Jenny: Hi friends, welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a Healthcare marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy and Hopp, a full-service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited today to have with me Sarah Cutcliffe. Sarah is Hedy and Hopp’s new Director of Epic Services. We are so excited to have her join us, and she’s going to be joining us at SHSMD this coming weekend.

So we wanted to do a quick little podcast episode for those of you that are attending SHSMD, it’ll give you a little bit of context about who we are, who Sarah is, what we’re going to be talking about so you can come prepared and excited. And if you’re going to, unfortunately, miss SHSMD, you’ll get a little bit of an understanding about what is happening and be able to connect with us.

If there’s anything that we’re going to be talking about that you won’t be able to hear in person. So first of all, Sarah welcome so much. We are so excited to have you join Hedy and Hopp. You’ve been here for a few months now. Really enjoyed having you integrate with the team. Let’s kick off by having you talk a little bit about your background and how you fell into this world of Epic expertise.

Sarah: Yeah, well, the excitement is the same on my side. I’m super jazzed to have joined Hedy and Hopp. I’m excited to be meeting everybody, both from our team here at Hedy and Hopp, as well as all of our friends at SHSMD and beyond. My Epic background, when you say I fell into this, it literally was that.  I’m going to date myself.

I put my resume on Monster.com after grad school. And Epic reached out to me the next day and said, hey, would you like to apply? And I had no idea what Epic was at that time. I did know that I had friends who lived in Madison, Wisconsin, so I took the interview. And now I’m looking back almost 20 years later and can’t believe that this has turned into my career.

But I started at Epic as a revenue cycle trainer, so I got to teach people how to use the software. It was an incredible experience. Once I left Epic, I ended up in healthcare consulting, and it really gave me a great new perspective of understanding how Epic customers actually use Epic. There’s a big difference, and Jenny.

I think you know what this difference feels like, between this is a software and how can we use it? And then looking at how customers actually use it, what is functional, how do we achieve our goals using this incredibly powerful tool? So I was able to work for several healthcare systems across the country, both as a trainer.

And then I moved into the analyst space. So I was doing the build and working with my internal operational teams to make sure that Epic did the things that they needed. And my most recent role was at Hospital for Special Surgery. I was the Director of Performance and Optimization, and I was able to take really complex projects and bring them to life in Epic.

So across many different teams, I was able to bring people together and execute on like pretty hard and, not always the most fun, stuff but we were able to put together some really, wonderful and impactful projects, like enabled paperless billing for the hospital. We were able to retool, our we had no, “no show late cancellation” policy, for example, and we were able to execute on that.

So my background is really understanding Epic, being able to talk to operational teams, marketing teams, understand what they need and then be able to translate that in how it can be executed using Epic. And anybody who’s dipped their toe in the Epic world, you know that it has its own language, its own teams, its own processes.

I’m very familiar with what those are, and I think that I’ll be able to bring that knowledge to Hedy and Hopp and be able to help us, be able to support clients as they navigate using this new tool in the marketing space.

Jenny: You already have, Sarah. Teams and clients have already spoken so highly about working with you. At this point we’re working with systems across the country, helping them leverage and understand marketing analytics and marketing automation tools that are available. And so being able to have somebody that actually understands the vocabulary, terminology, how to ask for something, using the right language, it’s really a gamechanger in helping our clients move a lot faster and more confidently navigating those conversations.

So, so excited to have you on board. We are very excited about SHSMD. We are doing an hour and a half long lunch session on Sunday. The title of the session is from Access to Action Turning Epic into a Growth Engine for Health Care Marketing. And if you are not yet registered, I am sorry to say it is sold out.

This was a registration required event and it sold out very, very early. So that’s really exciting. We are in the works of planning a webinar repeat. So if you are attending SHSMD and aren’t able to go, or if you are not going to SHSMD and you’re having FOMO, keep an eye on our socials will be announcing a link to be able to register for a free webinar for a repeat, but we’re really going to be about all of the different analytics and data tools that exist within the Epic tool suite, and how to use that to be able to measure and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way.

So very excited to dig into it. One of the things that I’m most excited about is we’re leaving about 30 minutes for Q&A, because whenever we did our Summer School Webinar Series, there were so many questions submitted, we had to do follow up emails to respond to all of the questions because we just ran out of time. So with this session, we’re really allowing a lot of time for folks to be able to dig in, ask questions, really understand the material in a meaningful way before they head home.

So, should be pretty fun.

Sarah: So I’m excited that it is on Sunday, because that gives us an opportunity to be able to talk through those questions over the next few days of SHSMD as well.

Jenny: I completely agree. I, one of my favorite things about presenting at conferences in the first day or two, is being able to have folks be able to come to our booth, schedule lunches, coffee. So we’ll just have one-on-one and talk about their implementation questions or their tactical questions related to the content that we presented.

So I completely agree. It should be fun. Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about, kind of what you are excited about with SHSMD, what you’re looking forward to. This is the first time you have gone to SHSMD, right? So yes, I’ve not gone to an industry event that is focused on marketing before, so this will be new to you.

So what are you interested in?

Sarah: I’m really excited to learn more about how Epic can fit into this space overall, and meet needs of our, like, future clients or any health care systems. I’m also excited to meet people. I’m a people-person I like really feed off of getting to know people. And because this is my first like marketing for a, I get to meet a lot of new people, which I, I know I’m really gonna enjoy, but I also am excited to see, what health care systems are there because I have a pretty wide experience.

I have a suspicion that I’m going to actually meet people that we’re connected based on where I’ve already been before, or people that I know who work at different systems. So really jazzed for people. Also, I went to grad school in Maryland, so crab cakes, baby. I’m jazzed to grab some good seafood when we’re in the Baltimore area.

Jenny: Same. I am so excited. That will definitely be a highlight. Yeah, so. Well, thank you everybody for tuning in. We are very much looking forward to SHSMD. Sarah, we are so excited to have you join us in person. So clients will be able to meet you in person. And then folks in the industry can start chatting with you about your POV and how we are bringing all of these tools to life for systems.

Sarah: Yeah. Can’t wait.

Jenny: Awesome. Well, thank you for tuning in to this week’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy! Share this episode with anyone you know that will be attending SHSMD. Be sure and stop by our booth. We have a very uniquely handmade backdrop this year as Hedy and Hopp often does, we’re bringing the vibes. So swing by to be able to check it out, as well as some super fun swag that we are known for that you will love wearing around the conference.

So thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you next week on another episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers. Bye.

Jenny: Hi friends! Welcome to today’s episode of We Are Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I’m your host Jenny Bristow, and I’m also the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp, a full service, fully healthcare marketing agency. I am so excited to be coming to you fresh out of SHSMD 2025. Our team had so much fun at this conference, and so we’re going to use today’s episode as a recap.

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

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

Brenda: Hi! 

Marissa: Thank you! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers!