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.
Back from their final conference of the year, Jenny Bristow, Shelby Auer and Julia Pitlyk of Hedy & Hopp share their highlights from the 2023 HCIC conference in Los Angeles. They discuss various sessions and speakers, including the patient privacy masterclass with Hedy & Hopp and Cincinnati Children’s, several sessions on new marketing channels for hospitals and health systems (like TikTok!), what they learned about marketing technology stacks to enable personalized patient experiences, and ways healthcare marketers can better collaborate cross-functionally. They also speak to the importance for healthcare marketers to lean into each others’ experiences, share their learnings, and work together to help healthcare marketing advance and innovate as an industry.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Shelby:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-wanne/
Connect with Julia:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpitlyk
Connect with our favorite HCIC 2023 speakers and resources:
Houston Methodist “Find A Doctor” Tool
https://www.houstonmethodist.org/find-a-doctor/
Aaron Williams, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-williams-969a4b11/
Steve Coates, Hartford HealthCare
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-coates-9565449/
Jody Ganschinietz, Nationwide Children’s
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ganschinietzj/
Callista Dammann, Nationwide Children’s
https://www.linkedin.com/in/callistaconzett/
Matthew Mader, Broward Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-mader-4092423/
Carla Rivera, Broward Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-rivera/
Val Lopez, Baptist Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vallopez/
Kier Bradshaw, MERGE
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keirbradshaw/
Linda Ho, UCLA Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindavho/
Priya Sreedharan, UCLA Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/psreedharan/
Cristal Herrera Woodley, Renown Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cristalherrera/
Alex Nason, Frederick Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-nason-b47b462/
Alec Endara, Baptist Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alecendara/
Mary Kay Boitano-Nelson, Houston Methodist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marykayboitanonelson/
Tom Price, Houston Methodist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprice/
David Feinberg, Mount Sinai Health System
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-a-feinberg-57746a5/
Chloe Politis, Mount Sinai Health System
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloepolitis/
Tara Nooteboom, UCI Health
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarajnooteboom/
Episode Transcript
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy – A Healthcare Marketing Podcast. I am Jenny Bristow. I am the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be joined again today by Julia Pitlyk, Hedy & Hopp’s Director of Marketing and Shelby Auer, one of our account managers.
Welcome ladies. So we just got back from a super, super, super fun HCIC. It was in LA this year. It was super jam packed and I’m excited to do a fun recap episode with y’all.
Julia: Yeah, absolutely. Had such a good time. So many learnings. It’s been hard to cram them all into a short little episode, but we’re going to do our best.
Jenny: Perfect. So let’s start with a brief chat about the masterclass that I did along with one of our dear clients, Aaron Williams of Cincinnati Children’s. It was a 90 minute presentation masterclass [00:01:00] specifically on HIPAA, FTC, and state laws, what you need to know now. And I feel like this is the end of our 2023 road show on privacy, but it was again, standing room only.
We had phenomenal attendance and I’m so proud of Aaron as a co-presenter about the level of technical detail he got into during not only the presentation itself, but also in the Q&A at the end. We had some really specific, technical questions that folks got into as far as the laws and how they actually were interpreted from a technical perspective and then implementation options, but he killed it.
Julia: Couldn’t agree more. You both did an amazing job. I think what’s funny about the roadshow comment, before we get to Aaron, is that we’ve been on this roadshow and the title has been what you need to know now, and the content has changed and evolved every time because this topic is changing and evolving week over week.
So I think that’s been a [00:02:00] really, it’s been fun. It’s also been crazy to continuously update that deck, I know, for you and your talking points as new points of view, as new sorts of policies and perspectives come out regarding all of these changes. So I think it’s just, it’s very interesting how much we’ve had to update this over the past couple months.
But yes, I think this is probably the session, probably because of the masterclass nature, where we had such a good Q&A, and you’re right, really, really specific questions and also really specific answers from the both of you. I love sessions where you don’t get answers that are “it depends,” which it often does depend, but Aaron, because he has gone through this journey with us, has been implementing server side Google Tag Manager, has been was able to really get specific on pros, cons roadblocks, watch outs when it comes to implementing and also provided some really great sort of philosophy on how they’re navigating privacy as a whole.
Shelby: Yeah, and I thought it was, as we were walking into the session, I know [00:03:00] that Jenny, you and Aaron were even talking about new pieces to the equation as of a week ago. And so I agree with the content constantly evolving. It just, it goes to show, even after we talked about a similar topic at the conversations that we were having with folks this time around and where they’re at in the journey even differs from just a couple months ago. And so being able to have those more in depth conversations with folks that are in, in the thick of things and trying to figure out where to go from here. Yeah. Lots of good conversation and yeah, you and Aaron did such a good job.
Jenny: Well, thank you. I think for me, it was particularly entertaining.
We had a couple of people come up to our booth afterwards later in the day or the next day and say, I feel like I finally understand technically why this is a problem and how to solve it. But then they went to another session right after and they said they could still do what a lot of the things that we [00:04:00] said you couldn’t do!
And so, I think it’s really interesting how the education and information and understanding within the industry is still evolving so quickly. And so I’m glad that we’re able to be a beacon of education, if nothing else, within the industry to help folks understand how it’s all working.
Julia: Agreed. We did a roundtable on this topic, too, during lunch, I think on Tuesday, and same, same thing. People were so grateful for just the clarity and the education and yeah, session by session, some of that clarity was becoming murky again. But, that’s where we were really able to have some rich conversations on both analytics set up, tagging and tactics.
From an activation standpoint, you had so many good questions in your masterclass around how this impacts creative. We heard a lot around: if we’re doing contextual advertising in the platform, can we put out some creative about a mammogram or a certain type of service line?
So it’s been cool to see how – cool is maybe not the right word – but how much [00:05:00] this is impacting the different aspects of marketing. I guess it’s cool to see once people get it, how they’re starting to ask deeper level questions to figure out where their guardrails are within their organization.
Shelby: And I loved there were certain individuals like digital strategists or folks who aren’t necessarily in the weeds of these conversations that attended the masterclass and were able to be like, okay, I feel like I have a better understanding and I hear what my colleagues are dealing with and I can have an educated conversation and understand why we’re going through this process.
So it was really neat to see how that education was impacting, hopefully, the future conversation teams are having.
Jenny: Absolutely. Well, let’s talk a little bit about some of the other favorite sessions that we attended. So we did a divide and conquer strategy like we do at all conferences that we attend. So, we attended a bunch, but we want to highlight a few of our favorites.
So Shelby, I know you attended the session around innovative channels for health systems, specifically talking about podcasts and TikTok [00:06:00], which is a conversation we have so often with clients and prospects. Tell me a little bit about what you learned.
Shelby: Yeah, so, honestly, I ended up attending, like, three different sessions on all of these different topics, and it was really, really interesting, one, talking about the power of podcast ads.
So, Steve, who’s the Senior Director of Marketing at Hartford HealthCare, he actually used to be a radio host back in a different life. And so he was very passionate about radio even before he got into his current role. But talked a lot about the intimacy that we’re able to achieve with radio because folks are listening to this in their homes while they’re doing chores around their house, walking, running, in their intimate time.
So you have that captive audience and that opportunity to really break through to individuals when they’re having their kind of me time. But it was interesting to hear about how podcast ads are not really being utilized to their full potential. So they [00:07:00] talked about how individuals are spending 31 percent of their media consumption time with audio, but only marketers are only spending about 9 percent of their media budget on audio on average.
So there’s a big opportunity, kind of missed opportunity there with a lot of marketing strategies to include audio in some way, shape, or form. And they also really hit on the fact that consumers trust the platform. They have some data that, like, 25 percent of consumers, if they hear an ad on a platform, on an audio platform, they’re more likely to take an action than other platforms.
And I think that’s really important because, yeah, we have our podcast hosts that we know, and we’ve learned from them, we trust them. So when they’re reading off some ads about certain products, I’m going to be more likely to go, go ahead and, and take an action or, or do some education. And they talked specifically [00:08:00] about two ways that they’ve seen this be successful for them.
One, when it becomes, when it’s, when it comes down to specific service lines. So for them, orthopedics, they’ve seen a lot of success. And they did some testing with different service lines to decide where they really should do their focus. But also when it comes to geographically, there’s a lot of opportunities to get really targeted when it comes to podcast ads.
And so if they’re launching a new service center or a new emergency department, really honing in on that geotargeting and seeing a lot of success there. So it was exciting to see what they’re doing in the podcast ad space.
Jenny: That’s super interesting. Like, I think as even, as a consumer, whenever I hear one of my favorite podcast hosts specifically talking about a product or service in my head, I just feel so there’s more vetting going through that I don’t ever see in an ad on Facebook, right?
Like the hurdle to get to that point of advertising and communication is bigger than just throwing a digital ad up online on other [00:09:00] platforms. So it’d be interesting if that is one of the sources of why there’s more trust or it’s a combination of that with the podcast host trust themselves.
Shelby: Totally. And the other big topic that was discussed again in multiple sessions was TikTok, right? TikTok and healthcare, we talk about, as marketers that like, oh, healthcare needs to get up with the times, we’re a little bit behind. And so it was really exciting to hear what different health systems are doing in the TikTok space.
And I sat in on a session with Jody and Callista with Nationwide Children talking about some of the great organic TikTok work that they’ve been doing, because specifically for them in the children’s hospital space, young parents, young moms are on TikTok, like the data is there. And so this is such an important platform for them to be on.
And in gaining trust with leadership to get buy in, it’s like if we’re not going to be there, one of our competitors will be. So we need to step up [00:10:00] and figure out how to be on the platform in an impactful way. And they took, they did this, I think, in a couple of really smart ways. One was, let’s answer, let’s figure out ways to do an Ask a Doc series.
What are the questions that parents are asking us all the time? Let’s get those questions answered in 15 to 30 seconds and roll those out. And so that’s been their bread and butter as they’ve gotten more traction has been taking that, that, patient focus of how can we get those answers to those parents that are doing research and again, becoming, earning their trust, right?
As they’re scrolling on TikTok, they’re learning, they’re, they’re being calmed by the information that they’re receiving from Nationwide Children’s. So I think that was really, really impactful. But the biggest learning I think that they shared was when it comes to TikTok, there’s opportunity to take content that performs well on another channel and move that [00:11:00] content to TikTok.
So for example, in hospitals, we’re having conversations with different systems that struggle with this, to where there’s negative perception out there. There’s negativity talking about the emergency department, right? So during a time where they were receiving a lot of negativity, they put out on Facebook, different symptoms that people are experiencing.
And should you go to urgent care? Should you go to the emergency room? Or should you see your doctor? That post on Facebook went viral, and they were not expecting it to. So they decided, okay, how do we repurpose this for TikTok? And I know you guys listening and you guys on the team have probably seen these TikToks where there’s a word above someone’s head.
And if you go in one direction… Or the other direction based on whatever it is. So for them, they were like, okay, let’s help educate on whether you should go to the emergency room or urgent care. So they had doctors in their scrubs where it’s severe [00:12:00] burn and they’re like, Oh, you gotta go to the emergency room or urgent care.
And they did this a couple of times. The first time over a million views. Second time 2.9 million views. They were like, Oh my gosh, we’re seeing such good traction from this. And so they’ve even iterated and done warm weather versions where, you know, broken bones in the summer and again, severe sunburns and They’ve just seen a lot of great success, but really spoke to also the challenges as they’ve been trying to get in a new platform, so really appreciated what they had to share.
Julia: I think that’s such a good actionable nugget of: take a topic that people need or want to know about and then adapt it to the channel, right? Like putting that exact same creative from Facebook on TikTok clearly wouldn’t have worked for many reasons, but adapting it and sort of applying a TikTok meme or motif to the same facts and things that were approved but applying them in a different creative medium and seeing that success is such a [00:13:00] cool insight.
Shelby: Yeah, and a similar thing that Broward Health, Matthew and Carla on their team are talking about TikTok. They really have some actionable insights on partnering with your video production teams when they’re working on commercials, right? You might have patients, families, staff members that have so much downtime during a full day of shooting.
And so really shadowing the video production team, getting those organic nuggets throughout the day that support the commercial efforts. So their oncology group were doing this “I Beat Cancer” series and they ended up just getting the patient to either dance or, have like the, the strong arms with just the, I beat cancer with Broward Health on TikTok.
And they, they showed it to us during the session. It was so impactful. There were, there were tears coming from the group as they were sharing these videos, but. again, just getting creative with how you’re [00:14:00] getting content. And if you’re putting a bunch of money and time into certain video production, where, how can you pull organic content from that as well?
Jenny: That is such an actionable nugget for all of us that have been on a production shoots, there is a lot of downtime, so that is such an easy, actionable thing to do. I love that. Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about marketing technology. I know both of you went to a lot of sessions around that.
Julia, why don’t you start?
Julia: Yeah, so I’ll start the first session I went to after your masterclass. I want to read the title of it. It was with Val Lopez of Baptist health and Kier Bradshaw with MERGE. It was “CRM and DXP and CDP, OMG: How Baptist Health effectively integrated technology to enable personalization.”
Like, how many buzzy, exciting words can you fit into one title? And this was a session where I felt like I was late to school because I got in like right at the last minute and could not find a seat. It was like sitting outside the door trying to hear. Some wonderful gentleman wound up giving [00:15:00] me his seat so I could actually see the slides.
So needless to say, a very, very well attended session to help marketers understand what, what are all of these different technology solutions? How do they go to work together to ultimately bring to hospitals and health systems the capability to do personalization, which is something that I think everyone aspires to achieve?
We hear that the consumer and or the patient, I’ll say those distinctively and separately, are expecting it. But how do you put all of the pieces together? Because achieving personalization, especially at scale is such a technology and data driven effort. You can put all of the right creative ideas on the table, but you cannot bring them to life in a feasible way without the right tech solutions at play.
So this was a really just a deep dive into their journey across, many, many years, really, where they started with their initial web presence, how they evolved to a digital front door, and then really this deep tech stack, [00:16:00] a lot of Salesforce technology, which we know is right for some size organizations and budgets and capabilities, not necessarily achievable for some, but they really talked about what they put together to do some of that data and behavioral driven, behavioral-driven personalization.
So, I think that my main takeaways in addition to just seeing really, for the first time, a really robustly implemented stack to drive personalization was really seeing how they were bringing things together, like call center, digital front door data, website data, CRM data, to drive that personalization.
So they were pretty particular about how they defined something like the phrase omni-channel, which we all like to throw around a lot, but it means 10 different things to 10 different people, they were really precise about how they defined that. And I think it’s, it’s cool to see what they were able to do, what they are able to do with the technology, but they also gave some great examples for how they [00:17:00] took such a big behemoth of a topic and broke it down into, the crawl walk run use cases to prioritize those use cases, sold them into leadership and started to execute. So not only was this a really good sort of technical deep dive, but also a good, strategy and stakeholder management type of discussion.
Jenny: That’s super smart. We’ve seen so many organizations try to implement CRMs and they try to fix everything at one time. And having specific use cases for sure is a way to be able to be focused in that implementation. I love it.
Julia: Yeah, absolutely. They did a great job, too. And I am sometimes guilty of this when I’m talking about a technology implementation. I want to show the back end. I want to show how the data is going to flow and do the lovely sort of Visio or Lucidcharts. They found a great learning that I want to share with our listeners is that they took the use cases that they were trying to show to support getting this technology implemented and they made them really visual and creative, almost took what that end goal was that they wanted to [00:18:00] execute.
What would a mammogram outreach campaign look like to an existing patient versus a prospective one and brought that to life. So they looked much less like technology flow charts and a lot more like creative marketing campaigns. And that they said was a big takeaway in terms of getting people to understand what the heck they were trying to do and then get that executive sponsorship.
Jenny: Oh, that is so smart. I love it. Shelby, you attended a couple as well that you had some really great takeaways. What do you have to share?
Shelby: Yeah. So I sat in a session with a couple of folks on the UCLA Health team, Linda and Priya, and they talked about a lot of similar things as the session you just described Julia, and really went in a deep dive on their tech stack, how everything is flowing, what different governance they have in place to make sure that the data is being kept safely, but they gave some very specific examples on how they have these.
always-on [00:19:00] audience journeys, one of those being something as simple as birthday emails that they send out about 2,000 a day to different folks in their system. And they get patients responding, saying, thanks so much. Like, and they, they’ve gotten really good, like about 30 percent unique open rate on those emails.
And really, again, trying to figure out ways to not only be there in an emergency for their patients, but how can we really show that we’re there for them in the everyday, in those celebratory moments, just like their birthday. But they gave a pretty in depth walkthrough of one of their audience journeys, specifically for anybody who has given birth at a UCLA Health facility.
And they really built this journey as a series of touchpoints and they treated them like the true moments that they are. So for example, they do a congrats message with also some information about [00:20:00] setting up your first peds appointment. What does that look like? The questions that parents have and they saw based on data that many parents when they left after giving birth hadn’t had their pediatrician picked out yet.
So they use that data to help build that audience journey what to expect videos that differ based on the type of birth, birth experience that you had because they realize why are we giving paper discharge instructions to these parents when they’re leaving. Like, how can we deliver that in a timely manner and in a medium that’s going to be easier for them to keep and save and share and look back on.
But again, even things like if they knew that that parent had another child at home, sending a text tip. How do you play with newborns? How do you introduce your newborn to your children at home? So really made it super personal based on again all of the work that they did in their data stack to be able to pull in information from certain [00:21:00] places and partnering with these different departments to help build out these journeys.
So they really talk to their team that is on the ground every day with these parents of what are the questions that they’re having? What are they calling and asking about? So it’s really neat to see how they built that.
Jenny: That’s awesome. I love that. So what about chatbots? I know we talked a little bit in the booth about some of the information you were hearing in sessions.
Let’s talk about chatbots.
Shelby: Yes. So there was a wonderful panel with three different folks talking about their experience with chatbots and it was very different across the board. Cristal, who was with Renown Health, talked a lot about how they first got their chatbots, a chatbot up and running and it was to help answer questions about COVID and to help fix some misinformation struggles that they were having in their community, but they’ve seen it be incredibly effective when sharing information about where to park.
Again, what are those [00:22:00] questions that individuals are calling about, asking about, and they’re having a hard time finding it on the site. Let’s make it easy for them and have it easily available in the chatbot. Alex, who’s with Frederick Health, talked a lot about how the chatbot has been effective when utilizing it to push forward new branding or messaging efforts. So incorporating the language that you’re utilizing in the chatbot to help it push forward any new kind of larger branding efforts, which I thought was a really interesting takeaway. And Alec, who’s with Baptist Health in South Florida, they have seen a lot of success in their kind of consistent iteration of their chat bot.
They’re at a 98% recognition rate with their chat bot being able to answer questions, which is amazing. And so they’re constantly looking at what unanswered questions are left trending and on the table, and how can we modify our chat bot to help really reach our patients where they’re at.[00:23:00]
Jenny: That’s awesome.
That’s is really interesting. I feel like telehealth and chatbots are two things that really came alive during COVID and now folks are really optimizing them and figuring out how to make the most out of those technologies. Julia, let’s talk about find a doc tools.
Julia: Oh, yes. So Houston Methodist, Mary Kay Boitano-Nelson and Tom Price at Houston Methodist, they gave an amazing session called How to Survive Upgrading Your Find A Doc Tool.
I heard Jackie Effenson from Houston Methodist speak about this tool a little bit at Becker’s, but this was really a deep dive, start to finish journey of them redesigning their tool. So I would say any, anybody listening that’s doing some semblance of find a doc, find a provider, anything, go to Houston Methodist, look at their tool, because the amount of user insights and the agile consumer centric approach that they took to building this really, really shines. I think it’s one of the best in class in terms of seeing how they brought insights to life to really meet, meet consumers, they said, specifically, they want new [00:24:00] patients. So they decidedly phrase them as consumers to really meet them where they are and pull them into their, to their system to find a provider, either a primary care or a specialist.
They gave a really great nugget that: sometimes where you start off with a project isn’t where you end. And they actually started off this project by taking an initiative to redesign the mobile app. And as they were doing some insights and some user research on that, it really popped that they needed to be focusing on finding a doctor first.
So I think that, that, I just, I love primary research. I love insights. And I think that that’s such a testament that if you don’t go get those insights early, you may be barking up the wrong tree or the not the best tree at this point in time. So they really carried that insight driven approach through and through.
This was a completely internally driven project, so between marketing, design and IT teams. So they spoke a lot to how they got that cross functional collaboration to really, to really hum a lot of that [00:25:00] through not treating this as they’re throwing requirements over the fence to IT, but really sitting and having a consistent steer co to drive all of these decisions they have.
Let me get my stat right. They have already seen, they’ve launched this a couple months ago, a 51 percent increase in new patient scheduling from this tool again, just in a few months of being live. So I could see how proud they were of their work. I’m so proud of it. I think it’s amazing. Amazing. And going back to Becker’s, I remember Jackie even saying that this tool is designed so well that they’re even seeing their own providers in their system using it to do referrals and fix some of that physician leakage.
So I asked some follow up questions about that. It’s definitely something that they’re, that they’re looking at from a provider referral journey and how it may be able to be replicated to serve that need, which I think is just such a wonderful testament to building something right, getting that foundation right, and then letting it scale and expand from a strong foundation. So bravo to them. I’m like a Houston Methodist [00:26:00] fan girl. I think they’re doing such a great job. I love it.
Jenny: I love it. And we’ve all done find a doc implementations and know how oftentimes within an organization, you’re just trying to do the bare minimum, right?
An organization needs one stood up. So I love that they’re at the point of organizational growth where it’s beyond that. It’s really thinking larger and bigger scale impact across the organization, but speaking of cross functional collaboration, Shelby, I know you have a couple of key takeaways on that topic.
Shelby: Yes. Yes. I sat in a wonderful session with the Mount Sinai Health System, David and Chloe on their digital marketing and social media teams talked a lot about team trust and how much they’ve had some difficulties, right? With leadership being suspicious of social media marketing, harboring doubts about the credibility and the actual impact that it has on the business.
And I love David said, this quote of “Change happens at the speed of trust.” And if you don’t have trust, your ability [00:27:00] to innovate and move and change is going to be hindered. And so that’s gotta be, if that’s not there, that’s where we need to start, right? How do we build that trust with higher leadership?
And so they talked a lot about kind of this roadmap to establish trust. But two of the big things that I think to take away or one obviously to be transparent, right, but not just about the positive, but what didn’t work, not being afraid to share with executive leadership, We tried this. It didn’t work.
This is what we’ve learned. This is how we’re adjusting. That’s how you’re going to build that trust and making sure you’re not just data dumping, right? Because data is information, but what does it mean? What point are you trying to make? Don’t just be sending over these, these numbers to higher leadership with no actual story alongside it.
So they really took that to heart. And we’re able, they developed this whole social media HQ for the internal team on Mount Sinai that talks about [00:28:00] trainings and resources about the different social media platforms that they’re utilizing, they even have courses that the teams can take and receive a certificate that’s signed by the social media team at Mount Sinai.
And so when Threads came out recently, they ended up putting together a deck that described the tool, their plan to use it, how they’re going to track it, and how they plan on iterating moving forward. And that’s how they’ve approached gaining this trust with executive leadership. But they’ve really seen this trust open doors for them.
Chloe’s team grew from just a team of one to a team of four in just a few years. They’ve really gotten that trust and it’s really, they’ve been given the opportunity to really grow and fly in averaging about 1.2 thousand social posts a month, uh, now with their team. And so they’re able to really expand the work that we’re doing, that they’re doing again, because of that trust that they’ve built with leadership.
Jenny: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. [00:29:00] And then Julia you have some insight around digital prioritization when it comes to cross functional collaboration.
Julia: Yeah. So this was a session with Tara Nooteboom of UCI Health. Love Tara. She’s a former classmate of mine, so I’m going to keep it brief because I could sing her praises for a very long time, but she gave, it wasn’t technically an HCIC masterclass, but it should have been.
She gave a complete masterclass in stakeholder management and essentially, how do you prioritize a lot of competing digital initiatives and focus on the ones that can really make an impact and bring them to life, especially in a pretty cross functional type of organization? So she’s head of consumer digital strategy at UCI Health.
Newly created role, and she mentioned a cute analogy that I think we can all relate to where, her scope is anything consumer anything digital, which is quite broad. So she said she has a lot of trick or treaters that will come knock on the door and say, Hey, can we get a chat bot? Hey, can we get [00:30:00] an XYZ pick digital thing du jour, right?
And so how, she talked to us about how did she create some structure around that to make sure that things could be prioritized in a way that wasn’t just her prioritizing, everybody could really be aligned to and they could bring the right things to life. So she gave some quick, simple tips on collaborating internally.
Define your space. So with consumer and digital, she had to get a little more specific about some of those things. She can cover anything from digital front doors to what is the right tablet to have when people are checking it, right? So she wanted to define some structure around that. Create some structure in terms of a forum.
She called them her own parties or decision groups inviting everybody. She actually emphasized over invite, make sure that you have as many people there as possible rather than having to spend the energy chasing people and back office kind of conversations. And then leveraging existing structures.
So they [00:31:00] had some internal innovation and technology resourcing practices, and she made sure that what she was building plugged into those. So it was complementary versus counterproductive. And I could go on and on. She’s just, she’s a gem. She’s awesome at what she does. So I highly recommend connecting with her, but I’ll keep it short because I know we’re pressed for time.
Jenny: And on that, I will just say for all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I know it’s way longer than our normal episodes, but there was so much valuable content shared at HCIC we just really felt it was important to give you some meaty highlights in case you were not able to attend this year.
And I will say, please check out the show notes because we are going to be linking all of the individuals that we mentioned as well as any resources, such as the find a doctor tool that we were singing praises of. So check out the show notes. And then I’ll leave you with a closing comment. One of the things that Aaron from Cincinnati Children’s mentioned at the end of our masterclass was, it’s time within healthcare to really start developing your own network of [00:32:00] folks that you can go to to do experience shares and really help lift everybody. We are not competing with each other. Many of us are in completely or many of you are in completely different geographies, different specialty service areas.
The odds of you actually competing for the same patient are relatively low. Start getting comfortable with the idea of sharing your best practices at, in a forum like mindset where you can keep in touch on an ongoing basis. I know Aaron opened up to all of the attendees and I’m sure he’d be happy to do it for all the listeners of the show.
If you’re chatting, for example, in this, it’s a specific scenario, if you’re chatting with your legal team and they have questions about why server-side tag manager works, call Aaron, give him an email, ask him about what his case was whenever he was chatting with his legal team and why it was okay. We have the ability to help healthcare leapfrog ahead if we work together in a smart [00:33:00] and strategic way.
So let’s all stop gatekeeping. All of us are in this for the greater good of the patient. So use these show recaps as a way to identify people that you want to reach out to and build a relationship with, cause I assure you all of them will be happy to accept the phone call and develop a relationship.
And that’s it for today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Thanks for tuning in and we’ll see you soon.
In part two of this series on paid media, Jenny welcomes back Hedy & Hopp’s own Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown, and Director of Marketing, Julia Pitlyk. This time, the group covers paid media strategies for healthcare marketers targeting physicians and other healthcare marketers. The group discusses the importance of providing a clinical yet compelling message in any marketing channel to capture the attention of these audiences, and also cover the specific channels that tend to reach more providers than others. Jenny, Lindsey and Julia also talk about the importance of sales and marketing teams working together to create the right provider messages and campaigns, and also provide suggestions for how both teams can map out patient journeys and provider workflows to identify the right areas to reach target audiences.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Julia:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpitlyk/
Connect with Lindsey:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseycbrown/
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 CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. And I am so excited today to do part two of our paid media strategy and planning series.
Today, we are talking about provider marketing. I’m joined today with Lindsey Brown, our Director of Activation and Julia Pitlyk, our Director of Marketing. So welcome ladies. So let’s jump right in. We just did a part one talking specifically about patient acquisition. When you’re thinking about paid media going into the new calendar year, everybody we’re talking to you right now is doing planning, even if they’re in a fiscal year, everybody is kind of revisiting their planning because of all of the shifts that have been happening related to COVID 19, consumer privacy, shifting budgets.
It really is not [00:01:00] business as usual for most of the groups that we’re chatting with. So I’d love to spend a little bit of time thinking or talking about provider marketing, specifically when it comes to paid, but overall acquisition tactics. We had a really great conversation with a new client a couple of weeks ago, and they kind of had been struggling because they had an agency that was doing all of their patient marketing. And then they were trying to just use those exact same tactics over on the provider marketing side, right? So thinking about, like, search marketing, social marketing, and it just isn’t a one to one.
So Lindsey, I would love if you could start us off by kind of doing an overview of like, psychologically, if you’re approaching a provider marketing strategy, where do you start? What’s different? How does that look like?
Lindsey: Yeah, so I think it’s always gonna start with your objectives. What are you trying to do?
So depending on what your business is, are you actually trying to get new providers or new clinicians to be part of your [00:02:00] network? Are you getting them to join a referral program? Are you getting them to refer? Many times, at least in my experience, there isn’t necessarily a specific conversion. I’m going to use those air quotes for provider marketing, because you’re not trying to capture a lead gen like you don’t already know who they are.
You already know who you’re trying to target. What you’re trying to do is get them to take an action that is not necessarily measurable. So that can be the really tricky part about provider marketing. But what that does offer is there’s a wide gamut of tactics that you can try and that you can think about as you’re moving into the planning phase.
For example, your standard digital things are going to be helpful, but one way that you would want to approach it differently is your message is going to be different. A lot of times clinicians when they’re in that mindset, and they’re thinking as a clinician and not as just a regular person, they want to see words that sound clinical.
They don’t want to use everyday words. They don’t want to see those kinds of things because that’s not going to put them in the right mindset. They want to know those clinical terms and those clinical things. [00:03:00] From like a social media perspective, they’re not consuming in social media platforms in quite the same way when it comes to their work.
A lot of us are on LinkedIn for our work, right? And then we’re on Facebook Meta or on all the other things for our personal things. And yeah, you can still target clinicians in a more personal social space, but they may not be in the right mindset or the right time to really hear that message. So think about again where, who you’re trying to talk to, how you’re trying to talk to them.
And things like LinkedIn might be a more applicable network, or maybe social media isn’t the right network for the clinicians you’re trying to talk to. A lot of them use closed social media platforms for that specific reason. So thinking about your things to that effect. Those are still things that are up for, that are applicable and available to HCPs if you’re trying to reach them, and there’s a lot of different targeting that you can do to make sure those funds aren’t wasted.
But that’s kind of where I start again, objective. What are we trying to get them to do? And then kind of build your plan around that.
Julia: Yeah, I love that, Lindsey. I love what you said about thinking about the message. And to me, provider marketing is a [00:04:00] very unique flavor of B2B because it’s still, still very user centric.
But I think the messaging there, when I think about any type of good B2B approach, no matter the industry, people that are professionals, like they want to get better at their craft. They want to get better at what they’re doing. And I think providers have that tenfold, right? They’re constantly trying to improve and learn and understand the best things that they can do to treat the patients that are on their desk today, so to speak.
And, we feel the same way when it comes to, we’re constantly learning, trying to educate ourselves so we can bring the best knowledge to our clients. So I like to try to find some of that empathy and commonality when it comes to, what is the type of content that we’re going to create and put out, be it in earned channels, paid channels and a CRM type of campaign to really help them accomplish that objective.
And I think that’s kind of unique to B2B because they’re not necessarily. scrolling through Instagram shopping for things right from a provider marketing perspective. They’re really looking to get educated and get better. [00:05:00] So I think the more, to your point, the more kind of clinical points of view and types of educational information that marketing plans can bring to the table, the more they’re going to resonate with the provider audience.
Lindsey: Something else I would love to bring up is just how sales and marketing really need to be working really closely together when it comes to provider marketing because salespeople are still going to be kind of the number one seller of your product or of what you’re trying to achieve.
And so if they’re in the hospital with you, the message that they are telling to those clinicians should be the same message that they’re hearing in your non personal tactics or in your other marketing tactics so that they’re hearing the same message and they’re really understanding again how you are coming to the table to educate them, make their lives better and make their patients lives better and just making sure that there’s really good cohesion between those two functions.
Julia: Totally agree. That’s a such a good point.
Jenny: It really is. I would love to chat about, this has been a really fun conversation that we’ve had specifically around our clients that are doing HCP marketing right now, is really identifying: Is it the [00:06:00] physician that’s the decision maker, or is it actually the nurse practitioner or the office manager?
Like, who are we talking to within the physician office that’s actually going to begin driving referrals, introducing the service of the product, service, whatever. How do we have a really, like, we have cool processes and ways that we approach this. So I’d love Lindsey, if you could talk a little bit, like, how do you figure out who that right person is and what does that look like?
Lindsey: So typically where we would like to start is in some kind of a patient journey, because understanding how your patient interacts or gets to your service or product at the end of the day and all those decisions they make leading up to it is really beneficial. I think you brought up a really great point of, a lot of times, we want to reach out to the doctors themselves, the physicians themselves, but many times it’s going to be the nurse practitioner. It’s going to be the physician’s assistant. It’s going to be a variety of other clinical support staff that are going to be interacting with your patient.
A really good example of that is when you’re pregnant. Like you were talking to a lot of people when you are pregnant.[00:07:00] And then when you actually go into have said child you are interacting with a whole slew of other people that you’ve never met before, but you are, as a new mom, I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing.
I will take help from any single person in this hospital right now to help us figure out what we are doing with this new tiny baby. So you have to really think about what are all of those touch points because that is an opportunity to not only help show up, help your brand show up in multiple ways, but also to reinforce those key messages and the key benefits of what your service and what you provide.
And I think really thinking about all of those things are important. And not to discount that support staff is really the ones that usually your patients are going to be listening to more. They tend to be in there a little bit longer. They tend to have more interaction with you. They tend to have more quality interaction with you.
They’re like your first touch point for the doctor comes in the office. So I think that kind of that thinking about those additional staff members are going to be really helpful. And then thinking about how your budget that needs to split to make sure you’re supporting them.
Julia: Yeah, [00:08:00] I love that.
I think starting with that patient journey is critical and then almost layering in, and we do this a lot, is okay, What is the workflow amongst the provider and all of the support staff supporting that patient journey, like you said, all of those different touch points, but kind of what’s going on behind the scenes? Because especially if you’re working with provider offices, different clinics, different offices, they’ve got a workflow that maybe they would always want to be more efficient, but they’ve got their processes at least to a degree of a well-oiled machine. So understanding that I think is so key for both sales and marketing. And I think that’s a point where sales often being in that physical location can bring a lot of insight back to marketing and create a good dialogue, I think is really critical because, marketing may be creating, we’ll get very analog here, but they may be creating leave behinds or brochures or things that are going to wind up in the back table of a clinic based off of how it’s set up. So I think there’s a degree of workflow personalization when it comes to bringing [00:09:00] marketing into the clinic or the physical location that needs to be considered.
Jenny: Absolutely. And I think it would be kind of to bring it back specifically around paid and execution there, it’s a completely different set of platforms that are in consideration, right? You talk specifically about closed social channels, one of the big things that we’ve seen over the last, I guess, five years is physician or specialty specific social channels popping up, right?
A general social media platform or like physician specific platform is beneficial. But if you’re wanting to learn more about your specific practice area, that’s where clinicians are more likely to spend their time. And I think going with and having conversations with a group that can actually kind of introduce those concepts to you and help do a little bit of research is really beneficial, especially if you’re trying to revamp your provider marketing and be more, be a little bit more targeted going into 2024.
One question again, I hate the dreaded P word privacy, but yeah. Folks that are doing B2B marketing don’t have [00:10:00] to be as concerned about it? Right? Like they don’t have to be as worried. ’cause HIPAA really isn’t applying. Exactly. You’re nodding your head. I see that side to side, Lindsey, break it down.
They still have to care, right? Like, talk to me about this.
Lindsey: They still have to care what? What? They don’t have to worry about as much as the PH, the H in the PHI. Right. But there’s still personal information and FTC is fairly clear. I won’t say 100 percent clear because none of these guidances are 100 percent clear, but they’re fairly clear that any human that is interacting with you digitally and providing you any kind of information, including your personally identifiable information, your name, any of that stuff.
You still have to be very thoughtful about how you are collecting that, how that is being shared back. And ensuring that it’s not being shared back specifically with those third parties. So making sure that you are having your forms go to a closed CRM and that you’ve got some kind of a service agreement in place with that CRM to ensure that data never leaves their offices or their [00:11:00] servers, so to speak, those kinds of things are going to be really important.
And so that’s really important. Even the pixels that we’ve talked about on the patient side of things, those can still be constituted as, or be considered sharing information back. So you still want to be really careful and thoughtful about how you use those.
Something that we haven’t talked a lot about though is when you are targeting providers you, a lot of times you can target them by their NPI number. And so that’s not really something that has come up a lot in our conversations like is that personally identifiable? Is it not? My point of view is that it’s still is personally identifiable because every single clinician has a unique number. That’s how you know who they are. So those numbers also are included and need to be a little bit, need to be handled with care. And that includes using those kinds of lists to retarget or target them outside of, again, your CRM programs.
Jenny: And I think it’s really important to also note something that some groups we’ve chatted with say, Oh no, we’re just B2B. It doesn’t matter. Well, there’s a lot of consumer focused messaging on the website, right? Maybe you sell through a [00:12:00] provider, but if you have consumer or patient related educational materials and maybe a contact form for them to reach out.
Then you still have to have the same level of care and consideration, even if you are not a covered entity. So I think I don’t want to go down the privacy rabbit hole, but just wanted to share that like it does not give you an ability to just go back to the old ways of doing targeting and marketing and tagging and whatnot, just because you’re not a covered entity.
Julia: Okay, I want to go in the rabbit hole just for a minute. Let’s do it. I want to go in the rabbit hole briefly because I do think, when we’re talking about, Lindsey, such a great point on the NPI and that’s great data to have and data to maybe model with and you can activate on it, but I think to your point, you really have to be privacy forward when you do it. And my hypothesis with a lot of these privacy guidelines that are coming out both in the healthcare space, the HIPAA space, healthcare adjacent, and just general consumer, I think that a privacy [00:13:00] forward type of approach is going to become part of a branding approach for a lot of organizations, be them healthcare or otherwise. So for me, if I am a provider and I am being targeted in some ways that maybe feel shady, inauthentic, questionable at best, and you’re marketing something to me that I’m then going to use and apply to my patients, it’s going to make me think pretty hard about what you’re going to do with the data from my patients that I’m using, referring to you or ordering a product from before. So I think that we’re going to see this privacy conversation bleed a bit into a brand positioning conversation as well. And so I would just encourage B2B HCP focus brands to really think about that when it comes to how they treat their provider audiences.
Jenny: Oh, that’s smart and accurate. We’ve already seen so many articles be published based off of fines that organizations have been levied based off of inappropriate [00:14:00] collection and handling of data, and you can bet if as an individual, whether I am an HCP consumer or whatever, if I Google the company name and the first thing that comes up is they were hit with a huge fine for mishandling of data, that definitely would give me pause when doing business with the organization. So great point.
Ladies, anything else about provider marketing that we want to touch on before we wrap up today?
Lindsey: I would just reiterate something that we talked about in the patient, in the patient segment is creative is still going to be really important with these folks.
A lot of times what we see with health care companies targeting HCP is it tends to be pretty direct and not always the most exciting and informative. You can still use clinical language and clinical imagery and things to that effect in a creative way that is engaging. And that helps a lot. Again, stop people in their tracks to pay attention.
So I would just encourage agencies not to discount the creative aspect with these folks either.
Julia: Ooh, I love that. Clinica, yes, but also stopping, grabbing [00:15:00] attention, I think is huge and a fun, creative challenge too. I love that. I think the thing that I’ll leave with is especially when it comes to paid tactics, thinking about layering those on top of things that are already in your sales and marketing calendar, specifically like congresses, conferences, events coming up. How can you use paid to amplify your presence? Or I like to say like your surround sound leading up to that event, during that event, after that event. I think that’s a great way to be really mindful of paid budget, too, is say, we’re going to spike it around these events where parties are already happening with providers and we don’t have to kind of create our own and really get some some benefit and some efficiencies there.
Jenny: I love that. There’s such an opportunity to test and iterate, right? Just because we’re talking on the HCP, I feel like on the HCP side, for some reason, people don’t think about the same level of testing and iteration that they do on the patient acquisition side. And so just like you said on the last episode, Julia, like having a portion of your budget set aside for testing and [00:16:00] understanding what’s working and not working is just as equally as important here.
Ladies, thank you so much for joining us today. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re struggling with your provider marketing strategies, give us a call. We would love to brainstorm with you and help provide some guidance about where you should be thinking going into 2024 so that we are able to more effectively spend those dollars.
Thanks for tuning in today. We will see you on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Take care.
In part one of a two-part series on paid media, Jenny welcomes Hedy & Hopp’s own Director of Activation, Lindsey Brown, and Director of Marketing, Julia Pitlyk. Together the group discusses what healthcare marketers should consider when planning their paid media strategies from 2024. They focus on how to balance awareness building and lead generation objectives in a media plan, the merits of paid social and exploring creative formats to tell a compelling brand story, considerations around patient data privacy in paid media tactics, and how to develop robust measurement plans for paid campaigns. Jenny, Julia and Lindsey also provide recommendations on how teams can conserve some of their 2024 media budget for experimental channels and tactics.
Connect with Jenny:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
Connect with Julia:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpitlyk/
Connect with Lindsey:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseycbrown/
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 CEO and owner of Hedy & Hopp. a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency, and I am so excited today to be joined by two fabulous members of the Hedy & Hopp team.
We have Lindsey Brown, who is the Director of Activation and Julia Pitlyk, who is Hedy & Hopp’s Director of Marketing. Welcome ladies.
I am so thrilled to jump in today. We’ve been talking so much about privacy, it feels really good to change gears. One of the things that our team gets really excited about is thinking about patient acquisition efforts.
And we’ve been having lots of conversations about paid media strategies going into the new calendar year, whether folks operate on a fiscal or calendar, everybody’s still thinking about a fresh start going into January. And so I wanted to pause and really spend a little bit of time with y’all talking specifically about paid [00:01:00] media and what a patient acquisition marketing mix should look like right now.
So Lindsey, I’d love if you’d kick us off just talking a little bit about where our clients heads are at and kind of the conversations you’ve been a part of what folks are thinking about right now.
Lindsey: Absolutely. So a lot of our clients are obviously in the planning stages. And so they’re thinking about “What do we need to change for next year?”
Obviously they’re making some changes because of privacy, which we won’t get into too much on this call. But they’re really thinking about how do we get more leads? How do we get out to more patients? And the first thing that they always think about is “What are those channels that are producing the best ROI from us from a lead perspective?”
So they go straight to the things like paid search that are really great at generating those leads. And there’s a really great way to, to attribute that to a paid search campaign, for example. The problem is with paid search, it is, it’s like a demand, it’s a demand platform. So you’re only going to get the people that are already interested.
So what we’ve been talking with our clients about is really thinking about what are those things that you need to do to build [00:02:00] up awareness and build up interest and consideration in your products and services so that when they’re ready to start searching and they’re ready to start moving forward, you’re going to capitalize them in your search campaign.
So that’s kind of where the conversations have gone.
Julia: Yeah. I love that, Lindsay. I think about that all the time in terms of what are the right paid channels that are about demand creation, right? That’s where we tend to look at awareness and some consideration. But then, yes, paid search is so wonderful for that demand capture of someone. Think about what they’re putting in the search bar, right?
Their zip code plus whatever condition they’re looking to treat. That’s the place that absolutely our clients want to make sure that they show up. But I think the planning phase is a great portion to say, okay, where do we need to pull up a little bit and think about that demand creation?
Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. So things like making sure your message is out in front of more people, making sure that partnerships that you have available and it’s not just a paid media thing, although paid media is really going to help you with that. It can help you with the volume. It can help you control sort of where that message is, how you spend that budget.
Media is perfect at that, [00:03:00] but there’s still other ways you can get that message out, right? You’ve got your earned efforts that you do through your PR. You’ve got owned efforts through email marketing and email communication and that kind of thing. But paid media really is going to help you sort of, expand sort of your existing ecosystem and give you a little bit more control over where you’re putting your dollars in your efforts to start to see those results come in through that funnel.
Jenny: I would love to hear both of your thoughts about how paid social plays into the patient journey and when it’s appropriate versus when it may not be, whether we’re thinking about brand marketing at a high level or service line or provider specific. What are your thoughts?
Lindsey: You want to go 1st? I can go 1st.
So from a paid social perspective, it’s a good question because there are so many social platforms. Five, 10 years ago, we were thinking about, Oh, it’s just Facebook. And then, okay, it’s Twitter. And then, okay, see, those are things. Now there’s a million different paid social platforms. So I think first and foremost, you want to make sure that the platforms that you’re in is actually where your audience is.
So a lot of [00:04:00] times our clients will just say they want to be in Facebook because they have a Facebook account, but maybe their audience actually isn’t active on Facebook, and they’re more Instagram people. They’re more TikTok people. They’re more Snapchat type people. Just kind of depends on who you’re looking for.
So you want to make sure number one, that you’re going to find your audience there in order to return that and get those better results and performance from your campaigns. But I think that paid is really supplemental to your overall social efforts. And this is also something I think that marketers kind of end up siloing a little bit.
We’ve talked about on previous podcasts where just because it’s the paid team that’s running that show doesn’t mean that’s it’s in a silo with what you’re doing with your social efforts overall. So if you want to have a paid social campaign, first and foremost, you have to have some sort of social presence because you want to gain some traction with your potential followers or your potential patients, potential customers and then those paid efforts can kind of.
And get them to do something else, like get them to your site to sign up for something, get them to your site to download an application or something like that, that organic efforts may not [00:05:00] really do. So you have to think about it in what you’re doing from an organic and owned perspective, and then using social or paid part of that to help supplement those efforts and drive to an actual action.
I don’t know. Julia, what do you think? What are your thoughts?
Julia: Yeah, I totally agree. And I love paid social from really sort of that awareness and, again, I’m going to probably say this a million times, that demand creation standpoint and, to go back to your question, I think it can work from sort of an overall, let’s say we’re talking about a hospital or health system, some overall awareness, but I think you can also talk to it from a service line specific type of demand creation.
My challenge to our clients and I think a challenge when you’re getting into planning mode to think about is how can you really get creative with the creative formats that paid social channels are allowing you to play with these days compared to something like paid search where it’s pretty darn limited. It’s a lot of text based, you got to really play back those keywords in, have some of those dynamic sort of search ads going on.
Paid social really allows [00:06:00] you to storytell. You can storytell through, wonderful static imagery and copywriting. You can storytell through some really creative short form video.
There’s so many ways to really get some more of that emotion, which health care is rich with, again at the overall level or at the service line level and really reach people and start to stick in their mind. So I really encourage, especially if you’re trying to tell a really emotional or really compelling story, to lean hard into paid social and your media plans.
Lindsey: Yeah, totally agree. I love that. That it’s like it can be more creative. You can be more creative. And especially as we’re talking specifically about patient acquisition, you’re talking to real people and real consumers. And so they want to see things that are interesting and relevant to them, things that kind of make them stop and think.
The long scroll is a real thing. We do it for hours and hours a day. You’ve got to find a way to cut through that. And so using social media in that way is really beneficial. And then again, from a paid perspective, it allows you to kind of broaden your net, [00:07:00] increase your user base, and then drive to more specific actions.
You can start to see some really great results.
Jenny: I love that. That’s a great kind of thought process of how to combine the two together and stand out. I hate to use the privacy word, but I feel like we have so many podcasts talking about this and we are not a privacy agency, but we have become experts in it.
So one of the things we’ve been counseling a lot of our clients on as they head into the new year is how they can continue doing a lot of the tactics they were doing before with patient privacy and consumer privacy front of mind. So specifically what I’d love to hear from y’all, overall, we’re saying don’t stop digital just because of everything that’s going on.
This is not a directive to go back to traditional mailers exclusively and billboards. We can still do digital. I specifically want to talk about social media targeting and the new rule of not really feeding the beast. So I’d love if, Lindsey, if you could give just a concise explanation of how can you still do [00:08:00] social and targeting effectively yet still be complying with all of the new privacy guidelines?
Lindsey: Yeah, I will try to be concise. I have a hard time being concise sometimes, I’m going to do my best. All right. So, from a social media specific perspective a lot of that feeding the beast comes from using things like targeting lookalike audiences. So that’s what we called feeding the beast. In social media, that is one way it’s a really, it’s a simple way to be able to optimize in real time your marketing efforts, right?
But if we don’t have the pixels on the site because we know that’s a not compliant way to move forward and we want to cut those off, that means that there really isn’t that learning that’s going on specifically from users on your site. There’s still learning that’s going on within the platform itself.
So, for example when we talked about, Julia talked about, storytelling a little bit earlier, one way that you can leverage something like Facebook and storytelling and still get to better targeting without using your site visitors or your site data is to just [00:09:00] retarget within the Facebook platform.
Let’s say you have a series of videos. You want to tell a four step process or a four step story, excuse me. And you start with your first one. And then those that have seen the first one, now you can target them with the second video. And then you can target with the third video. Now you start to, like, build in more of that story and you can do that all within the platform itself without having to use a pixel, without having to use any data from your website.
So there’s still ways to get more targeted within those platforms to leverage the targeting capabilities within the platform itself. They’re all available without the pixel. Sometimes I really think that those pixels are, like, helping those platforms more than they’re actually helping marketers because they’re learning more than really we’re learning as marketers.
So, I really think that again, you can stick to what’s available within the platform. And some of those platforms do have really great ways to target depending on what your audience is and what you’re trying to achieve.
Jenny: So for example, let’s say that a provider is trying to target for mammography campaigns, they’re doing a free [00:10:00] breast exam through the month of November.
You can use the Facebook or the Meta targeting to target women over the age of 40 that live within your zip codes, right? That’s the kind of stuff that is still available that I think a lot of folks are just thinking is off the table. Like, Oh, we can’t do any targeting anymore. We just have to like spray and pray, like the old school marketing.
Right. Like that’s not how it is anymore. Like you, you can still do targeting just using Facebook’s targeting situations, Julia thoughts.
Julia: Yeah, I agree. I think what is off the table is sort of what healthcare marketers were doing when it came to the classic example, like the abandoned cart retargeting ad, right?
If somebody clicked through from a Facebook ad to a service line web page and almost filled out that form, but didn’t quite, retargeting to come back and schedule an appointment like that from your own website’s data is off the table, right? But when it comes to retargeting based off of the click on that ad, which is [00:11:00] data native in that Facebook platform, that’s still okay.
So I think for me, it’s been really helpful to look at that entire end to end journey from the first introductory piece of content or ad we want to put out to a user of a specific target. Jenny, just like you spoke to, women over the age of 40. What are the stories, what are the messages we want to tell them throughout and then map out a layer underneath?
Like, what are the data signals that we will need to get from where in order to power that journey in paid social or in other paid media campaigns? And then as you do that, there’s going to be a couple that are now off the table, like sending that data from your website back to Facebook. But I think you’ll find that there’s still plenty more on the table from native targeting and retargeting within the platform than you may think when you’re grappling with some of these new privacy guidelines.
Jenny: I love that. That’s helpful. Anything else that either of you want to share that we haven’t touched on yet, thinking about patient acquisition brand awareness and kind of heading into the new calendar year.[00:12:00]
Lindsey: So one thing I do want to bring up is I think the measurement piece. So, Julia, you peaked it perfectly, like you’re looking at certain data signals to understand where people are, understand then how to modify or optimize within that platform. So, again, measurement also is not off the table. You can still measure all of the efforts of your marketing.
It just may not be as necessarily seamless or all within Google Analytics or all within one place. You’ll have to probably bring it in a little bit piecemeal, but there’s still absolutely possible to understand how users are engaging with your content, how they are moving forward in a pipeline, how your things are helping to drive that forward.
And so again, not completely off the table, just might take a little bit of additional upfront work and thinking of how you’re going to do that, but it’s absolutely possible.
Julia: I love that, and I’ll leave my parting thought with what everybody loves to talk about in media planning and planning season, which is budget.
And we know from talking to a lot of our clients budgets are flat at best, if not decreasing slightly. [00:13:00] But then there’s also: do brand awareness, market these new service lines, let’s experiment in a couple other channels. Like how do you grapple with a flatter or shrinking budget and all of these different objectives?
One of the things that I’ve found successful, especially with working with leadership who maybe has new ideas about new channels or things that they want to test and learn is take a classic kind of 80/20, or maybe even 90/10 model when it comes to your budget. Make sure you’re allocating as much as possible within reason to the channels that work.
Ideally, you know that they work because you have some really great measurement plans like Lindsey just spoke to. And make sure you siphon off a little bit, 20 percent, 10 percent, to be intentional about experimenting in some of these channels. That’s a strategy I found really helpful when you want to innovate, but you also don’t have an infinite amount of funds to do so.
Jenny: I love that. That’s such a great strategy. And I think I would just like, like to leave it that if there’s anyone out there that’s listening to this and you are kind of feeling the [00:14:00] pressure of going into a new year with a flat budget and all these privacy concerns, reach out. Chat with us. We have set up all of our clients are still getting full conversion reporting for all of their media plans in a compliant way.
It is possible. And so if you’re still kind of grappling with that, you don’t have full tracking in place, you are struggling getting reports to leadership. Call us. We’d love to chat with you. And with that, we are going to be doing another episode talking specifically about provider marketing.
So if you are a marketing team that is responsible for both patient acquisition and provider marketing, or if you’re provider marketing specific, look for part two of the series and tune in to hear more about media planning for providers. And with that, thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy.
We’ll see you soon.