have your agency partners. How do we tie that all together and make sure that we’re not missing any critical steps to, make sure that we’re not only collecting data and using it in a safe way, but also maximizing all the data that we do have so we can show, you know, the results on, on all the hard work that these healthcare marketers do.

 

So, so, so many great conversations around that. Obviously Hedy & Hopp is, you know, fully healthcare. So that helps. Jenny, you and I have had, quite the, career in healthcare background with you and your, you know, health issues that you’ve had in the past and how it made, you know it really come to light, that health care is something we’re passionate about.

 

Also, with my background being even on the clinical side, way back in the day when I was younger. So being able to have those conversations and fully understand, you know, the troubles that that these marketers are having and, and how we can work together.

 

Obviously, I heard so many, so much great feedback about utilizing tools like these types of podcasts to understand, you know, how we can navigate through that. Another area, that I had a lot of chatter around was content and how we can safely, and effectively use our content to not only, you know, draw awareness to, you know, important topics, but then also, again, navigate that crazy landscape of, you know, SEO and GEO, and AIO. So how how do we, take that content and make sure that we’re optimizing it so we can show up in these AI results that are now giving us even, you know, more opportunity, but making it a little bit more difficult to make sure that, that our content is coming up in the top search result.

 

So, so, so interesting to hear how different organizations navigate through that in just so many fun conversations around around those pieces. 

 

Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ll say in chatting, you know, with all of the different attendees, I will say that, you know, our biggest takeaway overall from HCIC is that folks are continuously being asked to do more with smaller budgets. And so having to get creative, both with the work your internal team is doing and with the way that you partner with outside organizations and really maximizing those assets, really is the key focus going into 2026. 

 

Abby: Absolutely. Yeah.

Jenny: Absolutely. One last shout out. I do want to call out the sweatshirt that Shelby is wearing. So the first night, happy hour all of us were wearing at Hedy & Hopp, all wearing these matching hand-painted sweatshirts by the artist Lauren Younge.

 

So lots of folks approached us and said, “I want one!” So we are going to link to her Instagram and the show notes. She’s a phenomenally, very, very talented artist. And these sweatshirts are a new item for her. So go check it out, if you’re interested. And we’d love, you know, supporting up-and-coming artists, so.

 

Abby: And Jenny, I will say that I had several comments about the sweatshirts and requests for us to wear them throughout the entire conference, so people could just see how pretty they are. So they were a huge hit. I love them so much. And many people asked about where they can find them. So, so happy we’re linking, to her page.

 

Jenny: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, everybody, for tuning in. We hope even if you weren’t able to attend HCIC, that we gave you a couple of good takeaways of things that you can just take back to your own organization. Look up the folks that we mentioned and their projects that are live that we’ve referenced. We’ll link to a lot of these folks in the show notes, so you can go look at their work, all very, very impressive stuff, you know, coming out in our industry right now. 

 

We also are going to link again, if you are interested in the content that we presented. It is, Unlocking Epic for Health Care Marketers, a webinar. We’re doing it next week, exact same content we presented as a learning lab at HCIC. That is in the show notes. Even if you cannot attend it live, if you have a conflict, still sign up. We’re going to send a link to the recording after the fact. 

 

There’s a lot of innovation happening in this space. And if your organization leverages Epic as an EHR, it will be a great introduction to understand even what tools that you have access to, many things you’re already paying for that you can begin leveraging immediately. So, hopefully it will be helpful information.

 

So thank you so much for tuning in folks. Please like this, comment, rate it, share this episode with any of your colleagues that you think may find valuable, and tune in next week for another new episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. Have a great day, friends. Cheers!

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 & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m very excited today to be joined by Lindsey Brown, Hedy & Hopp’s very own director of Activation. Hi, Lindsey. 

Lindsey: Hi, Jenny!

Jenny: We’re going to be digging in today about paid media restrictions in healthcare.

So we had a lot of conversations at Schmitt and Dallas. It was just a couple of weeks ago with folks who were either brand new to healthcare marketing. Many of them had many years experience in other industries, but were new to healthcare or folks who are not new to healthcare but have allowed their marketing agencies to really take the reins over the last five years and didn’t really stay up to date on the regulatory environment shifts, and they’re wanting to get caught up on what’s happening.

So, if this is you, this is a great episode to listen in. We’re going to be talking about why there are restrictions in paid media for healthcare marketers, the big restrictions marketers need to be aware of, and then what marketers can do really to, be aware of the future, but also make their campaigns successful today. So, Lindsey, let’s kick off, give us an overview: Why are there restrictions in healthcare? Why can’t we do the fun things that e-commerce companies can do? 

Lindsey: That’s always the question we get. And you know, as marketers, you have to take your take a step back and really put yourself into the shoes of a patient. As a patient, would you want marketers knowing more about you, about searches that you make on the internet, about health, about pages or videos that you’re watching in regards to very specific health conditions?

There’s a lot of, you know, concern over having that kind of data in the hands of big tech or in the hands of really anyone that you haven’t given consent to. And that’s really the purpose of all of these laws, is to ensure that, you know, patients and how people are trying to understand their health, improve their health, access health care, that that is really remained private and remains, a conversation between their physician and themselves as opposed to, you know, their physician, themselves and all of Google, for example. We really want to make sure that that information is protected and kept safe and secure. So, yeah, that’s really kind of why the restrictions are needed. And again, as marketers, we really have to respect that boundary, especially as for many and have all of our clients are in health care. So we know that they understand this really well.

And so be able to partner with them to ensure that information is being secure while also ensuring their marketing is working, is kind of our sweet spot. 

Jenny: Perfect. Well, let’s dive in to what I’m calling the three big hurdles that health care marketers have to jump over. The first one that we’re going to talk about is privacy and HIPAA.

So Lindsey, give us a rundown. How do privacy considerations and laws and HIPAA impact decisions made within paid media? 

Lindsey: So the biggest thing is, you know, we think about consent and offering consent and someone giving consent to share information. And really at the bulk of that is ensuring that their information isn’t shared with third parties, those that they have not agreed to share that information.

And what that has really turned into over the past couple of years is ensuring that that information is not shared with technology companies, especially like Google, where your analytics likely is, and Meta or other advertising platforms where there’s a lot of, engagement, a lot of information being shared. So really, the reason this is the biggest hurdle is it’s really kind of limited marketers ability to employ tracking technologies the way that they used to, where it’s just gather all the information you possibly can, and then we’ll slice down and figure out what exactly we want to work with.

So that’s really the biggest hurdle is, again, ensuring that from tracking technology perspective or big tech or any tech companies, that that information is kept private down to things like the content that you are reading, the information you’re putting into forms, where you are located down to your latitude, longitude, things to that effect are really areas where we’ve had to be really restrictive and ensure that we’re adhering to those particular laws.

Jenny: Yep. And as we’re thinking specifically about paid media activation, regardless of channel, there are some restrictions that that enforce that allow, forces us to enforce. Correct?

Lindsey: Yes, correct.

Jenny: So talk to us a little bit about like conversion pixels. Right. Used to be the gold standard for paid media is still in some other industries. So across all channels, you know, how should we think about conversion pixels now.

Lindsey: Yeah. So really conversion pixels are off limits unless you have some way of employing some type of private analytics tool using server side Google Tag manager or another private server. Really those pixels are essentially sharing information about that user and what they’ve done on your site back with, those platforms where that pixel is coming from.

So if you have a Facebook conversion pixel on your site, anything that a user does where that pixel is found, that’s going right back to Meta and they’re learning all sorts of things about you. So that’s number one, one thing that’s really important that those really should not be used any more whatsoever. 

The other one is list sharing. So a big popular thing that a lot of other companies do is they take lists that either they’ve purchased or that they’ve gathered on their own website, or that they have partnerships with, like second party data. And they use that, upload that into Google, into Meta, with programmatic partners, all sorts of other media partners, and use that for targeting either directly targeting those folks or using, other technologies, kind of figure out what types of people these are and what other types of people they can find that are like those customers. That’s what we call profiling. And that is something that also, not allowed, especially when it comes to patient information. If you’re using your patient lists in Meta or Google or any other platform that is absolutely not allowed anymore because that is constituting sharing patient information with those platforms, even though you’re using it for targeting or, you know, we know that they’re customers of ours, so it’s ok. It’s not okay from a privacy perspective. That’s another big one you have to watch out for. 

Jenny: So let’s talk specifically about Google ads. There are, first of all, some restricted areas or categories where it’s either not allowed or more difficult to advertise in Google Ads. Can you talk about that?

Lindsey: Yeah for sure. So definitely areas of concern will be health care, health and wellness, specifically around reproductive health. I think, political climate and things to that effect really have restricted the use of reaching out to specific types of people or trying to find certain kinds of people for reproductive health information. Weight loss is another one, especially with the expansion of all the new pharmaceuticals out there and different treatments that are available, GLP-1s, what have you. And honestly, some of the, you know, there are some legitimate advertising for that out there. There’s some not so legitimate advertising around there. So again, it’s kind of Google’s way of protecting the consumer from things that aren’t real or, or things that, really you should work with your health care provider on. 

Prescription drugs is another one. That’s a big one. And Google recently announced that they are actually lowering the restrictions on prescription drugs, which there’s a whole whole community of people that are kind of like on one side or the other of this, where on the one hand, as a marketer, if you’re if you’re wanting to share information with with potential patients or potential users of your prescription drugs, you know you want them to be able to find educational materials. You’re not trying to sell them on a drug. You’re not trying to do certain things. You just want them to know that it exists, or you want them to know, like what it’s used for or something like that. 

And so Google has actually limited, or expanded, the use of that within Google. So, where advertisers previously couldn’t do any kind of prescription drug marketing within Google Ads, now they can, so long as it’s informational or for educational purposes only.

The problem is: Who is making that decision? So from from a marketer’s perspective, we could say everything is about education. I’m not pushing it. I’m just I’m just telling you what it is. Google may have a different story. So that’s kind of where the controversy comes in, where, you know, someone may think that it’s an educational campaign, but Google’s like, nope, no, that feels promotional to me. And they kind of get to make the call. So we’ll kind of see how it all plays out. But, it’s interesting in a time where a lot of restrictions are being made in terms of how we can talk about prescription drugs or other therapies, Google’s actually lessening those restrictions, which again, we’ll kind of see how it plays out.

Jenny: What about the Legit Script certification? 

Lindsey: Yeah. So, a lot of times for, for specific areas, especially in things like prescription drugs, I want to say that reproductive health, weight loss, addictive, addiction, things to that effect that are already restricted, in order to run ads for those specific types of, therapies or for specific types of things, you would have to have a Legit Script certification. And that is something that you get through Google. Now, Google doesn’t allow everyone to be certified in that. So again, it has another layer of complexity where Google might think that it’s okay for you to be certified for one thing, but then another company won’t get certified. So again, the playing field isn’t quite even. But Google does make you jump through quite a few hoops to make sure that, you’re not doing anything that might harm the end consumer, which in theory is a really good thing. It’s just, again, how that plays out and ensure it’s consistent and, balanced for everybody. 

Jenny: Absolutely. Let’s pivot and talk a little bit about Meta. Meta has made some pretty significant changes over the last three years to what marketers and healthcare can and cannot do. Give us a rundown. 

Lindsey: Yeah. So really, we’ve lost, very specific health related interest targeting. So previously where you could probably look down to a specific kind of condition or a type of symptom or things that effect. Now Meta isn’t really allowing you to do that. There’s a broad health and wellness category, which if you’re a health care marketer, a lot of things go into that, like yoga is in the same category as, you know, heart attack or a heart condition, which are very, very different things. So that was kind of the first thing. All those restrictions being lifted. 

So what that really forced, marketers to do is to think about their services or think about, you know, what they are marketing or what they’re providing information of, really making sure that that creative is hitting on that message because we could at target as finite or because we can’t target is finite as we want to, or that we are accustomed to in things like programmatic or, other areas like direct mail, you know, we have to be more general and Meta. So it really forced marketers to get more creative, and kind of see what messages were drawing folks in, what messages were not, which actually was kind of fun. I think sometimes as marketers, we get so excited about the possibilities of finding very specific individuals, based on their behavior, that we kind of forget that there’s a lot of people out there that probably fit our audience profile that wouldn’t fit into those interests.

So it’s actually been great for us. We’ve had one campaign in particular where Meta was the top performing conversion. Even though it’s a broad health and wellness category, it was for a very specific service, but it really performed amazingly well for our clients, which was like all due to the creative and ensuring that message was really resonating. So again, some restrictions there, but again, you can be creative as marketers. It’s literally what we do all day. So it’s kind of it’s kind of nice to be able to kind of work around those. 

Jenny: Well, with that, let’s talk then about how marketers can pivot. So you talked about really balancing compliance, creativity and results. Talk a little bit more about what marketers should be keeping top of mind if they’re thinking about developing a paid media campaign.

Lindsey: Yeah. So I think the really important part is to think about, again, this is hard for marketers because we want to be very specific, because it’s important. Specificity is important to see the results you want, but kind of taking a broader step back. And like, what overall do we want folks to do. So those CTAs, using more general CTAs that still are applicable to your target audience. For example, “find a doctor” is very different than “schedule an appointment with this doctor now.” Even though we might want them to schedule an appointment with this doctor right now, saying that might get you into a little bit of trouble from a legal perspective, and also might be difficult for you to, to show results on based on the tracking technology—not issues, but, things that we’ve got to get around, Right? So something as simple as “find a doctor,” “schedule a screening,” “learn more.” These are typically things that as we become more sophisticated marketers, we’re like, don’t use learn more. It’s the worst CTA ever. But that is kind of where we’re at. You can use that still to your advantage because it shows that you’re really providing education.

Same thing, with that message, as I mentioned, education really is important. And at the crux of what health care providers and companies want to do is really educate potential patients on what they should do to kind of take their health care into their own hands, and to be really proactive. So I wouldn’t see this as a negative. It’s like, but we want appointments. Yes, you want appointments, but you’ve got to educate your clients first or potential patients first. So let’s really take that, lean into that, and use that in our created to help get around some of the compliance issues. 

So long story boring, the whole point is make sure that you’re really balancing the compliance and the creativity, and don’t be afraid to make something feel a little bit more, general, again, you’re going to find the right people that are interested in moving forward, and then you’ll be able to see those results on the end, on the back end.

Jenny: So one last question, Lindsey. This has been a fabulous overview. Thank you. One last question: I’d love for you to kind of look into your, magic eight ball and give us an idea of what do you think health care marketers need to be thinking about 12, 24, 36 months down the line? Right, budgets continue to get more and more restricted, compliance continues to get stricter and stricter. If I were the director of marketing at a regional hospital system, for example, health system, what should I be thinking about when I’m specifically thinking about paid media? 

Lindsey: So with so much that we’ve heard in other industries, you are going to see some potential with AI-driven targeting. And so what I mean by that is, in a platform such as Meta, there’s actually, a way to teach the algorithm on who you’re looking for, even though you can’t specifically target them based on interest or something else, like an ICD-10 code.

And leveraging something like that will allow that budget to go a lot further. It also will help you from an operations and efficiency standpoint, because you’re not necessarily spending a lot of time doing A/B testing. You’re teaching the algorithm who to find, and learning about what messages are best resonating with them, without having to do a lot of, you know, analysis and things like that. Because on the back end, if we’re going to struggle a little bit on getting down to the exact measurement that we’ve been used to, right, with conversion pixels and optimizing, automatically, you know, we’re going to have to use some tools to help us manage that most effectively. And so AI-driven in targeting or some areas where, we really think we’ll be leaning into to help us both from an efficiency standpoint and from showing improved performance overall. So very excited about the developments there. 

Jenny: Very exciting. Well, if you tuned in today, hopefully this gave you confidence in the future. All of these restrictions truly aren’t things that you need to be afraid of. You need to be aware of them. But as marketers, one of our core competencies is the ability to be creative and to adapt.

So if you look at this through the lens of pivoting with positivity, which is one of Hedy & Hopp’s core values, so say it often. But if you pivot with positivity and really look at this as an opportunity to work those creativity muscles, you really can still drive really strong campaign performance across all of these different media channels.

You just have to get a little creative—and technical—in the way that you implement them. So but don’t give up media still absolutely a strong channel in the healthcare space. You just have to know how to use it correctly. 

So and with that, thank you so much for tuning in. Please share this episode with a team member that you think may find it useful. And subscribe! We drop new episodes almost every Friday, so we’d love to have you as a subscriber. Until next time, have a great weekend and thanks for joining us on today’s episode of We Are Marketing, Happy. Cheers!

 

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 am so excited to be coming to you fresh out of SHSMD 2025. Our team had so much fun at this conference, and so we’re going to use today’s episode as a recap.

Even if you weren’t able to go, or if you did attend and want to see if our highlights are the same as what you felt was your personal highlights, this is a great episode to give you a little bit of a recap of some of the main things that we found as big takeaways for our session this year.

I am super excited to be joined by Marissa Gurrister, Hedy & Hopp’s very own Director of Growth, and Brenda Cross, our Marketing Manager. Welcome, ladies. 

Brenda: Hi! 

Marissa: Thank you! 

Jenny: Brenda, let’s start with you. Let’s talk a little bit about the Hedy & Hopp booth. So for conference attendees that have seen a Hedy & Hopp booth, you know, we always go big.

We do custom booths every single year that always try to incorporate artists. We like to give our money to real humans, as we like to say, instead of trade show companies. So, Brenda, tell our listeners a little bit about how Hedy & Hopp chose to show up this year. 

Brenda: Yeah, our booth was a home run with everybody. We went all out, like Jenny said. If you’re watching this podcast, I am wearing a custom sweatshirt that we had designed by our 2023 Artist in Residence, Lauren Younge. She painted these all by hand. If you want to check out our Instagram @hedyandhopp or our LinkedIn, you’ll see some pictures there as well.

Of all of the artists’ work that we incorporated, the big hit was our floral arch arrangements and floral earrings that we wore to the conference. These were all designed by floral artist Annie Kuhn with Verde Designs, and she is from Saint Louis. She flew with us to the conference, set everything up. Real flowers were part of our booth.

She refreshed them every day. We had new fresh floral earrings every day, and they were a huge hit. They were so colorful. And we stood out so much. And it was just, it was very sad to take it down yesterday, quite honestly. But we will be doing it again for HCC, in just a few weeks. So you will get to see more flowers very soon.

We also, as with every conference, we have art prints available for free for people to take from our Artists in Residence. This year, our artist in residence is Heather Ward Miles. She’s a painter from Carmel, Indiana. And soon we’ll be choosing our 2026 artist in residence. So each year, the art rotates. The art was a huge hit as well.

And we raffled off an original painting from Heather, too, for one lucky attendee, to have shipped to them. 

Jenny: Yeah. Great recap. And for fans, if you’re listening in, if you are a fan of the sweatshirts, Lauren actually sells them on her Instagram. So we had lots of people say, oh, I want one. Well, the good news is you can have one. Reach out to Lauren. She actually dropped them on her Instagram about three weeks ago, and I immediately messaged her and said, we will take six. So they are available. If you would like to show support to a fabulous artist, we’ll link to all three of the artists that we mentioned in the show notes. 

Marissa, this was your very first session and I would love to hear your big picture takeaways.

Talk about your perspective of your overall experience. And then I’d love if you could tell me a little bit about one of your favorites. Favorite speakers or sessions? 

Marissa: Sure. Yeah. So it was my first SHSMD. It was very fun. It was just fun to connect with folks in person. I had colleagues from past lives that were there that I got to reconnect with.

And, friends on LinkedIn that I have followed professionally for quite some time, that we got to meet up in person, which was really, really cool. You know, it was interesting to me. I kind of felt like there was a common thread among everyone about these, like, issues that we’re all struggling with. Like, there’s kind of this theme amongst healthcare marketers where I feel like we’re all having troubles measuring performance with all of the like changing compliance laws and regulations and keeping up with it all.

And, you know, just like finding time in our schedules to be innovative and come up with fresh ideas. I feel like one of those three issues came up in almost every single conversation I was having, which was, I don’t know, kind of reassuring to know that, like, we’re all struggling with the same things here. But it was just fun to be able to be there in person and hear what other folks are doing to overcome some of those challenges, bounce ideas back and forth, and just have real conversations.

But honestly, like kind of to that point, the keynote by the poet, Tucker Bryant, he really went into more depth about how sometimes, like our breakthrough comes when we can really, like, take things out of our everyday and remove things, in our daily work that we’re constantly doing to make room for new, innovative ideas. So I thought that really, it was, it really hit home for a lot of the folks there just having those conversations.

Jenny: Yeah. I think he, really, tied it together. He was talking about erasure poetry, where sometimes real art can be created by removing things instead of always adding things. And that really is such a big reminder for marketers because we’re constantly trying to do more, more, more, more and more. And as our budget shrinks, sometimes the actual art of being, you know, decision maker and trying to make a difference and perhaps removing things from our plates instead of continuously adding.

So I agree that one was really meaningful. My favorite session was actually Wash U’s session they did on integrated data. The presenters were Verna Ehlen and Molly Bailey. And I really liked it because I felt like out of all the sessions talking about data and analytics, theirs was one of the only ones that actually got real. They actually had some good meat to the presentation.

They showed some light examples of their dashboards, and there was actually enough expertise in the two women that were presenting where they could actually dig into the details. So it wasn’t just theory and philosophy around analytics and measurement. They were talking real numbers, real integrations, real best practices. And it really went to show how much time and energy had to go into making something like that that actually functioned.

So many times we go to presentations in sessions where it is all theory around what we all should be doing, and then you walk away and you’re like, you didn’t write that much down. So I just want to give a shout out to those two ladies from Wash U because they did a phenomenal job, creating a presentation, that had some good value for attendees.

Jenny: Brenda, how about you? What was your favorite session?

Brenda: My favorite was on the final day, one of the very early morning sessions at 8 a.m.. It was called Beyond the Campaign Launch: Why Your Experience IS Your Marketing, and this was led by Kristin Baird. She’s the president and CEO at Baird Group and Steve Koch, and he’s the managing partner at Cast & Hue.

And the big thing was highlighting that tricky but very crucial relationship between marketing, clinical leadership and operations. And having come previously from a provider, a lot of this I could relate to, that it’s like it was a lot of great information that seems very simple, but is actually very difficult to put into practice. And takes a lot of ongoing work.

Really the key takeaways were, if you say it as part of your brand, as part of your marketing, you have to be ready to live it. That patient experience ultimately dictates your brand, not what you say it does not what you say. Your mission is not what you say. Your promises. You need to make sure you can actually fulfill that promise that you’re making.

They actually put a really great slide up that, had, a tagline or a promise to patients. And then it had an asterisk and it said, like, unless, unless Carl is working or something like that because he’s mean, you know, so like it, it’s there’s no asterisk that we put on taglines or anything like that. But patients are experiencing these hiccups when they actually get to a provider.

That and I really can happen, throughout the entire experience, from booking to billing. If you don’t engage your operations and your clinical leadership and patients and have a poor experience, your marketing and strategy just goes out the window. It doesn’t matter. It will fail. Even if you did your job and you did it with the best marketing campaign ever, with the best creative, it’s, it’s not going to work because that patient experience, cannot—that poor experience—cannot make up for that.

They won’t want to come back. They’ll share it online and, and review, and other people will see that. And it really matters. So they had two steps that, Kristin and Steve highlighted, as part of this process to make sure you’re incorporating clinical leadership and operations. One was journey mapping. To really go through the steps that patients walk through themselves when they’re going in for a particular service.

So you start with a trigger event. What makes people call your organization an example could be, the patient develops a fever at work. They realize they they need to figure out what’s going on with them and really take each individual step, even the very small steps in between matter to see how they’re getting to you, what’s happening when they get there, and what’s happening after, another crucial part, of really engaging with the patient experience is mystery shopping, which I thought was very interesting.

And not something it seems like a lot of providers do from the hands that were raised in the room. There’s only a few people that had done mystery shopping at their organizations, but, it really allows you to look at both facts and feelings as part of that process. So not just all the data that you get from surveys.

You really get really meaningful information as part of that mystery shopping and places that maybe aren’t living up to your promise as a, as a brand, as a health care provider. One key highlight was to not try to do mystery shopping yourself. You may feel like, oh, I can go in and do that. As, the marketing director, or marketing manager, and do that on my own.

But you have your own biases, and you have a lot more knowledge of your organization than a typical patient does. And it’s really best to even have someone who’s not involved in health care as part of their day to day work at all, so they can have a more typical patient experience. And you can see it through, typical patients eyes and not through kind of, your lens that has so many biases incorporated in it.

So ultimately, the patient experience should be part of marketing, which I thought was interesting. I don’t know if that’s feasible for some small marketing teams to take on the whole patient experience with marketing. I think, what they really highlight is it’s important to have that really close relationship with clinical operations, to make sure there’s that feedback loop there and that you’re not launching any campaigns until you nail down your patient experience and any hiccups that are within that.

And lastly, empower staff to become really true ambassadors of the brand and to help them see how their work fits into the overall patient experience. So one example that I thought was really good was, maybe the person, who’s the janitorial staff, who helps clean the bathrooms. That is actually a crucial part of the experience.

I think there was one review they highlighted that was, “Oh my gosh, I went into the bathroom in the waiting room and it was filthy, and I could only think about how my dad is going into surgery there, and I don’t want them to get an infection,” and that’s what they’re connecting. So even things like that can make or break an experience of the patient and also the people supporting their patients.

So, even every single job as part of that system, is, is part of making that patient experience, whether it ends up good or bad.

Jenny: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Great sessions. Well, I can speak for not only the two of you. So the three of us, but also the other team members to say that we loved it this year.

We really had a lot of fun, made a ton of phenomenal connections. So thank you for the team at SHSMD for putting on a phenomenal conference yet again this year. We’re very appreciative of your time and energy. Hedy & Hopp actually led a pre-conference workshop that was 2.5 hours long on Sunday. Packed room talking advanced patient privacy, both on the marketing tactics and on the actual analytics side for integration.

So really digging into things like what the technical differences are between a CDP and sGTM. So, we really enjoyed speaking and got really great feedback afterwards as well, from attendees, so … 

Marissa: Lots of great questions too, from the folks in the room, which was nice to have that like back and forth in that dialog. It was it was nice.

Jenny: Yeah. Totally agree. It was super fun. 

So I will say overall that I think our biggest takeaway from SHSMD this year was that there’s power in prioritization. It’s so easy to keep adding more and more things to your plate. But sometimes having blinders on and focusing on those things that are truly going to move the needle for your organization as much.

But what is most important, and really, that’s exactly what we help health care providers, practices and payers with every day at Hedy & Hopp. So thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We hope this recap episode was valuable. And we’ll see you next week for another episode. Have a great rest of your day.

Cheers!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I’m Jenny Bristow, and I’m your host. And I’m also the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I’m here today excited to chat with you about AI and personas. 

I have two of my fabulous team members with me. I have Sarah Zajicek. She’s a Copywriter and Content Editor, and Yenny Rojas, who is an SEO Marketing Specialist. Welcome, ladies. 

Sarah: Thank you. 

Yenny: Thank you.

Jenny: So we created a podcast episode a few weeks ago, I guess a couple of months ago at this point, talking about SEO and how AI is really changing the game. And then I posted a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago talking about the huge strides our team is making and having our content rank well in AI.

So whether that’s an AI overview or showing up as an answer for LLMs, and I’ve received a lot of questions about the behind the scenes of, “How does that work? How are you using AI to create content on the front end, while you’re still able to somehow make high-quality content that people enjoy reading? What are you doing structurally to have it show up all on a website?”

So we wanted to do a follow-up episode. So on today’s episode, we’re going to be digging in more into the power of AI and really supporting the creation of content and how things like personas and structure come into play. 

So I’m going to start with Sarah. Sarah, really excited to chat with you a little bit about the big shift in AI and what is happening and how people are using AI to find content. So talk to us a little bit about that. How are people using AI to find information, and how should that shift to the way that marketers show up on behalf of brands? 

Sarah: Yeah. So there’s actually a study published pretty recently by the creators of ChatGPT that found that up to 49% of searches, or messages, that are being sent into ChatGPT are actually asking questions. So a lot of people are using it more as a research-based tool than a, an action tool, and they’re looking for answers to their questions.

So the way that we have found we can better structure our content is by answering the questions that people are asking ChatGPT, so we can better show up for those users and gain more brand awareness among them.

Jenny: So Sarah, talk to us a little bit about what that actually means in practice, right? So you have both large systems. You have service lines within those systems. And then you also have individual practice offices. So let’s say, a five location orthopedic practice. If I were a marketing strategist and I were trying to think about how people were going to be finding me, what does the study say? How are people using AI to do that research?

Sarah: So on a smaller practice perspective, patients are generally turning to AI to search for questions more about the conditions or procedures that they’re interested in. And having those service-based pages inside of a small practice’s website can really help the user find the information that they’re looking for, while also getting the education that they’re looking for. And from a hospital system perspective, patients are using AI search to find those specialties within their local area.

So having those specialty pages and having them structured well will help them find that information. 

Jenny: Absolutely. And we talked in a prior episode, not only about the importance of AI through the lens of how people are searching, but also the importance of reputation and the influence of AI. So if you—if that idea is new to you, go back and listen to that episode. We talked a lot about how ratings and rankings can really influence the way that you show up in AI. So really important to kind of think about not just content on the site, but also how people are talking about you off the site. 

So let’s talk a little bit about big picture best practices for content and SEO strategy in the AI area. One of the things that we do a lot for our SEO and GEO clients is focus on their blogs, but also their main service line pages, and that feels kind of obvious, right? Like, of course you’re going to put content there. But talk to us a little bit about the specifics. How are we optimizing those pages?

Sarah: So we optimize service pages and blogs fairly similarly. Our service pages, or the main pages on our website, that act sort of as pillars for the rest of our blog content to connect to. And the way we structured these is with bulleted summaries at the beginning of the page. This creates a quick and snappy way for users to find what information they’re going to be seeing on this page, but also a great way for AI to sort of quick sight what is found on your, on your website. 

Also answering commonly asked questions in the form of FAQs or Q&A style copy helps users find the answers that they’re looking for. Again, using bulleted lists to break up copy and large blocks of text. Anything that gets the user to easily scan what they’re going to be read is more likely to be cited in AI search. And implementing those FAQs. So snappy content, answering questions quickly, and an implementation of an FAQ schema, which is just a, a structured snippet of code, helps not only the users, but the AI search itself, crawl the website and gather that information. 

Jenny: So basically what you’re saying is: AI does not have a big attention span either. 

Sarah: No!

Jenny: So we have the write bulleted lists for users to scan. And we gotta write bulleted lists for AI to scan because everybody’s just looking for the headlines. 

Sarah: Exactly. The easier it is to read for the user, the easier it is to read for AI. And everybody is happy in the end. 

Jenny: Absolutely. I think what’s kind of interesting with a lot of things in marketing is a lot of this stuff feels common sense, right? But actually taking that and implementing it whenever you have a massive digital ecosystem is where processes and structure and well-defined schema really comes into play, right? Like nothing that we’re saying I think people will listen to and say, “Oh, that’s a lightbulb idea.” But the thing that’s light bulb is actually taking that and developing a process to scale it across a massive digital ecosystem, so that way then you’re really making, solid steps forward for the users and for, you know, AI platforms to be able to digest the information. 

Sarah: Absolutely.

Jenny: So if somebody were trying to implement this internally and they were trying to create, let’s say, going into next year, a program to implement this within their own organization, what are some practical applications they should be thinking about?

Sarah: The best thing that they can do, really, is just think about how to quickly and concisely answer the questions that people are using. Think in terms of how you would be searching for things online. A great resource is the FAQs section or more questions section in Google. It provides a list of questions that people are commonly asking and searching for, within a specific query, taking those and running with them.

And again, as many bulleted bulleted lists, Q&A-style copy format that you can, that you can fit into a page. 

Jenny: Absolutely, absolutely. How about the integration of AI writing tools into a process? So how should marketers think about that? When is it in your patient’s best interest to use those tools, versus when is it kind of becoming lazy and creating content that they don’t want to read?

Sarah: That’s a great question. I know AI writing tools can be a little controversial in the marketing space, just because if you don’t use them correctly, your copy can sound very robotic, and obviously if it doesn’t sound right, users aren’t going to find interest in it. And AI is not going to rank it very well either, the AI search engines.

So you want to be able to use your AI writing tool to your advantage, but you want to use your best judgment as a human to sort of, intervene when necessary, break up those blocks of text and, really play around with the instructions that you’re giving your AI writing tool to be able to get the best output for yourself.

So, emphasizing, you know, the bulleted lists.

Jenny: Well, in addition to bulleted lists, you can also do, summaries or headlines. Another thing that is really valuable that our team has done is, for example, if you do have an article that’s been written, you can use AI to be able to summarize it.

Okay, Sarah. So let’s talk a little bit about when I can play a role in the creation of content for SEO and GEO versus when it should be a human actually involved in the process. What’s your perspective? 

Sarah: AI writing tools are great for additional support. Although they’re not perfect, they’re not always medically accurate if you’re writing medical content, and they tend to sound a little robotic if used repeatedly. So, having that human intervention there to help in creating more of a natural voice throughout the copy, breaking up large blocks of text, again, with those, bulleted lists or even summaries, really comes into play with, using AI tools to the best of your ability.

Jenny: Absolutely. Think of it as a support member on your team, not the star person. 

Sarah: Exactly.

Jenny: Perfect. Well, let’s shift over talking a little bit about personas and AI search. Yenny, give us your thought about, kind of where we are, how it plays in, and what the future is going to hold. 

Yenny: Sure. Thank you. Jenny. So first, AI is changing the game, right?

So AI doesn’t care just about the keywords. It tries to understand who is behind the question—your role, context and even all the constraints can influence that answer.

So for example, I have two prompts: typing in “best skincare routine.” Or someone might say to ChatGPT, “I am a 35 year old male with sensitive skin and recurring acne. What is the best skincare routine recommended by dermatologists?” You see the difference in the two prompts? One has context and information. So AI tailors the answer to those specific prompts and personas. That’s why it’s so important for businesses to start thinking persona-first when creating content. AI and large language models change how search works.

Prompts don’t just carry what someone wants, but who they are also. Content must respond not only to queries, but to the identity and constraints behind them. In AI search, a persona is defined, is a defined identity or a set of characteristics that guides how the AI responds to process information. So it goes beyond what is being asked and consider who is asking and under what circumstances.

In old search, success mostly came from doing keyword research, finding the right keywords, making sure your content align and match the search intent behind them. And as long as you pick the right keywords and align your content with that intent, you could rank well, right? So now in the AI search prompts, expose not just what but the who is asking—again role content, context and constraints.

So with AI search, a user’s query isn’t just about what they want, it also reveals who they are and the situation they’re in. Also environmental factors like where they live, living in different states have an effect in their responses. 

For example, if a user prompts ChatGPT is something like, “I am a 50 year, 50 year old living in Miami, Florida. I need a yearly physical, but I don’t have health insurance. Can you show me a list of nearby, primary care doctors who offer free physicals and also provide me with a checklist of what to bring to my appointment?”

That was a lot of context, a lot of information. And so with this prompt, ChatGPT has enough background information: They know about the user’s needs, they know their personal situation, their financial constraints, where they live and how they like that information to be presented to them.

So AI systems personalize the summaries and citations around that context. Different personas, don’t just want different information, they also want it delivered in different formats. So AI tools recommend your content into different formats that are most useful for the searcher. 

For example, a person, an executive persona. Right. This person prefers a summary with a bullet list because they wanted to scan the content quickly. As on the other hand, a researcher persona might want a deep-dive narrative with sources and charts and explanations. 

So by anticipating the format preferences of different personas, we make it easier for AI to recommend the content in a way that is very useful and valuable for the user. 

And so what this means for content strategy, we want to start this in ways to incorporate personas into the content. We want to revisit our core pages, our core content, and integrate targeted examples, localized details. We want persona-specific insights to make the content more relevant and engaging, right? If not every content or not, every topic needs a personalized version. Instead, we want to find places where we can speak to the audience naturally and more directly—whether through localized callouts, customer-focused CTAs, or targeted subsections within that existing content.

Also, now that we have talked about tailoring the content to different personas and formats, the next step is making sure we have a strong base persona to work from. And this starts with core demographics. These are things that we already have when we create the content. Things like the age, the gender, the race, locations, education, income. So all of these basics, core demographics are the foundation for layering our context and preferences and constraints when writing the content. 

And it is tools like Google Search Console that come in very handy because it gives you a real world insight into what, who is finding your content, what they’re typing in, what are they searching for? So by analyzing these types of questions and queries, from your visitors, you can infer what problems or goals they have. And this helps you in building the persona for writing your content. 

Jenny: That’s super helpful. I think a lot of folks are thinking about personas when they’re doing social media content, but that hasn’t necessarily translated over to SEO and on-site content as much.

So hopefully for our listeners, this is really good food for thought and really helps you think about how persona-based marketing really extends into all of these other tactics and ways that you’re creating content for your patients online. So Jenny and Sarah, thank you so much for all of the information you’re sharing today. 

This whole world is shifting so quickly. So we’re going to continue creating episodes on SEO and the impact AI is having it, on it, every couple of months to be able to continue to give people some food for thought in context as they are refining their strategy. 

So thank you, both of you. 

Yenny: Thank you. 

Sarah: Thank you.

Jenny: And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in today. Hopefully, both Sarah and Yenny gave you some additional ways that you can think about content strategy, content creation and the way that AI and AI overviews are digesting and using your information on behalf of your patients. So the way that you will continue to create content will shift over time, and you’ll continue to do better and better to show up in those places that your patients are looking for you.

If you have any questions on this topic, feel free to reach out. We would love to chat more. Otherwise, please share this episode with a colleague who may find the information helpful. Subscribe to this podcast. We drop new episodes almost every Friday, and like us on social media. You need to get updates on the new information that we’re sharing.

And that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. We will see you on next week’s episode. Have a great day! Cheers!

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!

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow and I’m your host, and I’m the CEO & Founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to introduce you today to Marissa Gurrister. Marissa is our brand new Director of Growth here at Hedy and Hopp, and she joins us with over a decade experience in-house on the system side, coming to us from systems such as Ascension and Duly.

Welcome, Marissa. 

Marissa: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. 

Jenny: Well, you are going to become a familiar face on the podcast. So I’m so excited to kick off the first episode with you. And as we were brainstorming topics to cover, one of the things that we’ve had a lot of folks want to chat with us about, both to understand the technical details of how to do it, but then also talk about the fun strategy side is … influencer marketing. And you have quite a history with influencer marketing. So why don’t we kick off by having you talk a little bit about what influencer marketing is and what it looks like in health care? 

Marissa: Sure, yeah. So I know usually when people hear influencer marketing, they’re thinking of all those social influencers, all the fun folks that we follow online, on Instagram, selling us all of the things, you know, but really in healthcare, I feel like a few ways. We can have patient advocates can be used as influencers. So, like parents or family members of patients. We can use physicians as influencers. So that can be really fun if we’re looking for physicians to share more, in depth, you know, research based, details about particular services that they offer. And then, of course, we have micro influencers, and we can still use our traditional influencers.

So it’s really fun. A few different ways you can do them. But it’s a little bit different obviously, than social influencing. So in healthcare we typically see organizations using influencers to promote health and wellness services or encouraging preventative services. More educational type content and less selling of a product like you would on social influencing.

Jenny: Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about case studies. Let’s make it real for folks. So what examples do you have? What kind of campaigns have you participated in or you’ve seen in the past? 

Marissa: Yeah, so a few really exciting ones come to mind. We’ve used influencers for a fun children’s hospital out in Texas. This is kind of a tactic that we laid on to a full multichannel campaign that we were rolling out. So it was a smaller tactic in a full campaign. But we used parents and patient advocates of the children at the hospital to share testimonial videos. So we went into the families’ for the kiddos, into the house, and we just had them share what it was like to receive care at the hospital that we were promoting and how it really impacted their life.

And so that was a fun one, because they were well-known influencers and well-known families in the community, and it just brought some, you know, some a humanizing element to the care into the services that the healthcare was providing. It’s always nice to hear about these stories from someone that you might see, like at the grocery store or in the car line pickup at your kid’s school, right? Someone that you know and you can trust. So really having that trusted, authentic voice really helped in that particular campaign.

And then we’ve done other big ones. So we’ve used traditional influencers like you would see selling you something cool from Amazon. We can use them in healthcare as well. So in Tennessee, we did a fun event called Mammos at the Mall. That was like one of my favorite influencer campaigns we’ve done, and we used traditional social influencers, women of the age to be getting mammograms. We contracted them and they took us through their full experience so they would document getting their mammogram, walking us through the steps of scheduling and then going and then the follow up, all of the things.

And it led to a big event at the end of October where we had a mobile mammography bus at the mall, and these influencers invited their followers to come meet them at the mall and get their mammogram same-day. So it was really fun. We had a full event and the influencers were there. They shared like tidbits all leading up through the month of October. And then women could mingle and literally like go get their mammogram same-day, no appointment necessary, which made it extremely convenient as well. 

Jenny: That’s amazing and really takes some of the fear or the hesitancy of self-care away, which is phenomenal. One of my favorite campaigns that we ran here at Hedy & Hopp was actually in collaboration with St. Louis Children’s Hospital. And, what they were trying to do was actually fight back. They did a big consumer study to be able to understand how people perceived the hospital. And overall, people perceived it as, you know, if my child has cancer or they need a transplant, I’m going to Children’s Hospital. Otherwise I’m going to go somewhere else because the parking garage is scary, it’s downtown, all these things. Right? 

So we actually did an influencer campaign with some lead physicians. And so we actually had the physicians, going through and talking about their areas of care. We had one of, actually the marketing person, at the hospital was pregnant. So we followed her through her pregnancy journey, meeting with different physicians.

And it became really interesting because any time there was a new physician or a physician who had openings, we would put them in this series, and within a week their books were full because that’s how much people were really tuning in and engaging with it. So there’s lots of different angles and strategies, whether you’re trying to build consumer trust, trying to really get specific positions or specialty areas name out there, really can be layered with all of these other tactics to have it be a really comprehensive campaign.

But let’s talk about the challenges and the risks of doing influencer marketing, because it’s not exactly the same as on the consumer side, but we have our own set of concerns in health care. 

Marissa: Of course. Yeah. So obviously HIPAA still applies to all of the things that we’re doing, regardless of our campaigns. So generally, if it’s a patient sharing their own testimonial or the parent of a minor sharing their child’s testimonial, as long as you have your consent form and all of your legal paperwork signed, HIPAA is not generally a concern for those particular cases. If we’re having our physicians, like you mentioned, be our influencer, they still have to abide by all of the HIPAA regulations, sharing any sort of patient information or any sort of details like that—no, no. 

And then if they’re being paid. Right. So a lot of the times if we’re using, for instance, Mammos at the Mall, we used traditional influencers who do that for their living. So we did pay them as part of our campaign, as part of our tactic. And that just has to be all documented and disclosed upfront. I would say generally best practices, if it is a patient testimonial or like a, patient advocate testimonial, paid is probably not the best practice there. Like, you want those to be genuine and authentic and you would like them to come provide those without compensation.

So I would just kind of keep that in mind for payment. But yeah, all of those compliance regulations still remain. 

Jenny: Great point. Excellent. Let’s talk a little bit about best practices when you’re developing the strategy or implementing an influencer campaign, what are some of your thoughts? 

Marissa: Well, you know I think like number one best practice to me would be vetting and making sure that we’re selecting influencers that are aligned with our brand’s vision and mission and values. Right. Like you don’t want someone who has posted or is posting on their social feed about things or services that you don’t agree with or align with. And I think that also just kind of kills the reputability of the campaign, right? You want someone who is in line with your brand and your brand voice. So I think that’s important.

I think it’s also important to make sure that they stay authentic, that they’re sharing their own version of the story, or they’re sharing their own version of the services. So for, going back to like the Mammos at the Mall, we of course give them some talking points because at the end of the day, it is still our marketing campaign, right?

Like we still have to have consistent messaging and we have a story that we want to share through them. So we did provide talking points, which I think is fine, but as long as they’re sharing these things through their own voice and through their own filter, I think that that keeps it authentic while still sharing your message that you want to convey.

Jenny: Absolutely. And one other thing that I would share, based off a different influencer campaign that we ran, is we are working with a system, and they had a specific doctor, a physician, an employee physician that they wanted to promote. And a couple of months into the campaign, that physician, two things happened: First, they said some really negative things online on their personal account, but then they ended up leaving the system.

And the system did not diversify and have multiple faces out front. So when you’re thinking about building the strategy and number one, research, and understand, you know, this person’s behind the scenes and then also diversification, it should never be about one face. It should never be about one person. Because then that makes sure that regardless of what happens and what pivots you have to do in the future, you’ll have that ability to do so.

Marissa: Yeah. Totally agree. Great points, great points. 

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for tuning in today, folks. We hope that if you are considering an influencer campaign, this gave you a couple of different campaign ideas or ways that you could perhaps structure it for your organization. If you want to talk, shop and brainstorm, give us a call. We’d love to chat. We have lots of other examples of successful things that have been done, both on the patient and on the employer brand side. Influencer marketing is a fabulous thing to layer into a campaign to make sure it’s successful. 

Marissa: Yep, it was great having me. Thank you. 

Jenny: Yeah, thanks so much for tuning in today, everybody. Be sure to tune in next week for another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers!