In this episode, Jenny shares key insights from Hedy & Hopp’s 2025 patient privacy research. Analyzing 254 provider and payor websites, the audit shows a decline in Google Analytics 4 usage, a rise in server-side tagging, and improved compliance as Universal Analytics is removed by many. However, risky practices persist, with 29.92% of sites still using at least one conversion tracking pixel and some relying on non-HIPAA-compliant form tools. Meanwhile, more organizations are exploring alternative analytics solutions, and a growing number of marketers are operating without any tracking at all.
Resources
2024’s Patient Privacy Findings Podcast Episode: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/wearemarketinghappy/episodes/By-The-Numbers-The-Current-State-of-Healthcare-Marketing-Tools-e2itnm7/a-ab770oe
Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency that is very proud to work with providers and payers across the country to help patients find them more easily to secure care.
I am jazzed to share with you today an updated research project. Last year, Hedy & Hopp did a deep dive into 118 healthcare provider and payor websites. We wanted to understand the state of patient privacy. So many shifts have happened as far as influence from OCR, FTC, new state laws have come online.
We are tireless advocates of patient privacy and making sure that as healthcare [00:01:00] marketers, we’re doing everything in our power to make sure that we’re collecting, storing and using this information in a safe and compliant fashion. So we wanted to see what people were doing. Last year, we did a big state of the state, released those findings.
We’ll link to the show of last year in the show notes if you’re interested in listening. But this year we wanted to double down, so we more than doubled the websites that we audited. We were up to this year, 254 websites. The websites for the providers and payors range from small critical access hospitals, single location children’s hospitals, all the way up to multi-state, large regional providers. Also, single and multi-state payors.
We wanted to understand what are folks doing. How are, how have they responded through the lens of marketing technology to all of these privacy changes and shifts in the landscape? And I’m here today to share those findings with you. So, big picture, all of this [00:02:00] education has been happening, right? We’ve been talking about all of the potential issues.
We’ve been talking about potential. I know a lot of folks have been receiving some nasty grams from FTC and OCR. Lots of class action lawsuits are happening. How are marketers responding? Well, the good news is they are responding. We have seen a huge shift in the technology that’s being used on healthcare websites.
And the sort of tracking technologies folks are using for the marketing analytics. So let’s get into it. Again, we expanded the data set this year to 254 websites and our marketing operations team went through and dug into the analytics and the site code. So we wanted to understand a couple of key things.
What marketing analytics technologies are folks using? What conversion tracking pixels are they using and then what other technologies are they using on their site that may have compliance implications, such [00:03:00] as forms. So, first of all, the number of folks using Google Analytics 4 implemented the traditional way to traditional Google tag manager has dropped drastically.
So in one year, we have seen implementation of Google Analytics 4 drop from 70 percent to right under 50%. So a 20 percent swing in one year. Now, I think what’s really interesting about this is Google Analytics has always really been seen as the industry norm. Even super large, multi-state or large regional, they use the paid version, Google Analytics 360.
Most folks were on this platform. You would have a handful of folks that maybe were on a different analytics tool because of previous experience with that tool. But for the most part, everybody was on Google Analytics 4. So we saw a pretty big drop from the first time that we did this audit, it was over 90 percent and a 70 percent last year.
[00:04:00] And now we’re down to right under 50 percent this year. So it’s a pretty staggering drop. Now, a lot of folks are still using Google Analytics 4 outside of that 49%, but they’re implementing it using server-side Google Tag Manager. Now you’ll know that that’s something Hedy & Hopp preaches. We’re big fans of sGTM implemented using a B business associates agreement with Google by using one of their cloud servers.
You could filter out any variables that from a privacy perspective, you don’t want to collect and store. It’s by far the most affordable implementation for folks to do. And we have seen that jump from 2.5 percent up to right under 6% of folks using server-side Google Tag Manager on with that they’re using Google Analytics 4 so big jump of folks using that.
The other big pivot that we have seen is folks are finally cleaning up their old [00:05:00] tags. So I kind of laughed about this when we were doing the study last year because almost 45, those 44.91 so almost 45 percent of folks still had Universal Analytics of Google, the Universal Analytics tags on their site.
It stopped processing data mid 2023. So that meant that folks had really held on to it for quite a long time after it had stopped collecting and processing data by the time we did this study. Well, very excited to say that that number has dropped down to right under 18%. So we had a drop from 45 percent to 18 percent of folks that have that old Universal Analytics tag on their sites.
Great job cleaning up old tags. Marketers Another thing is let’s talk about who’s high risk. Let’s talk about who are still doing risky activities. 76 websites, which is right under 30 percent are still using one conversion tracking pixel. So that means it’s either a programmatic tracking pixel. It’s a Meta, Google [00:06:00] Ads.
76 websites are still using some sort of conversion tracking. And that’s if you dig down deeper, you’ll see that 26 only have a programmatic conversion tag and then 26 still have a media, meaning an ad platform conversion pixel. Those are not the same 26, it’s 26 separate that have one or the other.
And then unfortunately, six websites are still using a form provider that is not HIPAA compliant. So that is a huge red flag. If you have a form software or form tool on your website that is not HIPAA compliant, that means that information is likely not secure and you need to reevaluate the way that you’re collecting information.
So those six websites definitely need to do some additional diligence. Other marketers are pivoting. So, right around 40%. It’s 40.55 percent do not have Google Analytics 4, but they’re using some other [00:07:00] analytics tool provider. The two front runners by far are FreshPaint. At 26 websites and Piwik Pro at 19 websites.
Then there were a splattering of other website or other tools such as Matomo, Mixpanel, et cetera. We did not want to list all of them because most of them only had just a few each. But again, FreshPaint and Piwik Pro are by far the front runners when you look at what tools folks are using besides Google Analytics 4 and Server Side Google Tag Manager.
Those are the three directions folks are really going. And then the last most interesting thing is how many folks are flying blind? I think this is something that a lot of folks have wondered about. I’ve casually shared this number in a few different folks in the industry that I’ve chatted with over the last couple of weeks since we wrapped up our research.
And kind of as a game, ask them what percentage they thought, how many providers and payors do you think are flying blind at this point with absolutely no analytics [00:08:00] tracking technology on their sites. Well, I will tell you in 2024, it was 12%. That number has risen to 28.35%. So we have more than doubled the number of folks from a healthcare marketing perspective that are flying blind.
So. Again, that likely means that their legal team is not comfortable with them implementing anything. They’re likely in the middle of a lawsuit or dealing with a lot of heavy legal challenges and conversations internally, and they don’t have any sort of comfortability and finding a compliant solution.
Some of those folks may be in the middle of implementing a safe solution. So we’ll look at the findings in 2026 and see what sort of shift it is made from there and see, you know, what sort of progress the industry has made. But I was pretty shocked to find out it’s 28 percent of folks in the industry right now, based off of our survey data set that are flying completely blind.
So [00:09:00] hopefully this information was helpful and allowed you to kind of level set where your organization is compared to folks in the industry. If you’re hearing this information and saying, Uh oh, what if I’m one of the, you know, folks that are high risk that are maybe doing these behaviors that aren’t fully compliant yet?
Well, here’s five steps that I recommend that you do in order to begin moving forward. First is an audit. Everybody needs to audit. You need to understand what tools and technologies are on your site, what pixels are on your site, what form tools you’re using, what embeds you have, et cetera. Strongly recommend adopting a server-side tagging analytics strategy where you can be in complete control of what data you collect or another analytics tool or a CDP.
Number three, avoid risky tactics like remarketing. You just got to stop it. I know we miss remarketing too, but remarketing is dead in our industry. We just can’t do it anymore in a compliant way. Stop using all third-party tracking [00:10:00] pixels. Number four, secure business associate agreements with all of your vendors, thinking software, and agency partners.
If they’re doing anything with your marketing and technology for your organization, you need to have a business associates agreement in place, making sure they legally understand what they need to be doing to protect patients information. And then 5 become friends with your legal and compliance teams and create a plan.
I’m still talking to lots of folks in the industry that their legal team hasn’t brought this up yet. And so it may be on you to lead the conversation, but you need to chat with them and make sure that you’re aligned as an organization. And if they aren’t talking to you yet, please be proactive and talk to them because it’s up to us as an industry to continue pushing this forward and find solutions that protect our patients.
We will have all of this information embedded on our website in our blog post. If you want to see the visuals of the survey [00:11:00] findings, we have an infographic to share everything. Submit questions. I’m happy to answer any questions. We have a super detailed research findings that we distilled into these results and tried to pick out the ones that we thought would be the most interesting to folks.
One thing that I would say is that if you went to SHSMD or HCIC in the last two years, your organization is included in these findings. We used those groups as part of the data set and then rounded it out by making sure we covered the largest providers across the country as well.
So hopefully today was helpful and informative. Thank you for tuning in. Please like and subscribe. I look forward to seeing you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, Jenny and Lindsey Brown, Director of Digital Activation at Hedy & Hopp, share what healthcare marketers should expect from their media agency. Many clients are surprised by how much more we deliver compared to previous agencies when these practices should be the standard.
They dive into four key areas agencies should focus on: strategic planning that aligns with business goals, clear and consistent documentation for transparency, meaningful reporting that goes beyond surface-level metrics, and bonus items. Agencies should also consistently keep clients in the loop and be ready to pivot strategies when necessary.
If your current agency isn’t delivering on these, it might be time to consider other options.
Connect with Lindsey:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseycbrown/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] 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 also the CEO of Hedy & Hopp. We are a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we’re the organization behind this podcast. I’m very excited today to have on our very own Lindsey Brown.
Lindsey is the Director of Activation here at Hedy & Hopp, which means she makes sure that all of the work that our clients need is brought to life appropriately, we’re staffed appropriately, processes are in place so she has a pretty tall order. So welcome to the show today, Lindsey.
Lindsey: Thank you for having me again, Jenny. It’s good to be back.
So I’m excited today to jump in to an area that we talk about internally a lot. And as we were having an internal convo, I said, you know what, we need to just share this externally. Let’s rip the bandaid off and talk about it every [00:01:00] single time when we onboard a new client from a marketing agency of record perspective.
And we’re going to be focusing mostly on those agency of record where we’re managing their media accounts. That’s the kind of accounts we’re talking about now. There’s always a prize and an excitement and happiness. But we’re get, we always give them way more than they expect. And for me, that’s actually a pretty unsettling feeling because they were working with another agency immediately before they came to us.
And a lot of these things kind of feel like foundational activities that all agencies working with media budgets, especially in the healthcare space across the board, but we’re in healthcare, you know, is our focus, so in the healthcare space, they should be delivering either upfront or as an ongoing recurring part of the relationship.
So today we’re going to dive into 4 areas. We’re going to talk about strategic planning, documentation, reporting and then we have a fun 4th category called bonus items. And hopefully throughout this [00:02:00] episode, if you have an agency partner you work with, if you have an agency that manages all of your media, run through a mental checklist.
Are these things you’re getting from them? Are these things that they’re proactively offering? Are these things that you need to be reaching out and asking for? In our opinion, all the things we talk about today really should be foundational. You should be receiving them to make sure that number one, your agency has enough information to build the campaign strategically to service you.
But also that you’re getting enough documentation that you know they’re being good stewards of your dollars. So let’s jump in. Let’s first talk about strategic planning. So, Lindsay, I’d love your POV here. For strategic planning, what’s an agency’s role?
Lindsey: So, at least from our perspective and other agencies I’ve worked at, this is typically what we like to start with, the strategic planning phase.
The last thing we want to do is just kind of pick up where someone left off and leave it. So we really want to think about what is the client needing? What are they trying to achieve? Who are they talking to? What is the budget? Budget is very [00:03:00] important. Obviously, when media planning, it allows us to better understand how far we need to go with certain channels.
If we need to limit it, if we, you know, the world is our oyster. We have millions and millions of dollars to play with. You know, we kind of need to know those kinds of things, but essentially, the strategic planning part is really where the partnership forms. So your agency should be asking you a lot of questions at this time.
They should be asking you. The main things that I listed, objectives, who are we talking to? What are we trying to achieve? They should be asking you for your current marketing plans. Like, how does media fit into your holistic plan? And what are some of those challenge and challenges and reaching that holistic plan that even media could support?
And the client may not have thought of that before. There are some different ways to attack a lot of problems. And so we might be able to help you sort of attack a problem from a different perspective. They should also be asking you for things like what are your email marketing workflows? How are you directly talking with customers?
Can they see, can you see some samples of that just to get a better sense for like what is the tone with current customers? How does that need to shift for maybe prospective [00:04:00] customers or reaching current customers with a different message? Something like that. But essentially what you should if you have personas, they should be asking you for personas or some kind of documentation.
Even if it’s a bullet point list of who is your audience, what do you know about them? What do you not know about them? And maybe that’s a place where we can help supplement some of that information. So part of the strategic plan really should be I want to say it’s four components that it is consistent of.
The first one is going to be your research. So where’s your data point? Where are we starting from? What does the market look like? What does the competitive market look like? Like where your competitors running? What does your audience consume? How do they consume sort of what is that background to like set the stage?
Then making sure that we’ve got a clear marketing objective and that leads into the media objective. So a lot of things, a lot of times what will happen is you won’t get a media objective specifically, not from a client, but that’s something that your agency should be able to share because media is not going to do everything.
It can’t do everything. So it’s going to, be focused [00:05:00] in a couple of different areas, likely. And we want to make sure that’s clearly stated. So we’re all on the same page about what is media supporting and how are we going to attack that particular objective? The third part of that is going to be your channels.
So where do we intend in running based on where their audience is based on what they’re trying to achieve and based on their budget, where do we think that money and that messaging is best going to reach and engage our audience? So that’s really the 3rd component. And then the 4th part is kind of the nitty gritty budgets and flighting.
So some of the creative things your agency might do if you’re limited in budget is flight it so that you’re getting, you know, shorter bursts of engagement. They may suggest that you have a couple line items that are running you know, evergreen all the time and a couple that are flighted. So again, this is going to give you an idea of how that media is going to be spent and sort of how you’re going to reach your audience 24/7 or whenever you’re going to reach them.
So those are really those four components that we look for.
Jenny: That’s excellent. And one [00:06:00] thing that you alluded to, but I want to specifically call out when we’re thinking about strategic planning for marketing, one of the things that’s really helpful is really understand the organization’s strategic goals one year and looking out into the future if they have a three year or five-year strategic roadmap because then your agency can more appropriately message the campaign results to ladder directly up to one of those organization-wide objectives.
So the CMO or the head of marketing’s job is easier in that board meeting because we did all of that the connection and storytelling work for you.
Lindsey: Yes. I’m glad you mentioned that because part of the objective also is how are we measuring that objective, right? So not only how are we understanding where you are with your business goals and your marketing goals and your media goals, but how does that all work together?
So how do we show that what we’re doing from a media perspective is supporting your marketing objective that ultimately ladders up to your business objective. And that’s also a key piece of how that, that whole strategic plan comes together is. How are we going to measure it? How are we going to evaluate it?
So a lot of times what you might [00:07:00] see from agencies are, yeah, we’re going to show you clicks and impressions and things like that, but how are you going to evaluate that? Are you going to look at different creative? Are you going to look by audience? Are you going to look by market? Any of those things so that you as the client and your agency are on board exactly how you need to report out and you can spend less time figuring out what needs to be in the report and more time actually analyzing the data and figuring out how to optimize and how to move forward.
Jenny: Absolutely. So once that strategic planning is done, let’s move on to the second category of the things that your agency should be doing for you, which is documentation.
What are the things that we send clients on a regular basis? What are the things that people should be expecting from their agency partners?
Lindsey: So there’s a couple things. First and foremost is a brief. A lot of times that brief is the very first step in starting that strategic plan. It ensures that we are on the same page with the client on what is the strategy, what is the goal, what are the budgets, key dates, all of those things that we need to make sure we’re keeping in mind and that we’re referencing before we finalize [00:08:00] that plan.
We want to make sure we’re not missing anything. It also allows us space to understand what are the opportunities and where might we need to think a little bit bigger, a little bit differently than what the client has asked. So that’s first and foremost obviously you want a copy of the strategic plan.
Once you are done, once you’ve got it approved, they should have that document for their leadership or whomever. So make sure you’re getting that, whether it’s PowerPoint, PDF, doesn’t matter, whatever you need, make sure you’re getting that. And then the next piece essentially is the flowchart. And the flowchart is one of those things that, Everyone has a different flowchart and a different way of managing.
But I think what’s really critical for a flowchart is to ensure that you, the client, understand a couple of things. What tactics are running? When are they running? And how much are they costing? Those are really the most important things that you have to have in your flowchart. A couple of things that we like to add when we need to is maybe the objective or potentially the goal.
If it’s a lighter campaign, you have a little bit more room to play with. And so you want to make sure that you are keeping [00:09:00] track of like, what is your goal against this particular tactic? So it reminds you every time you go back and you’re revisiting that you’re keeping that in mind. It’s also very helpful from a budgeting standpoint, because one, you have it all planned out.
And once you have your negotiated rates. All of that. That is part of your flow chart and where you start. And then over time you start to look at, okay, what have we delivered to date? Are we behind? Are we ahead? And you start to reconcile that. And that needs to be something that is shared with the client probably monthly just as a here’s where we landed in terms of actualizing the budgets and where we’re at.
It also shows them where things change because inevitably things are going to change. We’re going to shift money to other tactics. We’re going to move things around and we need to make sure that the client has you know, a good view of what that is so that they have no questions whatsoever about what is running and when it is running and how much they’re paying for it.
So that’s number two. The third one is kind of a you know, in between, depending on if your agency is doing the [00:10:00] creative or not you may also share a spec document. So we’ve had it both ways where we’re developing the creative. So we have a spec document, obviously, that we use to build the creative, but we’ve also had our clients either use an agency or do it in-house.
So we have to make sure that they have a spec document. And it’s not just Facebook is this and Meta is this. It’s it. Based on the flowchart and what we’re running, here are the assets we need. Here’s how you build them, just to help eliminate as much back and forth as possible when it comes to production and then trafficking those assets to vendors.
The last piece I know so many things right. The last piece is thinking about messaging. So many times in campaigns or messaging is going to adjust based on the tactic or based on where that user is in the journey, or based on the time of year, you may have a very specific message in February, and we need to find a way to account for that.
So one of your strategic documents will also should also outline by tactic and month, what message are we running so that again, the entire internal team, the client team knows What we’re saying to [00:11:00] those folks, but it’s not muddying up the flow chart that has a million line items and things like that.
It’s more of a quick reference guide.
Jenny: That’s so helpful, Lindsay. I think one of the things that has been so interesting to me as we’ve onboarded new clients is they’ve missed a lot of those pieces or key pieces like reconciliation. We have some clients that have never received a reconciliation, so they don’t have any proof that any of the campaigns actually ran.
So that’s really important to make sure all of those bases are covered.
Lindsey: It’s really helpful. It was very helpful to us last year during political season for our TV clients. Because they got bumped. They got bumped out of so much in October and even September that we had to basically adjust and replan and where those added value spots running and they needed an update of that.
So the flow chart helped us keep track of that and help them keep track of it as well.
Jenny: Absolutely. That’s great. Let’s move on to the third category, which is reporting. What should reporting look like and what should that whole process encapsulate?
Lindsey: Yeah. So, as I mentioned, as part of the strategic plan, you have a [00:12:00] measurement plan.
So really, your report should reflect what’s in the measurement plan. What are your main KPIs? And what, and how are you reaching them? Have you reached them? Have you met your goals? Are you on your way? We would love to keep it simple. I think that some agencies and some clients feel like more data is better.
I think better data is always better. Not necessarily more. We’re looking at quality over quantity when it comes to reporting because the important point is that are we meeting our goal or not? And so what we do on our side is. Look at that metric first. So that’s the first thing we want to talk about.
Are we meeting that goal? If we’re meeting that goal, awesome. What are some of the quick wins on why we are reaching that goal? A tactic outperformed. A message outperformed. An audience came out of nowhere that we weren’t expecting. What is that? And if we’re not meeting our goals, well, why not? What is underperforming?
What isn’t working right? Did we get bumped because all of our TV spots went away? So we missed, you know, that big coverage for a couple of [00:13:00] weeks. You know, what is it? And then that’s what we want to share in the report. And then how do we fix it moving forward? So what is our ability to make modifications to change some things around to ensure that we don’t see another month like that.
And that’s really important from a reporting standpoint. The other part of that, and this is not something we’ve necessarily implemented for every single client here, I think it’s where we’re headed, hopefully, is a report that just shows what was purchased or what ran based on what was purchased.
So those are two different things. Performance is one thing. And then what did we run and how much did it cost? And what did we pay for is another because those things are important. The client needs to know that if they purchased a million impressions in the month of January, that we delivered a million impressions in the month of January.
So those basic things are also very important, just not necessarily part of your overall performance.
Jenny: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Now let’s go on to category number four, which is bonus items. What else are things that agencies should be doing or things that we do [00:14:00] for our media clients that they have told us provide tremendous value.
Lindsey: Yes. This is the bonus round. This is all the good fun stuff. So, one of the big things that we can do at Hedy & Hopp and it’s because of our director of media, Miranda Ochsner. She’s got amazing partnerships around, around the country with a variety of different folks and platforms, traditional and digital.
And she has the ability to negotiate with those folks what your rates are going to be, right? How CPM lower? What added value can we offer to get the effective CPM rate lower? Can we get better spots? Can we get better coverage? Can we get better inventory? All of those things that you, the client, don’t have to do on your behalf, we can do that on your behalf to get you the best possible plan.
In the best possible position, so that’s 1 thing that an agency will do for you, or should be doing for you. Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. The 2nd part is, you know, more of the custom packaging. So, again, because of relationships, because we have long-standing people here that have been in the industry for a long time, custom packages.
So things that, you [00:15:00] know customers or our clients, excuse me, or other agencies may not have that deep relationship. So they may not they may have to do out-of-the-box type of things as opposed to a custom package that actually works for the client. So that’s something else that we can offer. And then the media billing and reconciliation.
So not all not all agencies do this. It is a lot of work. It is a lot of tedious work. And we have people here that is the light of their life. They love this work. Most people hate it, but we have the special few that absolutely love it. So, that is something that we do offer as part of our as part of our fee as we do that.
But again it is hard to do. Digital’s fairly simple because it’s a pretty, like, what did I buy impressions? Not, but from a traditional side, you’re looking at multiple stations, different ways of purchasing, different ways of showing what, what ran. So all of that reconciliation is a lot easier on the client because you pay us what the fee is and what the out of pocket is, and we take care of all the nitty gritty so you don’t have to worry about it. So that’s a big one. And then the last one is a little more, [00:16:00] I would say, like, higher level thinking. So one of the benefits of going with a full-service agency is your access to other areas of marketing.
So going with a media agency specifically, well, that may be the right choice for you. You may be missing out on how that, how the media you’re running really works with. Your content marketing. How does that work with your overall strategy? How does that work with your analytics setup? And so having that full-service feel you’re getting a strategist as part of your media plan with Hedy & Hopp.
And that’s not just a strategist for media. We have a media strategist for that, but we have a strategist that actually thinks about the larger picture, thinks about the audience, thinks about the market and really helps. Ensure that we are foundationally reaching the right people and going about it the right way.
So that’s something that you may not get at other agencies. Same with creative. We have the ability to do creative, even if you are using a creative shop to do your concepting and do your large pieces. Having access to creative, we can make adjustments. So if we find a CTA isn’t working. [00:17:00] We can just change the ETA and we can run it and try that without having to go through a lot of hoops.
So it’s some kind of added value we can provide to ensure we’re giving you the best possible results. So those are just a few.
Jenny: That’s awesome. And I would add, of course, I can’t get through a podcast episode without talking about compliance. So we also help folks be compliant if your agency has not already brought up compliance and the kinds of tactics you no longer can do you need to talk to them about that because there are things like lookalike audiences, retargeting that you either cannot do at all, or you can only do in some instances. So definitely bring that up. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lindsey. Listeners, I hope this was helpful.
I know a lot of times I get on the phone with prospects and they want to chat about, you know, they’re working with an agency and they just want to kind of understand how other agencies work. Well, this episode was for you. So hopefully it helps set the stage of what you should be looking for and what your expectations should be, whether it’s with your current agency or with a new one if you’re looking for a new [00:18:00] partner.
And on that note, if you’re looking for a new partner, we’d love to chat. We are accepting new clients currently. Again, our specialty is healthcare, a hundred percent payors and providers across the country. So give us a shout if you’re looking for a new marketing agency. And on that note, thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode.
We look forward to seeing you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In this episode, Jenny sits down with Chris Boyer, senior digital health strategist and principal of @chrisboyer LLC, to discuss the shifting (and somewhat messy) state of social media in 2025. With the undecided future of TikTok and Meta reshaping its content and advertising rules and regulations, it’s time for organizations to rethink their social media strategies.
They explore the impacts of Meta’s content moderation changes, how the tightening of ad restrictions affects campaigns, and why social media should be seen as “leased land.” Plus, they discuss the challenges of fighting misinformation and creating valuable content in today’s polarized digital environment.
Connect with Chris:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp a full service healthcare marketing agency. And I am so excited to have my dear friend, Chris Boyer on. Chris is the principal @chrisboyer LLC, but he’s a senior digital health and experience strategist, and he’s a fellow podcaster.
So yeah, I’m so excited to have you on today.
Chris Boyer: I’m excited to be on your show. I’ve been a fan of your show since I found out about it. And I’ve been listening diligently ever since. And I mean, us podcasters, we have to stick together, you know.
Jenny: We do, we do. And Chris and I also are very lucky to share an absolutely amazing client.
And so we’ve been able to collaborate really closely on work for that client. And as a result, I’ve just really grown to respect the work that you do and the POV that you bring to your clients. So I’m excited to chat with you today. Today we’re going to be [00:01:00] talking about the state of social media, mostly around the trends of organic, but we’re going to do a little sprinkle on paid as well.
And for all of those healthcare marketers that are trying to decide what you should be doing as far as what platforms you should be investing time and energy on, where you should be pulling back and maybe removing your brand. Hopefully this conversation will give you a really great state of the state of what’s going on and our different perspectives of it.
We’re also doing this as a dual podcast. It will be on Chris’s platform as well as on mine. And so that’s a really fun experiment. I’ve never done it before. So I’m excited for both of our audiences to share this content.
Chris Boyer: First time for me as well. This’ll be a lot of fun to do.
So you actually set that up, Jenny, as having me do an intro on the state of social.
Jenny: I know I’m excited about it. Tell us, Chris.
Chris Boyer: Well, you know, I mean, I could really be snarky and shorthand and say it, that it’s right now a hot mess. I mean, there are a lot of [00:02:00] things happening. We’re recording this in early January of 2025.
There are a lot of things happening on social media that are reflective, I think, of a lot of the high tech space that’s going on, as well as sort of a shift to where things are going. But most significantly right now, I think that hospitals and health systems that are involved in social media have to really take a serious stop and reflection on what they’re doing and how they’re doing it now.
I’m not young to social media. I’ve been actually around the space. About 15 years ago I was part of the Mayo Clinic social center for social media. What we were was a think tank of hospitals and health systems using social media and advocating a way back when, health systems were blocking social media at that point in time.
And it almost feels like we’re in another state of genuflection about what we’re going to be doing. And it feels like we almost need to bring the band back together to talk about this, because certainly [00:03:00] things have changed. But it’s, it’s ever more important for us to take a step back and and assess where we’re at.
So let’s talk a little bit about where we’re at Jenny right with social media. This is coming on what I think it’s about a week ago that Mark Zuckerberg came out and said that content moderation on all meta channels is going to go in a different direction and the direction he’s taking it is the way that Elon Musk took X or Twitter to which is basically having the community moderate misinformation on these channels.
This also comes three weeks after Meta made some significant announcements about how they’re going to be advertising restrictions for health systems. In using social media, I think this is sort of a fallout from, you know, a year or 2 ago when they had the pixel issue. You recall the pixel issue, [00:04:00] all the compliance things that we’ve been dealing with where they’re now setting up some guidelines and restrictions as well around how to use paid advertising on the social channels.
So everything is evolving and changing. Oh, and yeah, by the way, as of today, the Supreme Court is listening to arguments about whether TikTok could operate in the United States. Now, we don’t know yet what their outcome is going to be, but the leaning is towards they’re going to completely disband TikTok, at least the way we know it, in the United States.
It’s crazy, right?
Jenny: It is crazy. Most creators on TikTok have been posting about diversification, how to go find them on Instagram, how to find them on YouTube. I mean, everybody is planning for the shutdown to happen less than one week from today. So from a marketer’s perspective we’re moving forward as though it’s shutting down.
I feel like we have two separate [00:05:00] you know, trains moving forward out of the station, right? We have the political perspective of the lack of moderation content moderation and trying to keep it a like say, not safe space, but an accurate space, right. Through some people’s definition of accuracy, which as of right now, I feel like if you ask two different people, what definition of accurate information is, they’re going to say different things.
So it’s a really weird state of the country. That’s one thing we have going on, but then the other one is all the stuff with the HHS and the privacy. And we saw Google try to respond to it last year and basically say, hey, not our fault, not our problem. If you get in trouble, it’s not us. That is really Meta’s way by trying to have the conversion data restrictions. It’s just their way to basically say, hey, it’s not our fault. Y’all have to figure it out on your own. The both of those are coming together at the same time and it’s chaos. I feel like just a couple of years ago, it was expected for us from a marketer’s [00:06:00] perspective for all of these healthcare organizations to be on all of these channels.
And it’s time to rethink it. It’s time to think about each channel individually, kind of think about the potential harm being on that platform could cause to your brand from an organic and a paid perspective, and then decide if it’s worth your if it’s a worthwhile investment. Endeavor or not. It’s not just about, can you put the effort forth to maintain that channel?
That’s what the conversation was a couple of years ago. Now it’s, will it cause your brand harm by being on that channel from a perspective you know, angle.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I think that’s really an interesting thing too. Right. If I participate in this channel, is that going to cause damage to my brand, you know, and what does that, what does that reflect?
I think social media always has been intended to be the voice of the community, right? Social media. That’s the kind of the whole impetus behind this let’s, let’s eliminate the original reasons why Facebook was created and all of that. We won’t get into that, [00:07:00] but I think the spirit of all of this was that we, that participants in these social channels could create community guidelines, could create the way we actually communicate and interact with one another. And to a certain extent, we are now getting coming full circle by saying, and you could also indicate what works and what doesn’t work on these channels in terms of moderation of content. But we’re doing this in a, in a society, not only the U.S. society, but a worldwide society that is rapidly becoming diverse. I would even call them siloed. Polarize. Yeah.
Jenny: Yes.
Chris Boyer: And so what does that mean for us, right? If we can’t, if we can’t understand, if we can’t even understand where you know, what is good and what is bad in terms of content, how can we be expected to moderate that ourselves as users?
And that’s a question that I have that I think that many of us that own brands and participate in social channels worry about at this point in time. Yeah. What can we do? How can we, how [00:08:00] can we participate in a meaningful way?
Jenny: I completely agree.
Chris Boyer: Yes, you know, way back when we used to say that you remember there was like paid owned and earned media.
And then when social media came around, they said it was least. Yes. Do you ever recall that? Right?
Jenny: Yeah. Whenever so I’ve been doing, you know, content strategies and audience driving strategies, you know, for the entire 10 years of heading up for healthcare, but then before that as well.
But the entire concept was, okay, we can, you know, build a platform on YouTube, but it’s not your channel. It’s not yours. It has your brand name on it, but at any time YouTube can delete the entire thing, Facebook, same thing. It used to be that you would put the content on there. And if you hit post, all of your followers would see it.
Then it was not that way anymore. The algorithm shifted drastically. It was who Facebook wanted to see your content. And then you had to begin paying [00:09:00] for people to be able to see your content. As you know, at the same level of visibility that just a couple of months previously, you were able to get for free.
So that really shifted marketer’s perspective of what these channels were and kind of created this idea of creating a content hub or a platform that you own your own website where the content of in one format lived. And then you view the social media channels more as a distribution channel, a way to reach these different audiences, maybe have paid campaigns.
Maybe have some sort of like a community discussion forum on some, however you want it to structure it. Right. But you cannot depend on any of these channels to actually be an asset for your brand long term or something that you had complete control over, like an email distribution list, for example. And not only are we back there, but now some of this leased land is on fire.
And so we have to decide if we want to continue the lease.
Chris Boyer: Right. Exactly. Meanwhile too, there’s always these new and upcoming social channels that You know, being tested, etc. I hear, you know, with the [00:10:00] X debacle, where there was a lot of people that just left X after, you know, the last six months, and they’ve been moving over to either BlueSky or Threads or what Threads, a Meta channel, by the way, right?
It’s Meta, but they’ve been moving over to these other channels. It’s like, where, where is the next channel? I think I’ve had a lot of health systems ask me, where do I go next? Like, what should I be keeping an eye on? Way back when we would say, you know, when, in the early days, when it was all the Twitter, Facebook and, you know, YouTube, really, we would say, claim your name.
At least someone, no one could take your name away, right? You don’t want anyone posting on your name’s behalf. So go ahead and just claim your, your username and then maybe monitor those channels you know, and at a certain point, if you had the analytics to start to understand, hey, maybe this is something we want to go and participate in now, there’s so many other parameters that we have to take into account, like, you know. You mentioned like the algorithm will the algorithm deliver my content to the right [00:11:00] people or do I have to pay to distribute my content to those people?
And when I do distribute that content to those people, is the information that they’re going to give back to me about performance? Is that accurate? Is that inflated? Right? There was a lot of lawsuits and fallouts around Facebook, Meta Overinflating their video views, for example, or whatever. So those are things you want to think about.
And then, you know, is it a black box? If we post there, are we going to actually be able to ever come out of that channel again? If we start doing community management on Twitter or X. Right. Are we going to ever be able to take that information and bring it back into our own patient experience management or whatever it might be.
These are now factors that we have to take into account with every new social channel that’s out there. It’s a, it’s a headache. I would say it’s a real headache for health systems right now.
Jenny: So I’d love to hear Chris, how you are guiding your clients. Then let’s say you have a client and they’re on [00:12:00] Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube right now with a content strategy where they have different variations of the content to fit the platforms appropriately.
They have a whole team creating content and they come to you and say, Chris. Do I need to jump ship for some of these? Do I need to make modifications? Do I need to add other ones? What are some key things you’d want them to think about?
Chris Boyer: Well, I think you brought this up earlier too, right? Jenny is that you, you mentioned, right?
You want to create your own website or your own content on something that you own. Yeah. We still have to do that. We still have to maintain that. So many people have kind of outsourced their video delivery network. To YouTube, I would, I would say to them, first of all, invest in something that can host your own videos on your own website and act as YouTube does with your content library.
And you could, you could distribute it and, you know, segment your content everywhere you want to on your own web properties. First, using taxonomy, using, you know, SEO, using whatever those properties that you need [00:13:00] to in order to, to ensure that it’s being seen by the right people. That same content you can then duplicate on YouTube, because I would say don’t go away from YouTube because YouTube is still the second most highest trafficked web presence next to Google online right now. That’s, that may not be true in a few years, but right now it still is.
Jenny: Yeah.
Chris Boyer: So you have to keep that. The other thing though, is when you get into like Facebook and X and, you know, these other channels that are out there, this is where you have to really take a look at, is this the right form for me to reach my audience, the audience that I want to reach?
I would say that a lot of health systems right now are still using Facebook as a way to communicate with their own, their own audience. People their own employees, right? They follow them on these social channels, so they’re now starting to shift more of using those channels as an informal way to communicate feel good stories about [00:14:00] themselves to their audiences.
I think that’s still a safe and benign way to do that. They don’t pay a lot for that, right?
Jenny: Mm hmm.
Chris Boyer: So that’s it’s a kind of a low investment and it’s an augmentation of your communication channel. But when it comes to X, that’s the one where I see a lot of health systems already abandoning SHIP on.
They’re leaving it. Same. They’re moving on.
Jenny: Mm hmm.
Chris Boyer: And, and to me, I wonder, because I have an account on X still. I don’t post, but I haven’t felt the need to pull the plug yet and leave. And I’m still wondering because is this going to change again? I mean, think how quickly it happened, right? It was what, two years ago, right?
That it, it’s over the last two years, it evolved and changed. Is that going to happen again in two years? Are we abandoning ship too early? Can we just sit it and stay and maybe temper down the active you know, involvement that we have on these social channels, and the only way we’re going to really be able to do that is by measuring the interactions that you have [00:15:00] and really quantifying those and quantifying them now less on the top of the vanity metrics about how many people you reach, et cetera.
But more on, is that content resonating? Is it producing the actions you want? Is it getting clicks through for an action or is it doing the community management that you want it to do? Are a lot of people using Facebook as a way to come to make comments about their care? Right. Or, or what have you, if that’s the case, you can’t really abandon that platform, but maybe you can reshift your focus.
What about you? What are you hearing?
Jenny: So a couple of things. First of all, I got off Twitter last year, maybe 2023. I was like, I gotta get out. This is. Nah, I don’t feel good when I’m on here. So I jumped ship. And I am so happy that I did. A point I want to make about having a different video distribution platform instead of YouTube is that’s great for patient privacy reasons as well, because YouTube is one of those embedded tools that’s grabbing IP address behind the scenes.
So there are multiple benefits to doing that beyond just thinking about like [00:16:00] content distribution. Best practices. So I want to note that’s a good reason to think about that. Additionally I, at this point, none of our clients are actively pursuing anything on X. The political nature of the platform has just made all of them want to shy away.
Most of them still have their handles, but they’re not actively doing anything, including paid on it. I think my advice, usually whenever we’re talking with clients about this is to really step back and think about your personas and who you’re trying to actively target based off of your key service lines and key geographies.
And can you serve them appropriately on those platforms and with the content that they need to move forward? Right? So I think it’s easy to say everybody’s on Facebook. Okay. A lot of people are on Facebook, younger demographics. Maybe they have an account on Facebook. They’re not spending time on Facebook meaningfully, right?
They’re on Instagram. So if you’re trying to target a younger demographic and yeah, you have an account on Instagram, do you actually have the [00:17:00] expertise or a partner with the expertise and then the money to meaningfully engage with them on Instagram? Cause there’s a difference, right? So organic content creation can you meaningfully create and maintain that content distribution strategy? Or do you just need to do paid? A lot of folks that we are working with are choosing, like you said, to really pull back on the organic content creation. They’re still doing it. They’re not shutting accounts down right now. But they’re really leaning in on the paid side because they can make sure they’re targeting exactly who they need. They’re actually seeing it, which a lot of our brands still aren’t seeing on the organic side, and they’re able to much more effectively measure conversions and whatever. We had a really cool campaign launch for one of our clients.
It was actually around a specific location and it highlighted a couple of key individuals and it turned into this beautiful love fest. All they, it was shared dozens of times, all like hundreds of comments talking about how amazing this location is and that these employees are. And it’s not of course, [00:18:00] necessarily going to be driving immediate patient appointments and volumes as a result of that campaign, but it’s building brand affinity.
So really thinking about the channels and how you want to leverage it based off your resources is important because. If we’re going to be going out and testing blue sky and all of these other ones, then we can’t show up equally at all of them. Or should we?
Chris Boyer: That’s true. We really can’t. Yeah, exactly. I like that.
I, and I think, you know, when you, when you mentioned that client with that story, it also brings up something that I hear a lot from people that are participating in these social channels as a users is that they’re, they’re really looking for content that’s not political in nature. That’s not negative in nature.
So this could be, these, you could really have a homestead of content that has feel good stories about the care you’re doing in your community and have that really perform very well. Again, this is early stages, right? But as, as more people are starting to say, wait, should I be still on Facebook, even [00:19:00] from an advertising perspective?
Well, yeah, Facebook is going to go through its little. You know, just it’s gonna move over to a certain extent. It’s not going to be really good right now, but there may be an appetite for really great positive content, which hospitals and health systems can promote. Right, so maybe that’s an opportunity here, you know, too early to tell, but, but the whole concept, I think I, when you and I last spoke, I, or at a recent presentation I gave, I talked about social media advertising as being paid for education.
So there’s another opportunity there, too. If you think about it, well, whether we like it or not, these channels do reach a lot of people. If you can leverage advertising on social channels as a way to reach these audiences that are hard to get otherwise, can you do it in a way to educate people about your brand?
About the work that you do about the wellness that you [00:20:00] provide to your community. Is that worth it? I think it is absolutely top of the funnel metrics, but it certainly helps you in the long term.
Jenny: I definitely agree. Let’s talk a little bit about the the conversion tracking restrictions on Meta. Cause I think that goes hand in hand.
And if you’re going to be launching a campaign, can you measure the success of it and I think it’s really interesting because Meta made all of these announcements at the beginning of December, and I’ve been slowly rolling out additional information. Different organizations have seen restrictions hit their account.
There’s 2 different levels of restrictions you know, high and medium, depending on how concerned they are with the level of potential PHI that they are coming into into contact with, and I think a couple of things that I just want to educate folks on what they’re really trying to do is they’re going to, they’re trying to stop receiving patient level information as a result of your advertising campaign.
So if on your website, let’s say you have a [00:21:00] hospital website and your campaigns are driving to a specific service line where it’s a schedule appointment. When you have all, you have a conversion pixel on that landing page and you have a form where they’re requesting an appointment or it’s tied into Epic and they’re scheduling an appointment that way.
Facebook doesn’t want any of that. They don’t want to see any of that. Right? So if you’re using a CDP, if you’re using fresh paid, if you’ve set up sGTM, like I preach about all of the time as one of the cheapest ways to move forward with fixing your analytics, you’re, you can still run all of your meta campaigns because you already have all of these best practices set up.
We have not seen any restrictions with any of our client campaigns because we already took out all potential PHI. We changed our naming structures where we’re not giving hints to them about if it’s about scheduling an appointment or, you know, we don’t have campaigns named like mammography or anything that would help them even understand what’s going on.
It’s all, you know, veiled you know, naming structures. So learn about it. Learn about how they are restricting [00:22:00] it, but then go back to that patient privacy, one on one, you know, framework of what do we need to do to make sure we’re not accidentally sharing this information with any third party platform, and then you’ll be fine on Meta and you can still run your campaigns as.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, Jenny. When you think about that, right HHS guidelines really set the bar for where we want to go, and I know they revised them like in the middle of last year, but they reinforced the fact that you want to avoid sharing any kind of privacy information with any third party company, you know, and it was so much so that Google said, yeah, not us.
Don’t even use us, right? They basically said we don’t want to be used. Well, now that is going a little bit towards that route as well by saying, right? Look, we’re going to restrict the use of what you can track through our platforms, which really reinforces the first party data strategy that we all need to take and the privacy centric frameworks that we need to adopt.[00:23:00]
So when you look at like, you know, the tools that, you know, various different tools about how you can keep patient privacy withheld, I think that’s great. I think the also is where do you want to apply that pixel? How do you want to track? Where, where in the funnel do you want to bring them in to measure them through and when do your own internal measurement systems take over and measure it through to, you know, conversion, ultimately conversion, we all have to do that.
And we got along, we got by for so long by not paying for any of this stuff.
Jenny: I know it was, Oh my gosh. And retargeting that was so much fun.
Chris Boyer: Oh my gosh.
Jenny: Lookalike audiences. That’s the other thing that Meta’s big announcement restricted is you can’t do lookalike friends. We shouldn’t have been doing that for anyway.
We shouldn’t be uploading a list of our cardiology patients and saying, find me more of these. And a lot of people were doing that. So if we’re not going to be learning and kind of holding our own selves accountable as healthcare marketers, these platforms are [00:24:00] going to do it for us because they don’t want the liability and I don’t blame them.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be in that business either. And, you know, I think that it is time for us to really kind of level set our marketing technology to address the current state of privacy of patients of not only what the government restricts. Think about all the state level. Restrictions that are coming out and they’re changing state by state.
There’s something like 20 different state legislations right now, and they’re all slightly different.
Jenny: And there’s a national privacy law that’s working its way through. We’ll see with the incoming administration. They typically historically have tried to push things to the state level. Maybe the national one will be put on hold for the next four years.
Who knows? But no, I agree for anyone who’s listening. I have a really great HIPAA 101 episode on the We Are, Marketing Happy that walks through the state of the state where we are in some tech frameworks that you can think about to get your organization aligned. Go check out that episode. If all of this is a new topic to you, because that will get you caught up to speed really fast.[00:25:00]
Chris Boyer: Yeah, it’s a really good episode. It really kind of breaks it down in a very easy to understand way that I think that’s really fascinating. And also the other thing is. Think about internationally, they’re already ahead of the game, right? So a lot of organizations I work with are building their privacy frameworks to meet what the EU has already established.
Right.
And so I think that they are far advanced than the United States is in terms of the privacy. It is more complicated and rightfully so, right?
Jenny: It is. But I mean, Chris, they even have laws coming out around AI governance in the EU right now. And we are years behind that in the United States.
So following all of the privacy laws in the EU, and I will say California mirrors a lot of those. So in the States, if you want to look at the most restrictive state, definitely start looking at California and consider that a best practice. And that’s typically the way everything rolls out. You can spam if you want to.
Go way back, [00:26:00] right? Like that’s how it rolled out. EU first, California, and then national. And so my guess is we’re going to see that not only with patient privacy, but then in privacy in general, but then also of course, with AI eventually.
Chris Boyer: Right now. Now let’s, I want to circle back to a word you used earlier on when we were talking the political aspects of things here.
Because that really is weighing its hand here. I was just listening to the New York Times daily about how the technology companies are embracing the new administration because they believe they’re going to ease restrictions on these social channels because they believe it hinders innovation. And so there is sort of like a cultural shift of technology companies to embrace sort of that more of this open, unregulated, unfettered, innovative social world, right?
Technology slash social world that we’re in, hence why we’re moving away towards from content moderation, those sorts of things. [00:27:00] But it’s gotten to the point where, where does it start? When does it stop? And unfortunately, that’s the hard part. I was over the weekend, the Washington Post released an article, an interview with Xavier Becerra, who’s led the Department of Health and Human Services.
And he said, I just can’t go toe to toe with social media anymore because the level of instantaneous information and quote unquote disinformation that’s being propagated on these channels is so hard for the government to participate in. So, wdoes that mean for us as health systems? Do we have to start regulating our content as well because there’s no higher body that’s going to be addressing this?
What are your thoughts, Jenny?
Jenny: So I always recommend that an organization kind of create some rules and guidelines that make sure they’re being true to themselves and their brand, right? What are the brand’s core values? What’s important to the brand as far as the way that they show up in the way that they develop [00:28:00] relationships and share information with their community.
Develop those first. And in the vast majority of situations, that’s going to be much more conservative than any social media platform will try to guide you. And so I always recommend creating that and then have your content strategy, speak to that. You have to have a review process before you put anything out into the world where you look at it through a variety of political lens.
How could this be interpreted? How could we accidentally be stepping into something that maybe we don’t fully understand that review process now, unfortunately needs to be mandatory. Whereas, you know, a year or two years ago, it didn’t. But that’s something you need to do to make sure that you’re not accidentally using language or imagery or something that, you know, could accidentally get you in trouble.
Now your brand to be positioning yourself as one thing or the other, you know, one side or the other, and that’s fine, but accidentally doing it as a landmine that most brands, you know, want to build some general, you know, safety nets around. So that’s, [00:29:00] you know, my general recommendation, even basic things like pronoun, there’s so many ways you can accidentally step into it right now on social media.
But generally if a healthcare provider system, et cetera, wants to develop an education a platform to be able to communicate directly with their patients, potential patients, education, and sharing your point of view. Folks are hungry for real information. And a lot of folks do have the ability to understand misinformation and spot it.
And they’re looking for content from trustworthy sources. So I actually view this as an opportunity for brands that have the ability to create content that’s meaningful and educational to lean in and help create some content that’s trustworthy on these platforms and fight against the misinformation.
Because otherwise if we all lean back, then the platforms, you know, we’ll have zero value for consumers. And who [00:30:00] knows, you know, where things will be guided in the future.
Chris Boyer: I really like that. I really like the fact that you’re suggesting that we are sort of the stewards of combating medical misinformation as best as we can, whether we like it or not, we as health systems still have a lot of trust in this space.
The elements trust barometer is still pretty high for hospitals and health systems. It’s gone down for federal agencies like the CDC. It’s like a 40 percent now down from 64 percent for just two years ago. Right. I mean, we’re starting to see the trusted. Established organizations don’t even ask about mainstream media, right?
It’s just like, trust is going all over the place. But one thing I found consistent is that hospitals and health systems that have a local presence in their community still have a trust index that’s lingering between 60 and 70%. That’s pretty significant in this day and age.
Jenny: It is significant. And I have [00:31:00] found with our clients that whenever you go even deeper than that, and you actually have humans that work at your organization that are well known, that are well loved that have a large client or patient base that loves them.
If you have them be the face of your content, we have found that drives engagement and trust even further.
Chris Boyer: Yeah. But, you know, this, conversation reminds me of what it was like 15 years ago when we were talking about adopting social media in this space, right? Is that we’re still dealing with a lot of things of like, is it trustworthy?
Is it going to damage our brand? Are we going to participate? I would argue that. We always should be questioning what we’re doing to that same level of you know, critiques. We need to make sure that everything we’re doing is meaningful, is addressing our end ultimate end goals as our strategies of our organization.
It reflects us in a genuine, authentic way. That’s our branding, right? In order to do that. Does that mean we’re going to be on Facebook in 3 years? Who knows? Right? [00:32:00] Because that may change too. There may be a backlash. I’m kind of on the mindset of like, if it’s not working, just go quiet and let it go.
Right. And then see if you come back to it eventually.
Jenny: Mm hmm. Here we are standing away.
Chris Boyer: Yeah. So. I mean, maybe it’s gonna happen again, right? And maybe Twitter will eventually or whatever X will then shift hands again. And suddenly, you know, maybe it’ll, it’ll shift or maybe there will be a replacement coming into play, who knows, right?
But at this point in time, I think we still need to be very cognizant and be truly authentic to who we are as a brand. That’s my theory.
Jenny: I agree. And create a hub where all of your content lives in one place and then view all of these channels as simply distribution methodologies. And it’s going to shift over time and then that gives you control of your future and not have you, you know, be beholden to some, you know, [00:33:00] billionaire’s whim decision.
Chris Boyer: And if you’re in, if you’re getting into paying social strategies and how much your media distribution cost should be, that’s where you need trusted partners that really understand the space to help you with those decisions. If you’re doing it all yourself, make sure that your team internally is very aware and understands where their dollars are being spent.
But I will tell you, it’s great to have people like you at Hedy & Hopp to kind of help organizations make it, you know, make the right decisions in the space because we’re in a hot mess situation right now.
Jenny: I know it’s really interesting. I will say just anecdotally that we have no clients right now doing anything on X, but almost all of our clients that are running paid campaigns are still really heavy on meta platforms and it’s driving really strong performance.
So just anecdotally for anyone listening. And saying like, has everybody pulled from Meta? Are we behind? No, most people are still doing from my experience and purview are still actively promoting on Meta. That doesn’t mean they’re creating content [00:34:00] organically on meta and investing time there, but from a paid perspective, it is still driving meaningful results that you know, warrant putting the dollars there today, as of January early January, 2025.
Chris Boyer: Get back to us in two months or two years.
Jenny: Exactly. Well, Chris, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy for anyone who’s interested in following you or connecting with you, where can folks find you online?
Chris Boyer: Well, I’m easy to find because that early on I learned how to SEO myself and I also am doing AI SEO right now.
So you can just Google Chris Boyer, probably find me. But the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn, Chris Boyer. You’ll see my headshot there geeky guy with glasses, or you can find at christopherboyer.com. That’s my website. And then of course, listen to my podcast at Touchpoint Health, the Touchpoint Podcast.
Jenny: Well, thanks so much for being on today, Chris. And for listeners, we’re going to share all of those links in our [00:35:00] show notes. So if you want to reach out to Chris, it’ll be super easy to reference later. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining us. I hope today was helpful and gave you a little bit of an understanding about all the different shifting sands in the social media world today.
So thanks for tuning in and join us on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In the final episode of our “AI for Healthcare Marketers” series, we’re getting hands-on with AI platforms. While understanding how AI platforms function is important, it’s when you start using them in your workflows that the real value shines through. This interactive episode walks you through five practical exercises designed to make your daily tasks smoother and more efficient.
The exercises covered:
•Using ChatGPT for quick note transcriptions
•Brainstorming content ideas with Claude
•Conducting market research with Copilot
•Navigating privacy concerns with Perplexity
•How AI can improve communication
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host and I’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. Hedy & Hopp is a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we specialize in working with providers and payors across the U.S.
Today is episode three of our three-part series titled AI 101 for Healthcare Marketers. We designed this series to really allow you and then anyone on your team you forward the series to really understand how AI works, understand the different tools and models that are available to you, understand some core tenants of using AI within your marketing function.
And then really getting your hands dirty and doing some prompt engineering and getting some results. You got to move beyond theory in order to really understand something. So that’s today’s goal. If you are listening to me today, I strongly [00:01:00] recommend that you have me in one ear with an earbud and you have your laptop or computer in front of you, because I’m going to walk you through some prompts that are going to allow you to really get your hands dirty.
So this is really meant to be an episode that you listen to for a second. Pause, listen to again, pause. And it may take you an hour to get through it simply because you are being interactive and working through these different examples. And I think we have six different examples we’re going to be walking through.
But again, I strongly recommend do not skip this and please do not just listen to it and not do the prompts real time, because I know you say you’ll go back and do it later, but I assure you that you won’t because you are busy. An you have a million and one priorities so let’s please make this interactive. So we’re going to use a handful of different platforms.
The reason why we’re going to do that is because I want you to see what the output looks like. I want you to create a free account on a variety of platforms so you’ll go back to it and use it again. And I want you to see what they look like and the outputs that they [00:02:00] generate. So, the first one we’re going to do is Chat GPT, and this is actually something that you’ll need to use with your phone.
So take a moment, go and download ChatGPT, the app to your phone to your iPhone or Android, and it is as of the recording of this podcast so mid December 2024, it’s a little green icon that you’ll want to download. Once you download it, you’ll have to create a free account if you haven’t already. But this is one of my favorite uses, use cases to teach people that are kind of afraid of prompt engineering.
But it is a huge time saver. So I myself, I will show you for anybody watching the video, I am a handwritten note person. A study came out 15 years ago. I think that said, if you write during a meeting, it actually makes the information be cemented multiple parts of your brain. And, you know, I’ve never followed up on if that study is accurate or not, but I am [00:03:00] a believer.
So I’m constantly doing pages of handwritten notes. And then at the end of every day, I’m having to actually transcribe them and text them in in order to share them with my team. So this is a great hack. Using the ChatGPT app, open it up in the lower left-hand corner, hit plus button and go to camera.
So you can take a picture. Take a picture of your page of notes. You also can take a picture of a PDF. Let’s say a handout, like a marketing sales collateral piece. Take a picture. And then once you do that, hit submit, and then it will ask you, what do you want to do with this? And one of the options will be to transcribe.
So respond back. Yes, please transcribe. And then what it will do is actually then will transition that image, whether it’s handwritten notes, collateral, whatever, in to text. So it does such a good job reading handwriting. I have very bad handwriting and it does an excellent job reading my handwriting and trying to decipher the organization of content off my notes.
So if I had [00:04:00] something on the far right, it does a good job putting it where it needs to be in bulleted format. Once it does this, you can actually select the content. You can text it to yourself, jump into Slack, email it to yourself, whatever you need to do. But if you are a handwritten notes person like I am, this could be a great way to use AI technology to quickly eliminate that time consuming task of texting or typing in your notes.
Workshop number two, using AI for content brainstorming. I really like this from a content marketing perspective. So again, whenever we talked about the AI tenents, one of the core ones is not using output as a marketing collateral. Like we’re not going to take something that Claude writes and just use it as a blog post, right?
We’re not doing that for a variety of reasons, legal concerns, quality concerns, et cetera. But it’s great for brainstorming ideas. I really like it because it helps get out of my box in my own [00:05:00] head of the biases I have of what I think matters, what I think people are talking about. So we’re going to use Claude for this one.
So open your browser to Claude.ai, create a free account if you don’t have one yet. And then here is your prompt. So first we’re going to tell the platform we’re going to tell Claude their role, we’re going to give them a little bit of context and then we’re going to do the ask and we’re going to do a general ask and then we’re going to get more specific with the ask.
So here’s the prompt. And again, I’m going to read this. You can pause this podcast and then you can think about how you’d modify it for your own needs. You can type it in as is if you want, or you can modify it based off a project you want to do content brainstorming for your own organization and modify it.
So prompt, you are the chief producer for my podcast We Are, Marketing Happy. We create concise educational videos for healthcare marketers. Please create a visual mind map for all the video topics I [00:06:00] could write on about healthcare marketing for providers and payors. Please include the article title in a short summary for each topic.
Make the title and summary punchy and use lessons from David Ogilvie to craft them. So if you think about that prompt, we did a couple of things, right? Okay. Told Claude who they are, gave them context, and then said what we want the output to look like as far as the format and the copywriting approach.
This is really important because you could also have the copywriting approach be very professional and buttoned up or very casual using slang, modern slang language. There’s lots of ways that you can modify that to have it be appropriate for your brand. And for the output, I actually asked it to do a visual mind map.
Again, you don’t have to do that. It can, when it does the visual mind map, it also creates just like a piece of like written text to accompany it. That could be really helpful. Workshop number three, we’re going to use Copilot for this one. Again, just to get [00:07:00] examples using all the different platforms. So go ahead and open up Copilot, make an account.
If you don’t have one yet and here’s the prompt. This is around market research. I want to open an urgent care facility in St. Louis, Missouri, where my customers can get quick and easy access to care at a standard rate. Act as a market researcher and give me information on the demographics of people most likely to use urgent care in St. Louis, including age gaps or age groups, income, education, gender, and specific location. For queries like this, you’re likely to get back a lot of information that you already know. After all, you have a job as a marketer in healthcare. You’ve been doing this for a while. Some of you for a long time.
I’m 20 years into my career. I’ve been doing this a long time. Of course, I could do that on my own without using AI, but I like it for four key reasons. Number one, it usually adds perspective or other angles to things that I may have missed. Right? Assumptions that I may have [00:08:00] made. It uses language the community uses.
So specifically in that prompt, it ended up naming places like Central West End and other things that are just included in the day-to-day conversations that folks in St. Louis use. It challenges biases the team may have developed internally. So maybe with a specific service line, you think, oh, people come to us for pricing or people come to us because of this, and they always go to our competitor because of that.
Do they, or is that just what you’ve been telling yourselves for the last decade? So prompts like this are helpful for that reason. And then also when you tell it at the very end, if you add, please cite your sources and give citations it can find sources for you that are more likely relevant to your goal.
So there are general market research resources that you may use to pull data, but it also may share information for some lesser-known regional publications or additional contacts that maybe you wouldn’t have found otherwise. So it can be really helpful. The fourth [00:09:00] is around privacy. So for this one, we’re actually going to use Perplexity AI.
And actually, if you want to be if you want to be a little saucy, you can do it on Perplexity and you also can do it on Gemini and you can compare the results. But the prompt in this situation is around privacy. And once you opened Perplexity.ai, the prompt is going to be, please tell me the privacy and user concerns a healthcare business would have using Facebook pixel on their website, considering the most recent HIPAA guidance.
Now, this is interesting to look at the output for a few reasons. First of all, you can see if it’s biased or not, but also, so, again, I’m filming this mid-December. About three weeks ago, HIPAA, sorry, Meta dropped a bunch of additional guidelines around conversion tag usage for healthcare companies. Does Perplexity, Gemini, or any of the other tools share that with you?
How up-to-date and recent [00:10:00] is the information that they’re sharing? A lot of these models can access the Internet, but unless you tell it to, sometimes it just relies on the indexed data that has available. So, should you take any of these outputs as gospel? Absolutely not. But what it can do is actually summarize a lot of the issues around the topic in a tidy bundle.
Once you get that, then you can check into the sources that it cited, make sure that they’re accurate. You can learn some of the legal terms or issues you need to research. So, for example, maybe it will bring up some special considerations within your own state related to private state-level privacy laws, et cetera, so just flag some things you need to dig into and then also can give you a starting point to have a knowledgeable conversation with your other team members, like legal compliance analytics and development.
So whenever we are wanting to step outside of our own area of expertise there’s a whole nother culture and set of acronyms in all these other departments. So the more that you can [00:11:00] understand how to bridge that gap, the easier it will be and these tools can help you do that with queries like the privacy one we just shared.
And if we really want to dig into communication our final examples, we’re doing five, not six, I apologize, is around communication. So, for this one, you could really use any of the platforms that you like. I would probably prefer if I were doing this on my own, I would probably select Claude just because of the how human the responses are that Claude provides. But again, dealer’s choice.
You could even do it on multiple platforms to compare examples, but there are three separate prompts I’m going to give you. So you’d want to do each of them separately, but what we’re going to do is I’m going to tell you the prompt and then I’m going to tell you why you might want to do that prompt or other use cases within your organization or processes.
The first one is how do we speak about service line or disease, let’s say cardiology with the public? What is common nontechnical terminology that is [00:12:00] used? And what are the biggest concerns we should address? So, again, this challenges your organization’s messaging around service lines or diseases. It challenges biases or assumptions.
And it really can help you kind of get out of your own head whenever you’re thinking about how you’re talking about a service line. If you have service line campaigns launching in 2025, this is a great thing to run for all of them to make sure that your messaging is still relevant. Your landing page copy is still as comprehensive as possible.
And you’re being thorough for your patients. The second prompt. I think my business needs server-side Google Tag Manager. Can you explain that to me and help explain it to other people on my team? This is a great one if you’re trying to understand something that another team owns, and you need to be able to walk into a meeting and look like you kind of know what’s going on.
A great example of this is we were at, when our team was actually setting up server-side Google Tag Manager, we are setting it up on a Google Cloud platform. One of our clients. [00:13:00] Their internal team had only used traditional servers. They were asking us a lot of questions about using like traditional server language that just weren’t really relevant for Cloud servers.
And so our team was having some problem bridging the gap. There’d been like seven emails back and forth saying like, no, that’s not how these Cloud servers work. Instead it’s like this. And we just weren’t able to connect based off of that gap in vocabulary. Our team actually used a prompt that actually said, how can I explain this Cloud server set up specifically around X, Y, and Z to a person who’s more familiar with a traditional server structure?
And it gave all the answers, of course, our team read it, fact-checked the technical setup, et cetera, but once they did, they sent it over and the person on the other side of that, oh, awesome. Cool. Proceed. Right. So there was just a communication hump they couldn’t get over. And then the third one, this is great if you are walking into a meeting and you’re going to be expected to be knowledgeable about something [00:14:00] and you have no idea what’s going on, really great foundational knowledge.
So let’s say for example, here’s a prompt. We are interested in media mix modeling. What are some of the pros and cons of this that I should be discussing within my organization? So let’s say, for example, your manager put a meeting on your calendar for next week around a topic. And you’re like, Oh man, I’ve been so busy with these other topics I haven’t even really researched or learned about that yet.
You can type in a prompt like this to one of these platforms and say, give me the 101. What do I need to know to be able to speak on it at a foundational or intermediate level? And these platforms can give you the information and then you can even have a Q and A session to be able to make sure you’re rounding out your knowledge.
So a great way to use it. So why do you, why should we care about this? Right. When the first episode we talked about and we covered about how where we are with AI right now is sort of like where the internet was in the late nineties. People could still do business without it, but my gosh, once you started [00:15:00] doing it, it was easier.
And then once you got to, like, the mid 2000s, you really couldn’t do business anymore without understanding the Internet and being able to send an email. We’re kind of at that point with where, you know, you don’t have to learn it, but my gosh, and I don’t think it’s going to be 10 years from now. I’m thinking 5 years from now based on how quickly everything is growing and ramping up.
We need to learn and understand how to integrate AI into your workflows. And I strongly suggest you start now and going through this three-part series was already a great start, but what’s coming next. In 2025 is my guess we’re going to be seeing three key things.
We’re going to be seeing marketing campaign optimization. We’re going to be seeing a lot of ways that you can be able to optimize your campaign. Assets do a lot of additional testing within your campaigns to be able to optimize performance results. There’s going to be a big jump in the ability to leverage AI-based analytics analysis and reporting.
[00:16:00] So is an analyst job still going to exist? Of course it is. But they’re going to have all of these new AI tools that are going to take them from looking at data for seven hours to looking at it for 20 minutes and having a much better understanding about what is going on. And the third is creative asset development.
So right now, a lot of the creative tools are kind of crappy within AI, right? Like they’re nothing I would put out on behalf of our brand. Besides basically, like, the creation or extension of using a basic template, but in 2025, I really think that’s going to change. I think there’s going to be a lot of tools that are able to take a basic brand design and then framework and then really be able to roll it out to a lot of different assets.
So it’ll be interesting. And what you have to do now is get started now. Make sure you understand all of the guardrails. Make sure you’re really well versed on it. And then, of course, make sure that your organization is bought in and you have all of the different legal things in line. [00:17:00]
So thank you again for tuning in to our three-part series. I really hope this was helpful. We have found again the more you actually dig in and use these platforms, the less scary they are. Just remember to keep privacy top of mind, and I’d also recommend hopping on a couple of LinkedIn groups around using in your daily workflows.
There’s lots of great prompting examples that are shared. It’s just a way to be able, if you’re a LinkedIn user, like, I am, it’s a great way to really incorporate it into a daily bite size learning by using or joining a tool or sorry, a platform like that.
There’s also tons of newsletters you can sign up for, but I think at this point, most of them are created by so they’re not awesome, but it will give you information at least about the platform advancements if you’re interested in that. But thank you again for tuning in to our three-part series and for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy.
My name is Jenny Bristow, and I so appreciate you tuning in, reach out for any questions. [00:18:00] jenny@hedyandhopp.com. Have a fabulous day. Take care.
In the second episode of our three-part AI series, Jenny builds on the understanding of AI by covering the six tenets for using AI at your healthcare organization. While AI offers exciting opportunities, it also comes with challenges that require caution and strategy.
The six tenets covered:
1. Approach AI results with heavy skepticism: Even tools like ChatGPT can provide inaccurate information, with hallucinations still occurring about 30% of the time.
2. Do not use AI outputs as-is: AI-generated content should always be reviewed and refined to avoid sounding impersonal or inaccurate.
3. Do not have AI create marketing deliverables: Relying on AI for final marketing assets can be a liability due to inaccuracies, bias, copyright concerns and can cause potential harm to your brand.
4. Be clear in your ask: Use structured prompting techniques to get the best results.
5. Ask for sources: Always ask AI tools for sources and confidence levels to verify their output.
6. Keep privacy a priority: Treat any shared information as though it could appear on a public billboard to ensure confidentiality and compliance.
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of this fabulous podcast. I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I’m very excited today to bring you episode two of our three-part series of AI 101 for healthcare marketers.
In our first episode, we talked about how to understand AI if a person presents it to you. Trying to understand and categorize the different kinds of AI at a foundational level to give you a better understanding. And the six core platforms that are used most heavily today
What we’re going to do in episode two, is we’re actually going to talk about the core tenants, the 6 tenants of using AI in healthcare marketing. And we’re going to talk a little bit about how to get buy-in within your internal organization about using these tools. So let’s get started.
[00:01:00] Six tenants for using AI in healthcare marketing. The first tenant is approach AI results with very heavy skepticism. Even ChatGPT knows it lies sometimes. So it’s called a hallucination. All of these platforms are built wanting to please the user, which is you. So if you ask these platforms are questioned that they don’t know the answer to very often they will lie to you.
They will come up with an answer. So you have to really approach all of them with really heavy skepticism. A great example is at Hedy & Hopp, again, we’re a full-service agency. So we do everything from marketing strategy, messaging, persona work, to activation. So big strategy and activation for campaigns to drive patient volumes.
A great example of this is on the privacy side we were digging in and helping one of our new clients be compliant. They were in a state that we hadn’t worked with before. So, before we called our attorney that we have on retainer for all of our privacy work, we thought, hey, let’s see [00:02:00] if these platforms can give us a good rundown of the current privacy laws in that state.
No, the platforms lied. Specifically, ChatGPT lied. It actually made up a court case, including the name of a court case. So had we not been super diligent and actually fact-checking the result we would have given wildly inaccurate information and it does this for all sorts of questions. It could do it if you ask it a statistic, if you ask it any information that it cannot easily access, even the versions that have ready access to go onto the Internet to search. If they can’t find the answer quickly, they will lie. Now the percentage of times hallucinations happen are drastically dropping. Every time that these models are updated, hallucination rates decrease. I saw a recent study that for in particular, from the prior model to this model, hallucinations dropped [00:03:00] from it was like a percentage in the fourites down to in the thirties. And you may say, Jenny, but wait in the thirties is still super high. And yes, it is, which is why we’ve got to fact-check this stuff.
So again, number one was approach AI results with very heavy skepticism. Number two, don’t use AI output. As is it’s not great. It reads like it’s AI. So there will be a time and place where AI models are sophisticated enough where they can do full content creation and copywriting for you. But it’s just not there yet today.
We tested all of the current platforms, but the same prompts and have been doing that over the last year to kind of understand the way that they’re maturing and the way that the models are shifting Tested different prompts, all of these things. You do not want to make any of your users feel as though AI [00:04:00] is talking to them.
So we’ll talk about some ways that you can use AI to compliment your content marketing program through thought partnership, brainstorming, assumption checking, but we’re not going to use the output as is. And number three is do not have AI create marketing deliverables. So a couple of reasons, but the biggest takeaway is it’s a direct liability to your employer or your brand.
There’s four reasons why. First legality. I mentioned this in the first episode when I went through all of the different tools, but ChatGPT is actively being sued because they trained the model using a lot of content where the creator of the content was not given. They did not give permission and they were not compensated.
So, imagine if ChatGPT, you know, next year ends up settling this lawsuit or going all the way through the courts and then being fined, say 2 billion. How do we know that’s not going to roll downstream? And [00:05:00] anybody who used any some certain outputs of ChatGPT are going to be financially liable.
We don’t know that. And so we have to be really careful and understand that using it exactly as is to create a marketing deliverable can be a legal liability. We also are going to bring up hallucinations again, accuracy. We don’t know that it’s accurate, right? We’re not going to trust it more than we trust our own ability to create content or strategy work.
And so that’s important. Bias. AI tools can learn bias from the data and training that it is interacting with. So, you want to make sure that you’re really careful in the way that you prompt, even the words that you use. Maybe creating bias and the results that you’re receiving. So we have to be really aware of that and not using deliverables as is to publish content out on behalf of our brand can protect you from that.
And then fourth attribution and authoring [00:06:00] along with the aforementioned legal issues. If these tools are used to create things that are put into production, there could be an issue. For example, let’s say you’re doing a brand refresh and you’re wanting to come up with a specific tagline. You ask Gemini, for example, to come up with a variety of taglines for you and one feels so good.
It is so awesome. And you launch it. A week later, you find out that’s one of your top competitor’s taglines. No wonder it sounded so good. So again, you cannot take things at surface value. So we’re not going to have it create marketing deliverables for us. The fourth tenant is to be very clear in your ask.
So there’s actually a prompting structure called Risen R I S E N that my friend, Chris Boyd forwarded along to me. And cause I had just kind of been creating all of these prompting structures myself. And he goes, you know, there’s a thing called Risen, right? Like, Oh, thanks, Chris. Yeah, I didn’t. I appreciate you.
But whenever you’re actually creating [00:07:00] a prompt or typing in something to ask the AI model to do something for you, it’s called a prompt. You want to give it clear directions by asking it to play a role, giving it context using specific language, asking for multiple versions, asking for it to cite sources.
Sometimes a prompt or request can be two pages long. So prompting is truly an art form today. Now, will prompting be important in this time in 2025? Probably not. I think back to when again, the Internet was first coming online in the late mid nineties, late nineties. I taught myself. I was in 7th grade in 1997.
I taught myself how to hand-code websites using HTML and JavaScript, and I started a web development business and I built lots of websites in my local community for businesses, schools, and churches. It was really important to know HTML and other coding languages at that point. Today, you can stand up a website using Squarespace and [00:08:00] not have a, any idea about what the code looks like on the backend.
Now, is there still a profession where understanding coding is super important. Of course there is, but again, we’re talking about like the average marketer. And if you need that skillset, I strongly still recommend that if you’re interested in becoming proficient, you should understand prompting and prompt engineering.
There are a couple of different sources. I would recommend Coursera has some great courses around prompt engineering specialization. Udemy has a session called Master AI with Prompt Engineering. It’s 65 bucks. So super affordable. And then LinkedIn learning has lots of new sources. I do know that they run specials from time to time.
If you’re a new user, maybe your employer already has the ability for you to do LinkedIn learning courses. Check it out. Otherwise, they still are really affordable to go through them. It is really important to understand it again now and I still think it’s going to be [00:09:00] important in the future as these models get better and better at kind of like guiding the user where we need to go.
We may not need to know exactly what a prompt should look like at that level of granularity, but it also still helps your brain understand what’s happening behind the scenes. So it’s still a great tool or a good thing to learn. Number 5. This is why I love Perplexity, but also why I think maybe Perplexity may not be around much longer because you can do this for all the models.
You just have to remember always tell within your prompt for the platform to cite its sources. So, you can ask the platform to give you its confidence level and its answer, and then also ask it to provide sources and citations for any information it included the results. So again, Perplexity does this automatically, but all the other platforms, you can just include that at the end of the prompt, and it’s really fabulous.
And then number six, remember, keep privacy a priority. We absolutely have to keep remembering that. Any [00:10:00] information you put within these platforms, imagine it going on a billboard outside of your organization. And if you’re comfortable with that. By all means, move forward with it. The last thing I want to touch on is building consensus within your organization.
So one of the reasons that we created these six tenents is to give our clients and then also just people in the healthcare marketing community, a starting point to have these internal conversations. Just like in the privacy world, if you go to your legal and compliance teams and say, hey, here’s what we’ve been doing with marketing, here’s the diligence we’ve been doing. Here’s the research and the education we’ve been doing. Let’s have a conversation to get aligned. It’s a much more mutually respectful situation than if you go to them and say, hey, will you do all this privacy stuff for me? You know, so let’s treat AI the same way.
Let’s do the legwork. Let’s understand some initial starting points of how we may want to use it within our organization. Let’s help come up with some rules of what we want to see [00:11:00] happen within our marketing team and the usage within our team and organization. And feel free to use these six tenents as a starting point, add to it, modify it, whatever you need to do.
But these are some great guardrails as you’re thinking about rolling it out and implementing it across your team. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope episode two of our three-part series of AI 101 for healthcare marketers was helpful. Next week we’re going to cover some actual prompts.
We’re going to dig in and actually look at some specific queries you can type in with some real use cases. So when you’re listening next week, be sure to have me in one ear with your laptop pulled up in front of you cause it’s meant to be an interactive session where you can get hands-on and really build your confidence at starting to use some of these platforms. W
ith that, have a fabulous rest of your day and we can’t wait to see you next week on that episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In the first episode of our three-part “AI for Healthcare Marketers” series, we break down the basics of AI so healthcare marketers can better understand how to use it effectively. Jenny discusses how AI has rapidly evolved—ChatGPT is just two years old, with 56% of adults ages 18 to 24 using it according to YouGov and Reuters Institute—and explains the types of AI, including Narrow AI (used today), General AI, and Superintelligent AI. She also covers how AI learns through methods like supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, and highlights its key capabilities, such as natural language processing and computer vision.
The episode introduces the most used platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, and Claude, breaking down what makes each unique. By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of the leading AI tools and how they can be utilized.
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the host of this fabulous podcast and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service 100 percent healthcare marketing agency located in the Midwest and we specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
Today I am very excited to kick off the first episode of a three-part series about AI and healthcare marketing. In this three-part series, we’re going to break down a topic that a lot of marketers really find overwhelming. Whenever you’re learning a new technology, that is such a seismic shift from how you work in your normal day-to-day you typically have a couple of different approaches.
You have early adopters, people who love learning new things, making themselves feel vulnerable, and shaking up their day-to-day. And then you have the people that, you know, adopt things in a [00:01:00] standard time frame. They’re not going to be an early adopter.
They’re going to wait and see which tools really shake out, which processes shake out, and how the industry responds. And then, of course, you have the laggards, the people who really don’t want to adopt new technology. I’m hoping this three-part series will help demystify AI and help give you, and hopefully, your team, if you choose to share this podcast series with them, a much better understanding of AI as it stands today.
So late 2024 going into 2025. And really understanding how can we begin using AI effectively within our internal marketing processes today? What does that look like? What do we need to put into place in order to make sure we’re doing it effectively? And you know, where do we start? So our three-part series, episode one is going to help you understand the primary AI platforms right now.
So I’m recording this in mid-December 2024. We’re going to talk about their differentiators and [00:02:00] examples of different tasks where they shine. Episode two is going to be talking about practical ways to really develop some framework around how you roll AI out to your internal marketing team. So we’re going to call it the six healthcare marketing AI tenents.
And we’ll provide some guidance around how you can work with your own legal and compliance teams, and be able to set up some frameworks so you can use them in an approved way within your organization. And the third and final episode is going to be real-world examples. I’m going to have you listen to this podcast, and have your laptop or computer up.
Pause me. Do the prompt on your other window, and then hopefully you’ll feel much more comfortable understanding what you’re looking at and ways that you can incorporate it in a meaningful way into your day-to-day workflows. So with that, let’s dig in. I think one of the most interesting things when you think about AI, I mean, ChatGPT really became available to the public in 2022.
So I’m filming this in 2024. It’s just two years [00:03:00] old. I mean, it is not that old. That’s basically the same amount of time that we as marketers have been worrying about all of the HIPAA guidelines changing. So a lot has been happening in our world. So first of all, take a deep breath and just say, to yourself, it’s okay if you’re not on the bleeding edge of AI implementation, you’ve had a lot of other stuff to worry about, but I do want you to think about, you know, the late nineties, early two thousands, you know, even if you like me, I wasn’t in the business world yet at that time, but I very clearly remember the shift to people being comfortable with using the internet and using email in the business world.
If you made that shift. You were successful. If you didn’t make that shift, it really impacted your career trajectory opportunities. And that’s what I am going to do. So a great quote is by Karim Lakhani, a Harvard professor. It is “AI won’t replace humans—but humans with AI will replace humans without AI.” and that’s very much my belief as well.
I don’t think marketing departments are [00:04:00] going to go away, but I do think we’re going to be expected to move faster and use technology to really expedite our processes and our output. So let’s learn how to do that. Another thing I will say is that in June of 2024, EMARKETER came out with a study, they did a survey to understand how many people are actually using AI in their day-to-day, not just at work, but in general, even for their personal life and 56 percent said of adults, ages 18 to 24, have used ChatGPT, but that number drastically decreases as folks get older.
In fact, if you look at the age range of folks, 45 to 54, only 28 percent of people have ever used ChatGPT. Now, that was about six months ago, so I’m sure that numbers are a little higher at this point, but if you haven’t really dug in yet. That’s okay. Let’s get started. So when I’m learning something new, I like to put a framework around it.
I’d like to understand what am I learning. How am I learning it. So that’s how I’m going to present AI to you [00:05:00] today through the lens of a framework. There is an AI upskilling framework that LinkedIn Learning put out that I’m a really big fan of. They, it’s basically a pyramid shape and each level of the pyramid is a higher level of specialty within this topic.
So the foundational level is understanding what AI is, having some overall literacy around it and understanding what responsible AI looks like. The next level up is actually applying it. This is where you start prompt engineering, start developing a strategy around AI implementation, and really focus on productivity with it.
Above that is where you’re actually perhaps building your own AI models or putting an overlay, a skin over an existing one to be able to build your own interface. Above that, you’re really becoming a specialist at this point. This is where you’re training and maintaining models. You might be, you know, building a machine [00:06:00] learning models, really getting into deep learning and neural networks. So you’re really a technical specialist. And then above that is really where you’re deeply specialized, where you’re at the level of education, where you can even do security and ops specifically around AI. So as we’re thinking about that level of special specialization that you can do with AI, we’re really going to focus on those bottom two levels.
We’re going to focus on understanding and then applying it. So, that’s our goal today. I do want to pause a little bit and give you a general reminder about compliance. I am the queen of compliance. I don’t want to be, but here we are.
I’m always talking about compliance on our podcasts. We’re going to talk about this a lot. As we talk about the actual ways that you can get your hands dirty and start using AI, but a general reminder, unless your organization has set up its own AI ecosystem that you know is private and secure within your own environment, you have to treat everything that you [00:07:00] put into AI as though you’re putting it on a billboard outside of your office.
So for example. Of course, we’re not going to upload patient names, but we’re also not going to upload information like our revenue goals for a service line or our organization’s name. And, you know, what areas we’re focused on for growth for the next year. Assume anything that you put in will be used to train the model, even if, many tools offer this, even if you opt out of allowing it to do that, you still have to make the assumption that unless you have signed a contract with them and you know that it is within a secure ecosystem, somehow the data could be leaked.
So proceed with caution. The other thing that I will say is that Europe is again leading the charge in the world of privacy, and they actually have developed an EU AI act. The estimated rollout is in 2026, and their focus is ensuring that AI is used in a safe and approved manner. And they’re specifically looking at things like [00:08:00] preventing the manipulation of human behavior to circumvent free will and the exploitation of vulnerabilities of a specific group of people.
So fabulous things to put in place. Some things that I know US-based AI organizations have struggled with a little bit because we haven’t put those sorts of guardrails in place. And it’s why we’re going to have a variety of tools to talk about today, because there’s been inner fighting and they break up and start another organization that they think will be more ethical.
But again, Usually, like we saw with GDPR, whatever starts in Europe will eventually make its way over to the U.S. We likely will see some sort of legal framework coming around AI usage in the future, but right now nothing exists. If you go out on the web and you just type in AI for copywriting, there are going to be dozens of tools that come up.
If you do AI for design. Dozens of tools are going to come up, but at the end of the day, most of them are actually powered by just a handful of [00:09:00] models, less than a handful of models. So what we’re going to do today is we’re not going to talk about the 40 cool design apps or this cool app that can help make sure I’m looking at the camera when I’m doing this podcast, because maybe I’m reading off a script, which I’m not.
I always go off-script. Just ask my podcast manager. It drives them crazy. But we’re not focusing on that. I want you to understand the foundation of how AI works because then what you can do is look at any tool that a team member presents to you and you can say, yeah, but what model runs it and then you can understand structurally how it operates.
So I think we’re going to start with understanding the categories of how AI works, learns, et cetera. So the first question you want to ask whenever you’re presented with AI is what kind of AI is it? And there are really three kinds of AI. You have narrow AI, which is also known as weak AI. General AI, also known as strong AI and super [00:10:00] intelligent AI.
The only kind of AI that’s available to the general public today is narrow AI. So any sort of AI you’re interacting with right now, ChatGPT, Siri, or Alexa, all of those are really narrow AI. Strong or general AI is a platform or an AI tool that can really do anything a human can do, like learn new things, solve problems, and understand emotions.
They say this is not yet developed. I believe it likely is created, but it is not yet available for the average consumer. And then the third, which I really hope does not exist yet is super intelligent AI. And this is an AI tool that is really smarter than the smartest human in every single way. So picture a super brain that can solve problems that we can’t even imagine.
That is really what horror movies is made of. So that is a third kind. So all of the AIs we’re going to be talking about today are considered the first category, which is narrow or weak AI. The next question you want to ask when you start thinking about AIs [00:11:00] and how they categorize themselves is how does it learn.
There are again, three ways. But how it learns, you have supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. So supervised learning, for example, is when you show, you want them to recognize it, to learn how to recognize a cat. So you show lots of pictures of cats, labeled cats, and then it understands what a cat is.
Unsupervised is when you actually give it lots of photos of different animals, and then. Without telling it what it is, it kind of figures out based on similarities and context clues. Oh, these are all cats and these are all dogs. Reinforcement learning is more like training like a dog. So if it does a trick correctly, it gets a treat.
If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get anything. So it wants to learn in order to be given a treat of some kind. The next question that I always ask when you’re confronted with a new AI tool is what can it do? So you have four different categories of generally what AI [00:12:00] technologies can do. First is expert system.
So this is an AI that’s like an expert in their specific field. So think like a medical AI that can help doctors diagnose diseases. So they can perhaps look at test results, they perhaps can look at an MRI scan, and they can identify certain things. The next, which is what most people think of when they think of the word AI, is Natural Language Processing, or NLP AI.
So this AI understands and talks in human language, so this is a chatbot that you can talk to, think, ChatGPT. Again, that is an NLP AI. Computer vision AI. This is where AI can actually see and understand images and videos. So think like when you’re flying internationally and TSA doesn’t need to see your passport because it just took a picture of your face and it knows exactly who you are.
That is computer vision AI. And then the fourth category is called robotics AI. And that is when an AI [00:13:00] controls robots to do physical tasks. So think like an assembly line in a factory where it’s assembling cars or the Amazon warehouses where it’s actually picking items for shipment. That is robotics AI.
And the last section that we want to talk about whenever we’re thinking about AI is what kind of interface is it. So you have two. You have an out-of-the-box solution, which is what we’re going to talk about today. So you have ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, or you can build your own interface using one of those existing models.
So, when we think about all of those cool tools, for example, like that tool that can make my eyes look at the camera, even though I’m looking off to the side. That is an interface somebody built using one of the existing models to power it, and you can do the same thing. So once you get good enough at AI and understand how the different models think you could, for example, create a platform to allow your marketing team to interface with [00:14:00] a model that is segmented off into your own secure ecosystem, and it’s trained on your brand voice, and it is trained on your service line priorities and your marketing goals for 2025 and your team can do Q and A with it and get really specific with it. Really exciting and not really that hard.
So, in order to do that, you have to do a couple of things. You have to create a dev environment, decide which model you’re going to use, set up an API. So you can do that. Create an interface. How do you want to look at it and type with it? And then launch. And of course, you have to think about the security through the lens of of course, HIPAA and whatnot.
So your team would have to help you with that but it is not as technically advanced, you know, or scary as it may seem before you get to know how all these models work. So whenever we are talking about all the AI tools today, we’re really talking about are these couple of core models that have chat [00:15:00] interfaces on the front.
So we’re going to talk about 5 models. We’re going to talk about ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude. So these are the top 5 based off of our team’s usage and trends that we are seeing in the industry. Let’s dig in. The first, one, ChatGPT. This is the tool that when everybody says, do you use AI, this is what they are talking about.
Right now they have a 65 percent market share. It’s pretty astounding. They were the first one in market, they officially launched in November 30th, 2022. So they just celebrated their two-year anniversary, which is really crazy. It was developed by a company called OpenAI. And there’s a couple of specific things around it.
So, you can use the tool without logging in. Which is really nice if you’re wanting to just kind of understand the tool without creating a free account or signing up for a paid account, which you can do. Paid accounts or anywhere from 20 to 30 a user per month. And you also can get a [00:16:00] company account, where then you can create notebooks or the ability to have shared threads with other team members, which can be really helpful.
The next one we’re going to talk about is Gemini. So Gemini is actually a combination of two tools developed by Google. We have Duet AI and Bard. They lived separately and then they were, it was officially rebranded on February 21st, 2024. So this one has really only been around less than a year and it kind of feels that way.
It feels much younger. When you’re talking to it, it also feels like training guardrails have been put in place that make the answers feel a little bit more generic, but then also biased towards Google. So you may have noticed in recent months that Google is starting to include more Gemini responses in its search results.
So if you do a search, for example, saying like, who’s the best orthopedic surgeon in St. Louis. It will try to answer that with AI above the search results. So when people are thinking about and talking about like AI SEO [00:17:00] or AIO, that’s what they’re talking about is how do we get listed up in that area? It’s been a pretty slow rollout simply because of how long it takes to generate the answers.
And users are very impatient when it comes to searches on Google. So they are only rolling it out for some topics and for some users, but they will eventually have a pretty wide rollout. And then Gemini is also been the source of news headlines because of its apparent bias with its tool, especially when it comes to image generation.
If you think back whenever there was that big controversy around a query, such as give me a picture of a land owner. And it was an older white man, like there’s just some biases and the answers that it provides. And there also are biases in the written answers. So, for example, one of the queries we asked all of the platforms during our comparison and testing was information about if Google Analytics 4 was still safe to use with the new HIPAA guidance. And it wrote back and was like, why yes, you can still [00:18:00] use GA4. Whereas all the other platforms were like, proceed with caution. Here’s some information you need to know about it. So the tool is very clearly designed to keep you within that Google ecosystem.
But there are some built in integrations that make it really easy. For example, it’s already built into some of the tools you use on a daily basis such as Google drive, Gmail, et cetera. I will say my 14-year-old son is a huge Gemini fan and he uses it for a lot of his schoolwork. He creates private notebooks or gems for each of his classes.
And then he has it create study guides for him. So he uploads the documents that teachers give him, asks them to create study guides and to quiz him. So it’s really easy that it’s built-in with the existing infrastructure that many of us are already used to. The next platform is Copilot it’s owned by Microsoft and it runs on OpenAI’s GPT 4 large language model.
So what [00:19:00] again is interesting here is once you start seeing, okay, there’s all these different brands, but wait a minute, Copilot operates on OpenAI’s GPT. So you start to see overlap in the technology. It launched in February of 2023 and it replaced Cortana and Bing chat. It’s limited to only five queries a day without logging in.
So if you do want to kind of understand the tool without creating an account, you can dip your toe in a little bit. And then there’s a paid version that integrates with Microsoft 365. So your company may already have activated this. This could be an easy one to play with depending on your company’s tech stack and ecosystem.
It was definitely lesser known overall in the generative AI market, but they’ve done quite a few recent, well, throughout 2024, huge marketing pushes, including a bunch of Super Bowl ads that really increased its awareness. And we also really like that the formatting and prompt responses are pretty easy to read and consume.
So it’s notably different the way that it. [00:20:00] And the formatting it often did bulleted lists versus paragraphs of text. So that’s just an interesting difference in the way that it’s choosing to communicate. It’s also connected to the internet in the free version, which is a very helpful feature. But you have to be careful as it doesn’t have the maturity of ChatGPT, and it could be misleading with its accuracy or confidence levels.
So it hallucinates and we’ll talk about hallucinating a little bit. In the next episode, all these platforms hallucinate but Copilot definitely does. Another thing that I didn’t mention about ChatGPT is. And that’s going to come up with copilot also is that they right now are being sued by multiple different parties as a result of the way that it trained its model.
So, it basically just let it loose on the web and let it digest hundreds of thousands or millions of documents and pages and websites and books and all of these original content pieces created by other people without permission or [00:21:00] compensation. So, lots of lawsuits are happening with ChatGPT.
CoPilot, so, it’s powered by GPT. What’s interesting is they actually have advertised that they will protect any of its commercial customers from these lawsuits based off of their uses of Copilot. So, if ChatGPT ends up kind of going down or being sued for 2 billion dollars, will that roll downstream to its users?
We don’t know yet, but we do know that CoPilot through CoPilot, Microsoft has made a promise to allow it to roll down to its customers. So we’ll see if they hold true to that. The next two are interesting. So we got Perplexity. Perplexity is privately owned by four co-founders. It was launched in 2022 and it leverages OpenAI’s GPT 3.5model and Microsoft Bing’s search engine.
So it is really kind of positioning itself as a search enhancement tool rather than generative AI tool. And one of the things that we really like about Perplexity is how it really cites its [00:22:00] sources for any searches that you do. For example, if you’re going to be doing market research or anything where you really need to understand where the data is coming from, we really like perplexity for those.
Purposes, but we will see how long Perplexity is around as these other models continue to get more sophisticated and people just get used to asking for these models to cite their sources. It may not become as big of a differentiator. And the last platform I want to chat about today is Claude. So Claude is actually my personal favorite platform.
It’s owned by Anthropic, which was started by former members of OpenAI. So at the very beginning of the episode, I mentioned how there was a little bit of infighting within OpenAI because of the lack of consensus around if guardrail should or should not be put around the training models, the kinds of responses and questions that you can ask AI.
And so four people that helped found OpenAI just said, forget about it. We’re leaving. And they started [00:23:00] Claude. They use a unique approach called constitutional AI. And that means it’s focusing on making the models helpful, honest, and harmless by having them self-critique and revise their responses based on the company’s guiding principles.
So we think that they wanted to develop an AI that had more guardrails from the start, as opposed to the direction OpenAI took. The Claude AI models have been developed with a strong focus on safety and ethical AI practices, and they’re designed to be transparent and how and why they share the information that they do.
An interesting thing is that Claude can actually analyze both text and Images and you can even understand complex diagrams. We know that in June, Claude 3 Sonnet was released, but they’re rolling things out continuously. All these platforms are. So I’m not going to talk about specific models for any of them, but they’re continuously releasing new models and updates.
The other thing that I think is interesting is that [00:24:00] the concept of constitutional AI sounds good on paper, but there are some queries. For example, our team asked it, how can I kill all Python processes in my Ubuntu server? That’s a normal thing a developer would ask, and Claude refused to answer it because of the word kill.
So is that a problem with AI model because it didn’t understand that or is that a problem with our prompting and we need to learn to use different language. So something to think about. But again, Claude to me is the most personable and the way that it communicates. So, thank you for tuning in today.
This is the first of three episodes that we’re going to be talking about AI. Today we really covered AI as far as how to understand what you’re looking at from a model or technology perspective and the six core platforms that are used the most right now. Next week, we’re going to get in and talk about the six core tenets of using AI and ways to convince your organization to [00:25:00] integrate AI and allow you to use it.
And then the final episode, we’re going to be talking about specific prompts and give you some tips about how to actually incorporate it into your day-to-day. I hope today’s episode was helpful, and we will see you on episode two of three of AI 101 for healthcare marketers with We Are, Marketing Happy. See you soon.
In this special episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, Jenny dives into a critical update for healthcare marketers. Google is requiring advertisers to opt into call recording for its Click-to-Call feature, creating potential HIPAA compliance risks. Jenny explains the changes, why they’re a concern, and what steps you need to take to protect your organization.
Key Points:
•Google’s new terms for Click-to-Call could result in PHI or PII being recorded, violating HIPAA.
•The rollout is inconsistent, so accounts must be monitored closely.
•You can contact Google support to opt out of call recording.
Action Items:
•Check if the terms were accepted for your account.
•Share this episode with your team or agency to ensure awareness.
More Information
•Search Engine Journal Article
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am your host, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. We specialize in working with payors and providers across the country.
I am not so thrilled to be here with you today, because I’m going to complain a little bit about Google. I had to hop on immediately to record this podcast so we could get it live this week. Today I’m recording, it is Tuesday, December 17th, 2024, and I wanted to record and get this live immediately because this is a huge potential compliance and HIPAA concern for all of us healthcare marketers who are running Google ads.
So if you run Google ads for your healthcare organization, you need to be very careful about any new terms that [00:01:00] you accept within your Google ads account. Google has begun randomly creating notifications within accounts, kind of similar to account verifications, where it’s like no rhyme and reason about when you’re prompted for account verification, we had some clients prompted months and months ago, and some prompted yesterday, right?
So it’s not like it’s being done on the 15th of each month or based on budget or size, you’re just prompted and you have 30 days to do it. They’re doing the same thing. This one is specifically around call extensions. So if you’re doing a text ad within Google ads, you likely have called extensions activated, right?
It is a great way to allow patients or potential clients to click to call in to immediately speak with your team to schedule an appointment, book a service, et cetera. Right? Everybody uses it. Well, these new terms that you’re receiving under the notifications. What it’s trying to do is to force you to accept [00:02:00] call recording in order to continue using the call extension feature.
And why is that a bad idea? Well, we’ve been talking about HIPAA for a very long time. The last thing you want to do is share any potential PHI or PII with a third party such as Google. We’ve done all of this work getting our marketing analytics tech stack set up and now Google is trying to record those inbound calls from call extensions.
So let’s back up a little bit and talk about the history of this. We did a little bit of digging because we didn’t know Google had ever really done this. Turns out, a Search Engine Journal posted an article in 2018 that said they were starting random call recording in order to reduce fraud and spam. So it was not a system-wide thing.
It was not something they did regularly. It was just to try to improve the user experience. There was another search engine journal article in mid-2020 where they [00:03:00] said that within Google ads, it became a feature that you could turn on not turn off, but turn on. So it was off by default is our understanding.
Well, now, what they are doing is they are actually saying that they want you to opt into it being turned on all of the time. And whenever it specifically says about call recording Google monitors and records a small percentage of phone calls that are initiated by call-only ads or call assets for some advertisers in the United States, allowing us to improve call quality for both users and advertisers alike.
Evaluating call quality ensures that advertisers are providing a positive call experience and prevents caller spam and business fraud. So according to that, it sounds like it is not 100 percent of the calls, but is it 1%? Is it 80%? Does it vary by the day? We don’t know. Even one call recorded by Google, if you’re a healthcare organization, is too many.
Because from a privacy perspective, [00:04:00] we don’t want to do that. So where are you? What’s going to happen? Well, just like the Google ad verification, the account verification process, you actually can contact Google support and you can actually opt-out of this if you click on the terms themselves, it specifically has a section around HIPAA disclaimer, and it reads like this, unless otherwise specified in writing by Google, Google does not intend use of the communication features to create obligations under the health insurance portability and accountability act as amended and makes no representation of the communication features satisfy HIPAA requirements.
You and any third party that is advertising on your behalf are so for applicable compliance with HIPAA. So what does that mean? That means you have the ability to actually opt-out and tell Google Hey, we do not want you to do any call recording on our account. What is the concern? The concern and the [00:05:00] reason why I had to publish this podcast episode immediately, we modified our publishing schedule in order to get this out.
If you have an agency or a third party that is managing your Google ads on your behalf, they likely will receive this notification of change of terms and just accept it without understanding what they are accepting that will be opting you into this. And then again, we’ll be creating additional compliance issues and concerns for your organization.
So we’re going to have a variety of links that we’re going to share in the call notes or in the show notes for today’s episode. And what you need to do is if you have a third party managing your Google ads, number one. See if they’ve received a notification and opted into anything within your account, but number two, send them this episode, have them listen to it, and make sure that they are not accidentally opting you into this and creating additional compliance consideration.
Again, these are at the account level. So for example, heavy and hot, we have [00:06:00] hundreds of accounts that we manage. Every single one of them has begun to receive this notification. We received two yesterday. And so, again, just like account verification, it’s going to be a slow roll. You may receive 80 tomorrow, who knows but you need to know about this and make sure that you are not accidentally opting into it.
As always, this should be a great reminder that if you are not working with a healthcare-specific marketing agency to manage your media strategy, this is a great reminder that maybe it’s time to start shopping around. This is a kind of situation where somebody could accidentally opt into something without realizing the potential implications to your organization.
So just a little pitch to wrap up this episode. If you’re currently working with an agency that has not yet brought this to your attention, or perhaps even accidentally already accepted the new terms without realizing what they were doing, call me. You can shoot me an email, at jenny@hedyandhopp.com.
I’d be happy to chat with you about our [00:07:00] media and marketing services. But otherwise please share this episode with anybody who’s managing it, whether it’s an internal team or a third-party team, and make sure you don’t accidentally accept these new click-to-call terms. With that, I will wrap up today’s episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in, please like, and subscribe. We really appreciate all of our followers across all of the various podcasting platforms. And I will be with you again next Friday for a new episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In this episode, Jenny Bristow, CEO of Hedy & Hopp, is joined by Suzie Schmitt, Senior Digital Producer, to chat about creative solutions for data integration in marketing dashboards. Building on recent discussions about privacy and analytics at industry conferences, they discuss a workaround that enhances the reporting capabilities of data—while staying HIPAA compliant.
Additional Episode Highlights:
Connect with Suzie:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We’re a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and we are very proud to be the creators and hosts of this podcast. I’m jazzed to be here today with Suzie Schmitt.
She is our Senior Digital Producer here at Hedy & Hopp. And I invited Suzie on because as we’ve covered in recent podcasts, I was at SHSMD a couple of weeks ago talking about privacy and I’m going to be at HCIC in a couple of weeks talking about privacy, and though our agency does so many things beyond privacy we’ve definitely become known as privacy gurus in this space, which is a hat we’re proud to wear.
But the questions keep coming up about workarounds, like even once you get sGTM or some other analytics solution in place, and you’re really comfortable with the way that you’re marketing analytics or your website data is being collected, [00:01:00] used and stored.
What about those third-party tools that you’re using? And so I was having a fun offline conversation with Suzie and I invited her on to talk about a workaround that our team has created that I thought could be interesting to some of our users or some of our listeners today. So, Suzie, I’d love for you to just give us a little bit of the lay of the land.
How did this technology solution, this process even come about?
Suzie: Sure. So we were looking into call tracking options for one of our clients to track campaign performance and we found that CallRail has a great HIPAA-compliant product, but that reporting on it once you leave the CallRail ecosystem can be kind of difficult.
So when we’re trying to tie everything back into all of our marketing efforts to get a holistic picture, we weren’t able to get all of the data we needed just from the out-of-the-box connector. So what we did is we created an API call that [00:02:00] only calls non-sensitive information. So it all gets written to a Google Sheet that has no PII at any time.
So it’s completely clean and kosher from a privacy standpoint. And it runs on a time base every 12 hours and updates our dashboard automatically. And that was a way for the client to get those specific numbers tied to campaigns and tactics into their dashboard where they could see it combined with all of their other tracking metrics.
And we did that through Google Apps Script, which let us connect that API using JavaScript just to a Google Sheet.
Jenny: Excellent. And I love that. And we’ve been long-time recommenders and users of CallRail. Their HIPAA-compliant version is great. And VOCA is another tool that a lot of our clients use.
Again, they have a HIPAA-compliant version, but what we’re talking about here is that with the HIPAA-compliant version, while the tool itself then becomes HIPAA compliant, it can then kind of be [00:03:00] difficult to get all the data you need into your reporting interface to actually report on campaign efficacy.
So for example, with our clients, most of them use Looker dashboards, and we are the ones that set them up from a campaign reporting perspective. And so if we’re trying to do, you know, soup to nuts from spend to final conversion you know, we got to get that data in. And so what you were able to do then with the call reel data is export it.
Only the data that is non-PHI, and then pull it back into Looker and then associate it with the correct campaign information. So we could accurately report on the number of phone calls and conversions that came in, right?
Suzie: Correct. Yeah. It’s kind of like a little custom Looker connector.
Jenny: Absolutely.
And this can be done really with any platform that has API availability, right? Walk us through, like if a marketer on this call is thinking like, Oh, I want to make my dashboard more robust in the third-party tools that I pull in. How can they [00:04:00] think through what tools this could be applicable for?
Suzie: Really, anything that has an API is an option. But as you go through it, think about the fields you do and you don’t need. So for example, for the calls, we needed the number of calls. We needed the average duration. We needed the time of day that the calls were coming through so we could make sure all of our campaigns were running smoothly, but we did not need any of that sensitive data that CallRail needed. And so once we had identified what we did need, we went to the documentation for the API and matched it up. And if you can see that the documentation has it, the ability to get granular enough so that you can get what you need and not what you don’t, it’s probably going to be a pretty good option for a pretty simple JavaScript API call.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve done it may feel a little manual, but in the end, it’s not manual. We’ve done Google Sheets to feed data into reporting dashboards for lots of different use cases. So this is just another example of creatively pulling data in to customize it for our needs. [00:05:00]
Suzie: That’s correct.
And since most APIs are pretty static and don’t change very often, we have a really low level of maintenance to do with these. And Google also has a built-in way to handle secrets so we’re able to handle API keys securely as well. So it’s been a really great, low-maintenance way to keep our dashboards up to date and make sure that all that data is tying in together and we can tag everything appropriately.
Jenny: Absolutely. So for those on the call, if you’re trying to build out your reporting dashboard for additional data sets or information from other platforms that you use, and there isn’t an immediate way to do it, this is a great way to kind of think outside of the box and kind of problem solve a way to be able to get the data.
Another thing that came to mind for me, whenever you were talking about a solution like this is if you’re an in-house marketer and you create these reporting dashboards and you share them with people outside of your organization, especially people you don’t have a BAA with, this is just another level of [00:06:00] safety to make sure there isn’t any data accidentally being put into those dashboards that you shouldn’t be sharing with third parties.
Suzie: It’s a great clean data source to keep things entirely separate so that you have, if you need to, you can go into CallRail and you could even match that call ID and see those granular details on each one if you need it. But if you want to report and not worry about any of that, it is ready to go. And if it doesn’t have anything sensitive.
So it’s great for reporting, whether it be for a presentation, like it’s something like SHSMD or whether it be to a larger internal team anything where you just wouldn’t want that sensitive data around.
Jenny: Oh, that’s awesome. So what are some watchouts? I know, for example, we were talking through, like, you shouldn’t just go and set this up on your, like, personal Google workspace. So if somebody’s going to pursue the creativity of a solution like this, what should they look out for?
Suzie: Well, the first thing is that we have two BAAs with Google here at Hedy & Hopp. We have one for Google Cloud platform and we have one for our workspace instance, which means that all of [00:07:00] our Google apps for workspace for business are all covered by their BAA.
So this was done on my, on the Hedy & Hopp accounts and not on a personal Google. You can never get a BAA with a personal Gmail account. So you want to make sure that you’re doing this in a secure environment. Anytime you’re dealing with an API, you’re also probably going to have an account number and API key.
And you’re going to want to make sure that you take care of those by using Google’s secrets manager to properly hide those variables. They’re not just exposed and flying out there because that’s kind of just leaving the key to your house in the lock. And then finally, you just want to be really careful about the fields that you pull because you just want to make sure that you’re referring to that documentation and lining it up and making sure that you really are creating what you think you’re creating and that everything that you want to make sure that you’re not just relying on what you think a field name might be.
So those are really my big watch ads for keeping these compliance safe and useful.
Jenny: I love it, Susie. Thank you [00:08:00] so much. And for our listeners, I hope this had you look at the opportunities for data integration to dashboards in a slightly different, perhaps more creative light. I know this is a pretty technical topic to talk about on our podcast, but I like throwing those in every once in a while to kind of encourage some technical thinking and brainstorming, especially because I know based off my conversations over the last few weeks, so many organizations are still focusing on building appropriate reporting dashboards and incorporating as many data sources as possible to have them be holistic.
So hopefully this episode was useful. Please know that if you have specific questions about platform compliance, or even opportunities for what a dashboard could look like please reach out to us. We love talking about this stuff and we’d be happy to hop on a call and talk with you and even brainstorm about specific platforms or tools you’re trying to integrate and see if we can help you problem-solve. So, thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode, Suzie.
And thank you listeners for tuning in. [00:09:00] We will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
In this podcast episode, we cover the essentials for dashboards. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the terminology, technologies, and the need to demonstrate ROI when developing your first dashboard for your healthcare organization, you’re not alone. Our goal is to set a baseline of understanding so that when you tackle yours, you’ll know what to look out for and the right questions to ask.
What We Cover:
Questions to Consider:
This episode is designed for those just starting to dip their toes into dashboards. Whether you’re working with an in-house team or an agency, these insights will help with the development of your dashboard.
Related Patient Privacy Podcast Episodes:
Connect with Jenny:
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
[00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of we are marketing happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. My name is Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp. We are a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency and our goal is to bring the joy to your healthcare marketing work. I’m here today to chat a little bit about dashboards.
I’m going to call this episode Dashboards 101. Dashboarding and reporting can be extremely overwhelming to folks in the healthcare marketing space, especially for folks that come from more traditional think like communications or PR background. Whenever they’re beginning to try to show the ROI of the marketing campaigns for the first time, it can be very overwhelming.
There’s lots of different terminology that floats around. There’s lots of different platforms and technology that you can take into consideration when you’re moving into the dashboard or reporting space. And so I want to do just a little bit of a one on one episode today and kind of give you some things to think about, hopefully set a baseline of [00:01:00] understanding.
That way, whenever you go to tackle this project yourself within your organization, you’ll have a better understanding of what to look out for and the questions to ask. So let’s get started. I want to start super, super high level and talk just a little bit about terminology. We often see terminology like dashboards and reports kind of be thrown around interchangeably and I want to start out just by giving a little bit of a definition.
So a dashboard is usually if you think about like the dashboard on your car, it’s real time. It’s providing real time feedback and information about what’s happening, whether it’s how fast you’re going or how much gas you have left left in your tank.
It’s real information being fed to you in real time, whereas a report is really a snapshot in time. It could be generated from the dashboard or it could be manually created using other data sources. But usually that would be, let’s say right now it is August. Let’s say we’re putting together a [00:02:00] July campaign performance report that is a snapshot in time, looking exactly at those date ranges and really talking about performance, whereas the dashboard is more real time information.
And so, first of all, that’s high level, the difference between those two terminologies. As you’re starting to think about dashboarding and reporting first of all, don’t forget about patient privacy and all the different things you need to do to potentially clean up your data feeds and analytics tools.
We have lots of great episodes about that, so I’m not going to talk about that at all. We’ll link to some episodes in the show notes you can go listen to. But I do want to stress that everything we’re talking about today is absolutely possible to continue doing while keeping patient privacy, top of mind, so you can implement all the best practices, remove all the potential PHI or even just personally identifiable information from the data feeds.
And you still can get this level of granularity we’re going to talk about today. So let’s just assume that you’re moving forward with patient privacy handled. So if you’re going to start [00:03:00] building a dashboard for the first time, our organization always recommends when we go through with our clients, what we call a measurement plan.
So it sounds simple, right? Like, of course we know what we want to measure. It’s a campaign. We want to measure how many clicks we get. We want to measure how many form submissions or phone calls we get, but it actually can be a lot more complex than that because that may be the first instinct. About what you want to report on.
But if you take a step back and what we do with all of our clients is we say, okay, maybe that surface level information is what you want to know today. But think about at the end of the month, what do you have to report up to your leadership team? What would you love to be able to report to your board?
So it’s almost a wishlist of performance metrics of the information you would love to have at your fingertips to be able to showcase how well your campaigns or your work in the marketing space are doing. And so what we do is we go through when we first understand, you know, what are the business [00:04:00] objectives?
If there’s a strategic plan in place, we really like rolling up the measurement plan to that strategic plan. Just so again, everybody’s using the same vocabulary, same you know, foundation for how we’re talking about success, but then we get to the conversation and be breaking it down by service line or by product offering.
Do we need to break it down by location? How do you, how do you talk about success within your organization? How do you have to report back success? So really getting to that level of granularity of how we need to present the information. And then what actual metrics need to be included at that level of filtering and detail.
At that point, we go in and actually make sure the analytics tool we’re using is set up to measure those things. For example, a call tracking software, is it actually set up on all of the correct service line pages? That’s the call to action. Are there forms that should be tracked that aren’t? Are there other call to actions like downloading an informative PDF about your service lines that need to be reported [00:05:00] on?
Maybe that event isn’t set up yet. So you make sure that really the on site website tracking matches that measurement plan and what we’re trying to accomplish. Once that’s done, then we get to really the fun part where we’re talking about visualization. So when you think about visualization, often we’ll be talking to folks and I’ve had so many clients come to me and say, well, I bought Domo, but it didn’t work.
And I totally understand that frustration because if you look at the websites of these data visualization tools, it really looks like it’s plug and play and it’s going to be super easy. Right. But the interesting thing is that all data visualization tools are at the foundation level the same, right?
They’re going to visualize data in the way that you ask it to visualize data. So that measurement planning process where you’re getting organized and figuring out exactly how you’re going to tell that data story and how you’re going to visualize it has to be done within your organization before you can get to the pretty part about actually setting up those visuals.
So, we love Looker. as a [00:06:00] visualization tool. We actually have used Looker way before it was used by Google or owned by Google, but there are lots of other ones. We have folks that use Tableau, Domo. It really, the list just never ends of the different tools you can use. I really like Looker. If you’re just getting started with data visualization and dashboarding, because it’s free.
So you can spend your funds from a budgetary perspective on training your team, but how to use the tool or bringing in third party experts to be able to make sure everything is set up correctly versus paying just to access the tool itself. So that’s the data data visualization side. The other thing that I wanted to explain that I think folks kind of overlook or get confused about sometimes is how is the data coming into the visualization tool?
And really, there’s two different ways for this to happen. First is a straight data feed. Usually this is through an API. Most of the tools on the backend have a way for you to really just enter your login credentials, say to Google Analytics 4 or whatever, you know, analytics tools you’re using.
There’ll [00:07:00] be a variety that you’ll need to connect, whether it’s Google Ads, Meta, whatever. You enter that in and then the data feeds begin connecting and then you can make modifications about how it actually is visualized. The other way is a much more sophisticated option. So I don’t recommend starting here but it’s actually having a data lake and then doing backend calculations.
So you’re actually pulling the data together into one super large database. So then you can actually do data connections. And you can actually understand by IDs, different steps of the patient or the user journey and really connect it together. So you can get a bigger picture understanding about how that individual is engaging with your marketing on the front end or your organization on the back end, depending on if your analytics is really just focusing on the marketing side or your entire organization.
It’s much more sophisticated. So again, I wouldn’t recommend that you start here. If you’re just starting out and getting used to [00:08:00] showcasing formants of your campaigns, and you really just want to start showing ROI, I definitely would start with the easier version, but then once you are ready then you definitely would need to either have some pretty sophisticated talent within your internal team.
So this isn’t really just like a marketing person. This is more of a developer role to be able to set up that data lake. You can actually include some back end calculations, whether it’s ROI calculations, et cetera, to then be able to visualize the data in a super specific way for your needs.
Hopefully that was a really helpful overview. I could talk about this for hours and hours but I really wanted to create an episode that would be helpful for folks that are just starting to dip their toe in. So hopefully this gives you a framework if you’re going to begin moving forward with it. A couple of questions that you want to keep in mind if you are working with your in-house team to develop a dashboard for the first time, or perhaps you’re working with an agency that’s doing it [00:09:00] is acouple of questions.
First, what’s the timeliness or refresh rate of the data? You can make data, you can make dashboards real time. All of our dashboards that we do for our clients are real time so at any time whenever you log in it will be information up to that day. But others they update maybe every Sunday night for the week prior.
It just depends on how they’re building that dashboard. So always understanding what is the refresh rate or the timeliness of that data is super helpful. Understanding if it’s straight data feeds or if there’s any back end calculations, that’s super helpful. Understanding the data sources with all the dashboards that we create.
We actually on the first page, it’s kind of introduction to the dashboard. We list every single data source including like the property IDs. That way, if there’s ever a question about data matching or numbers not quite syncing up, we can understand exactly where the data came from and really be able to quickly understand any discrepancies.
And then the final thing I would say is if you’re building a [00:10:00] dashboard definitely do not skip that measurement plan and really challenge your team to make sure that every action you want to track within your marketing ecosystem is set up to be trackable so you can report upon it appropriately within the dashboard.
And really, if you haven’t yet start thinking about things like call tracking, form submissions through events and any other sort of interaction, whether it’s an online chat or whatever it is, make sure all of those interactions are captured in a way that’s measurable.
So you can really track out that patient or user journey on your website. So you can properly optimize it. So thank you so much for tuning in today to this episode of we are marketing happy to our dashboards. One on one. If you have any questions, reach out to me, I’d love to chat and answer any specific questions you have about maybe a dashboard or analytics project you’re tackling within your organization.
If you’re running into any roadblocks or any frustrations and we’re just like a second point of view, we would be [00:11:00] happy to chat with you. You can reach out to me at Jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com. So until next week please like, and save this podcast so you can get our weekly updates, new episodes drop every Friday.
And we’ll see you next week on our next episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
Healthcare marketers were thrown for a loop again a couple of weeks ago when the final ruling was released for the lawsuit by the American Hospital Association (AHA) against the Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The ruling threw out a key part of the 2022 bulletin but left marketers confused about what, if anything, they should do to modify their marketing analytics setups.
Listen in to learn:
If you’re struggling to answer questions to your leadership about how and what should change with your analytics setup, this is a must-listen-to podcast!
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Mark:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbrandes/
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow, and I am here with Mark Brandes. I am the CEO and founder of Hedy and Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And Mark is our Director of Analytics and Decision Science.
So welcome Mark.
Mark: Hey Jenny, thanks for having me.
Jenny: So first, I have to acknowledge anybody watching the video Mark and I are twinning today. We are both wearing Hedy and Hopp Artist in Residence t-shirts. So that’s a rare occurrence and I almost changed but I think it’s adorable. So we’re going with it.
Mark: It doesn’t happen to me very often, Jenny.
Jenny: It doesn’t. But here’s the thing. We’re talking about a pretty serious, heavy topic today. So if we can give some levity with matching t-shirts, we’re going to do it. So the topic today we’re going to talk about is the recent AHA and OCR ruling and the impact on patient privacy.[00:01:00]
As many of you know, in the healthcare marketing space, a ruling came down a couple of weeks ago. With the American Hospital Association lawsuit against OCR around the bulletin that was providing you guidance around HIPAA and the impacts it was having for healthcare marketers and our use or lack of use of marketing analytics tools.
We have been really leaders at Hedy and Hopp around helping healthcare organizations understand the bulletin that came out in 2022. Really making sure that we provided, at first it was just straight guidance and understanding of what tools were on the market. And then we pivoted and we actually created a solution because we wanted to put forward a low price, quick-to-implement solution.
So we did a Server-Side Google Tag Manager implementation offering, which we’ve helped now many healthcare organizations across the country [00:02:00] become compliant with that bulletin. And now, parts of that bulletin don’t matter anymore. So Mark, do you want to give us a rundown around kind of what happened a couple of weeks ago with the ruling and some big findings?
Mark: Yeah, for sure. So yeah the news was interesting. We knew there eventually might be a decision based on the lawsuit that was out there, and really our reading of it and talking to our legal team. Kind of feels like maybe only a small part of the bulletin was really kind of ruled against.
And so I don’t have all the legal terminology, but my understanding is that really, when you look at the part about the guidance that talks about IP addresses, along with specific health information, the ruling really said that that was an extension of HIPAA rules and not necessarily living within those correct rules that were already stated, right?
And so there’s a process for updating those rules and changing those rules. And that wasn’t really followed for that. And so that’s kind of what, how we look at that. And so [00:03:00] really it’s just that thin part of, if you have IP address, It’s mixed with something like specific health information, like, say, on a web page that has actually been vacated, but there’s still a lot in the bulletin that got kind of saved and still is there.
So it’s kind of interesting that it was only that sliver. And so we’ll see how the government kind of responds if HHS feels like they need to appeal that. But there’s also a sense that maybe they won’t appeal because it is such a sliver of a judgment and not necessarily so broad to take out the whole guidance.
So we’ll have to keep watching and see how that goes.
Jenny: Yeah, I think an interesting thing that I took away is that in the bulletin, OCR said that regardless of intent, you had to treat that combination of IP address along with a health condition as PHI. So for example, If you are a behavioral health center, your entire website talks about behavioral health problems and symptoms and treatments and services [00:04:00] that you offer.
If anyone goes to your website with that IP address, that should be considered PHI because it’s clear that they were coming to be able to research a behavioral health solution. But what was really interesting is that it said that no. Inference is required. So you have to infer the intent about why they were visiting, that was for themselves or for someone else.
And I think one of the things that’s interesting to me is this again, opens up and creates even more gray area. There was so much gray already, right? In the legal interpretation of the bulletin, but this is even more gray area of like, how do you define intent? And are people going to use that specific language to be able to say, well, we’re just going to begin going back to the old analytics setup and tracking that we had because you know, this is gray enough that we think we can play in that space.
I think another clarification that I’ve had a lot of questions submitted to me is because it was in the federal district court in Texas. A lot of folks were asking me, does this only apply if we are in Texas? And it does not, this is [00:05:00] nationwide implications, because it is OCR nationwide guidance and enforcement.
And so even though it was the federal state or federal court in Texas, this is a nationwide implication. One thing that I think is interesting is you talking about, you know, will health and human services actually come back and fight this? And try to push it forward. And I think this opens up another question of gray and frustration for marketers because it could take a long time.
I mean, I know we have talked about, we talked with our legal team around what it could look like from a timeline perspective, and it’s years. Right. I mean, could you talk, I would love to hear your perspective, Mark on, you know, from a marketer’s point of view about kind of the pros and cons of backtracking analytics, trying to play in the gray and kind of the weight of waiting years to get a solution.
Mark: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I feel like the people that have taken steps are ready to put in a compliance solution [00:06:00] or move to a compliance solution. I feel like they’re a step ahead still. And I don’t feel like they’re losing much right now. Some people have turned off their analytics and some of their tracking completely.
So those you know, companies can consider, hey, do we want to put that back on? If that’s your kind of solution needs to have it on or off, then, I mean, you can kind of make those kind of black and white decisions if you need to. However, for ones that have already kind of implemented certain solutions, like SGTM or moving to a compliance software, that’ll sign a BAA with you.
Right? If you move to those solutions, I don’t think you’ve lost anything instead. I think you’ve just allowed yourself to not feel the pressure of some of these decisions, right? So. If you already have that in place, you’re not really feeling like this decision is going to make a huge difference to you.
You might feel like, hey, maybe we didn’t have to do this, but I feel like it’s a different way. I feel like you’ve put the infrastructure in place that you need to then actually make those changes. So if it does get appealed, then we’re right back to this. Right? So, like, that kind of up and down roller coaster.
You might be on if you can put a [00:07:00] solution in place or move to something compliant have BAAs in place. You don’t really have to be concerned anymore. So there’s not like watching, you know, watching on the horizon to see what’s coming down the pike. You can kind of feel comfortable in what you’ve done. And so we’ve talked about there’s other pieces of legislation out there are other entities out there that also affect this.
And so it’s not just HHS. Now, that was the match that lit the fire in this sense, but I think we now understand how many other things are involved here. There’s civil lawsuits, there’s the FTC, their state laws.
And so I know we’re going to talk a little bit about that too. Jenny.
Jenny: Yeah, let’s talk actually about state laws. So there are at least I think there’s more than this, but there’s at least 19 state privacy laws on the books now. If I’m a healthcare marketer in you know, let’s say Virginia. And we don’t need to go specifically into state laws, but like, let’s say I’m located just within one state. Like, how should I be thinking about state law now?
Mark: So Virginia is an interesting one, because it actually talks in there [00:08:00] about how if you’re treating your data like PHI, then you can actually be exempt from Virginia’s law. So however, if, based on this ruling, companies and clients decide to move back to maybe the original way they were tracking stuff.
Well, they might actually now be pursuing under the Virginia law because they aren’t treating all their data like PHI, right? So there could be ways that gets invoked. Now there’s some other states where it doesn’t matter how you treat your data. It just matters how you’re kind of classified. So all that kind of has to be taken into account.
However, a lot of them do have carve outs for HIPAA and covered entities that are following HIPAA rules. And so if you are still following that, putting in a compliance solution, you can actually not really have to be concerned about some of those state laws. However, if you aren’t, and if you leave kind of your site up to the old way of tracking, You actually really need to be careful in how you’re doing that.
Whether you’re following the state laws, you need to be [00:09:00] on the lookout for any new states that are coming. So it’s kind of another one of those things. Where do you want the peace of mind that? Hey, we’re doing things the right way and can kind of just leave it alone. Or do we want to keep kind of jumping every time one of these things pumps up.
Jenny: Yeah. And a nationwide privacy law was actually introduced. I know it’s still going through the legislative process. It is nowhere near being finalized, but I mean, something that I think is interesting is will we see healthcare entities now need to be compliant and not have a carve out in any sort of national law because of this ruling?
So I think you bring up an excellent point that, you know, I think brands really have two choices. Continue down the path of being privacy forward. Making sure that everything’s compliant, then you have way less concern around watching the legislative landscape, or continue playing in the gray, because you, for some reason, think it’s worth it.
And then you’ll just have to continue staying up to date with all of those different legislative changes. How about the FTC? I know, you know, last year, health and human [00:10:00] services and the FTC kind of like sent a nastygram out to 130 systems saying, hey, we’re watching you. You’re not doing good things with patient data.
Well, how do you think and how is our legal team kind of shared information about how we think the FTC may respond to this?
Mark: So, the FTC is an interesting one, and it’s still a little unclear how this is going to affect this because they have their own definition of what they mean by health information.
Right? And so they kind of went along with that same definition of HHS, which is if I have an IP address and have specific health information, putting those 2 together is personal health information. So, like, they still, maybe follow that direction? We’re really not clear. But what we do know is the FTC is still very strong in that privacy landscape and basically making sure that companies are following what they say.
So in your privacy policy, if you list that, hey, we’re not sharing any of your personal information with third parties, you better be sure that you’re not doing that. And one way to do that would be to have a privacy solution in [00:11:00] place or BAAs in place that you know that you’re covered there because that’s really where the FTC is going to get you.
If you are doing something and you are being, you’re misleading your users, I think is the way that they put it, that’s when they’re going to start to have a concern. And so still having a good sense of, hey, what are all the softwares on my side and what data are they sharing? I think that’s still a good exercise to go through.
To have an audit and make sure that, you know, all the things that your website is sharing. So you can put those in your privacy policy. Doesn’t mean you have to stop doing some of those things and just make sure you need to be clear with your users. And so with the gray area with HHS, maybe you lean to be more having more data sharing happen, but there are times where if you’re doing that, for example, with Cerebral, I believe that latest lawsuit from the FTC, Cerebral can’t share any data with 3rd parties. Now, they’ve really kind of lock them down. It looks like, based on our reading of that judgment. And so that’s not something companies want to happen.
Right? So you want to make sure that you’re being [00:12:00] clear as possible and still being up front with what you’re doing and what you’re sharing and make sure those privacy policies are up to date.
Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. And quick plug. We do do those audits. So if you are a new listener and haven’t heard us talk about this yet, one of the things that we began doing immediately upon the bulletin landing is doing really comprehensive marketing and technology stack audits to help you understand every single technology that’s running your digital property website and all of your ad platforms.
So reach out if that’s a concern. Otherwise, I believe there’s a podcast talking about how to do it yourself. If it’s something your internal team wants to tackle, but you absolutely should be on top of that. Let’s talk about civil lawsuits because that’s another thing that’s been really interesting.
And one of the things I have done in all of the trainings around HIPAA and state law, FTC, et cetera, is encourage people go to the website builtwith.com type in their domain, and you can see every single technology that is powering your website or a large percentage of them at least. Talk a little bit about the [00:13:00] civil lawsuit landscape that healthcare organizations are experiencing right now.
And if you think that’s going to go away or not with this new ruling.
Mark: I don’t think so. I think that kind of train has already left the station so to speak. Yeah, it’s interesting. You bring up kind of Built With there’s a lot of tools out there like that. There’s some extensions. You can add to web browsers, like Ghostery or Wappalyzer.
There’s some other things that tag checkers you can add. They’re going to see all the things that are happening. Right? And so. We really made this akin to you know, kind of how the legal system moved toward if you have an accident, right? There’s a lot of people willing to kind of, help you out with that, right?
Get your legal case in the system. I think similar things are going to start to happen with data. So you’ve seen a lot of civil lawsuits where people are like, Hey, I just saw in my little web tracker that this website tracked this and send it to there. It’s easy to do and it’s free and they can do it individually.
And so. That one person can then raise their hand and say, Hey this client, this [00:14:00] hospital, this service shared my data with this 3rd party, check your privacy policy out. So, I mean, there’s so many things like that can kind of get you when you’re not really looking or paying attention to that. So that’s why some of this vigilance makes a lot of sense.
And the thing is, with these civil lawsuits. It’s not just stuff with HIPAA. There’s also things with like, the Video Privacy Act, right? There’s some of these esoteric kind of laws out there that we really don’t pay attention to that were put in place a long time ago, and they are coming back now because of the influence of the Internet and all the things we can find on websites now where that data is shared.
So it really need to keep that in mind when that stuff happens. So having again, a good inventory of what data is being shared and then having solutions in place for those, having your privacy policy updated to make sure anything that is in a gray area or things you feel like you still need or don’t want to remove from your system that those are covered under that.
So it’s still great to have that overall policy in [00:15:00] place. And once that’s there, then you can kind of go about your business and you don’t have to be concerned to have it on the back of your mind all the time. Like, oh man, it’s our website doing this? You can feel a lot better moving forward that yes, we feel comfortable with all the things that we’re sharing and what we’re doing.
Jenny: Yeah. I just, a quick anecdote on that. I was flying to Vegas to speak at a conference. And as the plane landed, we were stuck on the tarmac for like 20 minutes. So I pulled up social media to kill some time. And as I pulled up Facebook, I was served an ad by a law firm that said, have you received care at X hospital?
If so, your information may have been shared improperly with third parties, submit this form now. And so it was real life, sort of like the, have you been in a car accident? It’s happening already. And so I think that’s just a really important consideration. Let’s kind of shift a little bit to more fun forward thinking information.
One of the reasons that I always tell people get your stuff cleared up now is number one, you don’t have to worry about and stay up at night because of the legislative landscape, but also it opens you up to do some [00:16:00] cool stuff in the future. I mean, let’s talk about a little bit about like AI marketing optimization software, and there’s some cool stuff happening right now.
Mark, what’s your POV around, you know, if the organization has already cleaned up their data and they know that they’re safe Could they be more comfortable perhaps leveraging a marketing campaign optimization tool whenever those tools are available and on the market?
Mark: Yeah, I think so. I mean, we’ve seen SHSMD had an interesting webinar series this last week that we were a part of.
And one of the groups in that, that had a talk talked about implementing an AI within your CRM, right? And having that actually help you. And so if you have that on lockdown, you go with a piece of AI that, you know, is safe and it’s just in your own Personal space, that’s something that could definitely work and can really help you kind of, level up, you know, your marketing in those cases, then there’s also situations where, yeah, with third parties, if you’re sharing data with them, or not sharing data in this case, then, you know, what’s in there isn’t any kind of [00:17:00] concerning privacy data.
So, when you share that with a tool, if you’re comfortable with that, you don’t have to really worry about some of that data getting out there, because you’ve already made sure that what you’re sharing with it is safe and good, and so there’s definitely room there, but that kind of ecosystem having a lockdown on what you’re sharing and where you’re sharing it is so important, because once you start pulling in 3rd parties, especially something like AI, which can sometimes have a mind of its own and start training and doing things on certain data.
You didn’t realize having a lockdown on what is important and what shouldn’t be shared is really good for introducing those kind of tools to your system.
Jenny: Yeah, I that’s such a great perspective and I agree with you wholeheartedly, and I’m going to end with our sixth category of potential impact and that’s really around brand positioning when it comes to privacy.
I was on site with a client last week and I was so proud of them because we started talking about the implications of this and the first thing they said to me was. Honestly, Jenny, [00:18:00] at this point, now that we know what the data holds and what we may be sharing with meta or whoever by sharing these pixels, it’s a brand promise that we have made to our patients to not share that data.
We care more about a brand promise than about an OCR fine. And I was so proud of them, because that’s the kind of organizations we love working with. And so I sent an email out to all of our clients kind of explaining our POV on this ruling and whatnot. And I kind of said, you know, maybe it’s a Pollyanna worldview, but I think it’s really valuable for a brand to be able to make that brand promise to all of their patients and consumers saying, you know, hey, even if this isn’t the law, we know what’s right and wrong.
We’re going to keep your information as safe as we possibly can. And that’s something that you can expect from us just as a tenant of our ethics and values within our organization. So, definitely something impactful.
Mark: For sure. And I, you know, I think to myself you know, you go and some [00:19:00] user signs up for a bariatric surgery and you share that data with Facebook knows that person, you know, once or needs bariatric surgery.
Like, there’s just a sense of trust there that you’ve kind of broken. Like, how did they find that information out when all I did, it was on this website. And so I agree with you. I think there is that brand promise, but there’s also just there’s kind of a feeling of, you know, GoodRx, I think is going to be all on our minds for forever because of this situation.
Right? And whether or not in that situation, you read their ruling. They didn’t know about some of these things. They didn’t realize this was happening or that was happening, but that didn’t save them in the end, right? They still had to kind of, deal with that situation at the end. So, I think now that we know about it, there’s even less reasons why you would say, oh, we’re still going to keep doing this.
We’re going to still keep doing that. Like your client you talked to mentioned, right? Once they know about it, it’s oh, well, we should be doing something about this. We should make sure that we’re caring for our patients’ privacy the same way that we do everything else. Because I think that’s where digital information is going.
I think we’re all clear [00:20:00] now. We’ve seen what happens over in Europe with GDPR. Things are getting very strict there and very specific. And I think some of the HHS guidance got us on that road, but I think there’s still more room to do and that’s what we’re seeing with state laws coming through and we’re seeing just with individuals and tech companies are allowing you to block stuff directly.
So, I mean, I think a lot of people are heading down that path. And so the more proactive you can be, yeah, the more you’re going to have your customers appreciate your brand and appreciate what you do, especially because if you can talk about that and say, hey, we’re doing this proactively. I think that makes a big deal to customers.
Jenny: Yeah. I completely agree with you. Well, thank you, Mark, so much for joining us today. I know this is an extremely complex, difficult to understand topic. If this isn’t what people do in the day in, day out, I’ve had almost a dozen people reach out to me on LinkedIn and ask if we would do it. Episode on this topic to help them digest and understand specifically because their senior leadership is asking for answers and it’s difficult to digest all the information and know those answers.
So I [00:21:00] hope for listeners, this was really helpful. I hope it helped you reframe all of the new information coming at you and allow you to create your own POV that you now feel comfortable sharing with your marketing team and senior leadership as needed. As always, if you have questions or want to pow wow about your specific situation, please reach out to us.
You can reach me at Jenny@ec2-3-80-87-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com. We’d be happy to chat with you and give just some advice and recommendations. Again, we’re very proud of the low cost solution we put on the market. Our perspective isn’t to make a ton of money off this solution. It’s really to help folks kind of put this problem behind them and get back to marketing.
But there’s also lots of other great solutions on the market, like FreshPaint. And we’re always happy to refer people over and kind of share the pros and cons. Around each approach. If that’s still an internal question you’re battling with of what is the best approach for your team and your scenario?
So as always, thank you so much for joining us on today’s episode of “We Are, Marketing Happy,” and we will see you on a [00:22:00] future episode.