Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder Managing Director here at BWG Connect are giant networking, knowledge sharing group 1000s organizations. And we do exactly that we networking knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, whatever it might be that shaping a lot of what's happening in digital and Marketing. Today, I spend a lot of my time talking to organizations, when the same topics come up over and over again, we host an event like this. So a couple of things, housekeeping items we get started is we're kicking this conversation off three to four minutes after the hour. And just you know, we're gonna wrap it up with three to four minutes left in the hour as well, we're gonna give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other thing is want to be as educational and informational. So we've got a lot of questions that have come in ahead of time. So do you have other questions along the way, feel free to drop them in the chat, I can enable that or the q&a, we try to get as many of those as possible. And with that, you know, I kind of want to kick it off. Tom, you've been a great friend partner support of the network for a while now. You know, is we kind of tackle this, you know, the topic today how marketing political operations can collaborate for patients and success. I don't mind you jumping in and just kind of giving a brief intro on yourself and the housing group. And then you can kick it over to Karen and Sue, and then we'll kick off the conversation. Sounds good.

Tom Hileman 1:30

Sounds good. Thanks, Aaron. It's a pleasure to be here again. And I think that this is an area that we're really passionate about, I think the best. The best solutions in healthcare come when we work in collaborative teams, and nothing's more important than clinical in terms of serving our patients. And obviously, Marketing and Communications is important in getting folks there. So our organization helps marketing departments and health systems and providers, connect with patients and physicians, and I think this is a really good topic. So look forward to digging deep in with it. Karen, I'll kick it to you first, introduce yourself.

Karen Stone 2:00

Thanks, Tom. Hello, everyone. I'm so delighted to be here today, I lead the business engagement strategies team at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. And I've been at VUMC for about five years and came in to do some pretty innovative work, business to business and business to business to consumer work. My team works collaboratively with the VUMC stakeholders, both clinical and non clinical on value based models of care bundles being one of them. And there's some pretty exciting things that we've been doing on our team to use digital tools to be able to derive new pathways to existing revenue and new pathways to new revenue new for the medical center. So it does boil down to collaboration, as Tom just said, so excited to talk with you all today about how we're doing some of the work that we're doing at the VUMC. Sue

Sue Omari 2:55

Hey, thanks, Karen. Thanks, Tom. Aaron, really appreciate being here today with everybody. I'm Sue Omari. I'm the Executive Director of Marketing Account Services at Cleveland Clinic. And boy, Karen, you said a collaboration Tom Aaron, that is the watchword you really can you can be in marketing without being a good collaborator, and our team marketing Account Services, I would say we really feel that probably as much as any or more than any team at Cleveland Clinic. So our team works with every institute every facility to help them achieve their business objectives. And we work mostly in a paid, owned and earned model. And it's just it's such a challenge, but made much easier because we have such collaborative teams. And I know we're going to talk a little bit about structure, but you just can't You can't do this job without being collaborative.

Tom Hileman 3:47

Aaron I think you're muted.

Aaron Conant 3:57

Yep, I was saying, I think you just got a great place to start, which is around, you know, the structure of the marketing department. Do you mind jumping in sharing a little bit and then carrying it into here, as well?

Sue Omari 4:09

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Aaron would love to. So as I mentioned, we're a marketing and accounting services and my team, but we have the great privilege and pleasure to work with the way Marketing and Communications is organized at Cleveland Clinic is around subject matter areas. So there's teams and every subject area. So but the kind of broad brush would be, you know, big teams around content, creative services, that's the work, you know, that's the output work. Our team is, you know, fairly significant as well because we are where the rubber meets the road. We're working with every institute we're working with hospitals we're working with, to a lesser degree outpatient, outpatient facilities, but we rely heavily on subject matter teams. In the own space. We have our corporate communications team that's both internal external No, of course, the PR. And as I mentioned, big emphasis on content generation, and of course, our paid tactics as well with advertising. So we really, when we approach our marketing, we almost always get that color. The one of the first things we do in marketing kind of services, is we get our teams together, across our division in, we kind of look at, like, what are the pay down dinner and strategies that we're going to tackle for this particular challenge. And so we are organized and very much as subject matter teams. 

Aaron Conant 5:35

Awesome Karen. And I'd love to hear like, how do you structure the marketing group.

Karen Stone 5:38

So my team is really, I would describe us as a special unit within the marketing department. So our marketing department is very large and very similar to what Sue was describing and a very much service line driven, we're doing many of the things that Sue mentioned. But the team that I'm on specifically is a unit that's embedded within the broader strategic marketing department. And we support the Office of Population Health. And we're really looking at what I said earlier, those new pathways to new revenues were were very an existing revenue, we're really looking at innovation and kind of as a driver. And in many of the things that we're doing are even kind of outside the norms of what the what provider organizations will do so. So some of its in a pilot phase. And, again, it's very collaborative. And we're working from a product development standpoint, all the way to delivery and amplification, creating that awareness and driving traditional marketing lead generation for employers to engage with us and then activating employer contracts, marketing into the employees so that they become aware of the solutions that the employers are bringing Population Health Solutions, they're bringing to, you know, to the VUMC as a provider of those services. So it's pretty exciting. It's very different. And, you know, like I said, we still operate within the the broader marketing department, because many of the service lines that we're packaging into bundles also have an impact on the volumes of the traditional service lines, like maternity, for example. So it's really, you know, we're doing using a full slate of digital tools to do our job. They're in our marketing principles, but we're leveraging them in kind of a different way against product development, product marketing, and really thinking about traditional kinds of marketing pathways to make, make people aware of these solutions that we are helping to create and deliver.

Aaron Conant 7:55

It sounds like you are a you in the conversation like you deal with a lot of different organizations, what do you what do you see in this space as a whole? And feel free? To bring in Karen into your questions as well?

Tom Hileman 8:06

Sure, no, and how Cleveland Clinic is organized and the and the larger marketing departments VUMC, a very similar department, subject matter expertise based kind of skills based is what I call it is really putting people who create content, people who create to do the demand activations, the advertising and kind of groups of those folks. So that's a pretty traditional model. Actually, VUMCs is interesting that they move b2b marketing in side of the of the broader marketing team, a lot of organizations have b2b marketing in a different area of the organization. That's, yeah, that's what you have. And actually, many other ones do as well. And it's it brings some unique synergies, I think Karen would have your team embedded in that because it make it's very consistent. So there's some things there other things that we're seeing a couple new ways to, or one new way to organize we're seeing from some healthcare organizations is where they're organizing around the customer, and the customer lifecycle. So where are they go customer acquisition, which, of course, was content, creating content created, certainly expand all those, but you have customer acquisition, kind of and then during the funnel, and then customer retention or reactivation? They're building teams around that, as well as having the service line. And that's how they kind of organize some of the subject matter together. So it's a different Yeah, it's not I would say, that's not the traditional or the main way that most people do it today. But that's a newer thing that we're seeing in some of smaller healthcare systems, doing the leverage that across the kind of the customer lifecycle, I think we'll see more of that, as healthcare pivots. And we'll talk about that today. More acquisitions always being important but retention, reactivation and keeping folks in the system, right? And then of caring that's near and dear to your heart, in terms of how do we keep keep patient leakage right from from the system. So those are Aaron, this is some new things that we're seeing a newer slant on it still the same set of skills but organizing the thinking about who are we talking to and where are they in the lifecycle with us as a Help system?

Sue Omari 9:59

Karen I wonder are like, I'm so curious, how do you think it works? See, as Tom mentioned, we have a similar, I would guess more of a traditional where the b2b marketing, there's a marketing person or two that's in that product area over in a market network services area. Do you? How do you feel like the best way for the marketing team to work with that group, because sometimes I feel like they're on an island. And that can be hard, it can be hard for them to access our services, or even for us to even think about them in our own strategies that are service, you know, service line strategies where we want to proactively think about that group. 

Karen Stone 10:43

So great question, Sue. And I, I would say, in the beginning, we did feel like we're on an island, I think we've had a huge breakthrough in the last probably year and a half, really, in working very, very tightly with our service line counterparts. And it's, it started with a few people on the service line side, really wanting to see seeing the importance of working collaborative and the value that we were bringing. And we kind of use that with a lot of data storytelling, about the impact of how that collaboration really could drive results. And that sort of perpetuated itself across the rest of the service lines. And, and also, the clinical leaders within the service lines, especially maternity is that the best example that I have, they got very excited about what the bundles program was doing for their volumes. And they began to kind of tell their colleagues about it. So so both in the marketing department, the broader marketing department, we had to kind of help them see the value to them. And then then the clinical leaders who were part of the service lines, were also telling their counterparts and other service lines, and it sort of perpetuated itself.

Sue Omari 11:58

And then it kind of comes back around to service line, which is yeah, thank you. Thank you, detail. Sure. Maybe I'll go jump in,

Tom Hileman 12:08

jump in Aaron, maybe Karen, it might be helpful to explain what bundles are a little bit of audience that because there's some great examples of clinical integration, and also some ways we leverage digital to support that as well.

Karen Stone 12:20

Yeah, absolutely. So the bundles program, I'm sure you all probably most of the audience's is familiar with CMS bundles, these are these are not CMS bundles, these are commercial bundles, they're really built, you know, from a clinical financial and service experience, you know, model, they actually went in the team that built them the episodes of care team within the Office of Population Health, you know, deconstructed, you know, the whole experience, the financial model, the clinical components, to create these bundles. So they could be delivered to employers who would have a predictable cost of accessing the bundles, and it in the employers are offering these bundles at zero out of pocket. So their employees are pretty excited about it. So the idea back to maternity, of having a baby at zero out of pocket, is pretty remarkable for for patients and almost unbelievable. It took a while for some of the employer audiences to even believe that it was real. And now we have about a three year check track record that it is real. And so of course, that again, creates positive word of mouth. But to do that, digitally, you know, we came in with a success team model. So once we have an employer contract, we don't make money on that until we activate those patients into the program to get employee employer activation. You know, we have a success team who comes alongside the employer and creates, you know, a digital pathway for that to occur. We're also when enrollment incurs occurs operationally, we've created digital pathways for these active patients to have an incredible experience. throughout their journey. We did a lot of journey mapping on what we wanted patients to experience in the program and how they would feel supported. We've created both a support system for the patient but also for their supporting cast members, whether it's a you know, a husband or partner in the experience. And so how can they best support the patient through that experience? And so we're working with the navigation team. Within the episodes of care office who enrolls patients, they turn on the active patient campaign when someone enrolls, and then there's automated experiences throughout that experience gets we've seen tremendous open rates and click through rates on all of our active patient campaigns and support person campaigns to date and we're seeing how high net promoter scores as well, just because people feel so supported throughout their experience, and again, driving that positive word of mouth. And it's really a cool program. And it's exciting to be a part of it.

Aaron Conant 15:16

I'm just always, like, amazed at how much the the digital marketing, you know, the person, the team, the leadership has had to adapt over the past like three to four years. Right? That's just the reality. It's gotten, I don't know, so much more difficult, right, especially when you throw in digital as a whole. So when you think like, historically, if we think about collaboration as a whole, like which areas of your your marketing group have the most engagement with, like the clinical and operations team? You know, what is that engagement typically look like? From that standpoint, just jump into the calendar collaboration side?

Sue Omari 15:57

Well, just from organizationally, I would say our marketing Account Services team has absolutely the probably the closest to the business interaction with the service line teams. And Karen, that was so interesting what you're saying about the about the experience, though, because you're right, it does come back, I think the closer we are to the clinical teams, and really understanding the business like we hire new people in, we make a real investment in making sure they really understand the business that we're in that they and I will say it's kind of controversial now. Because we require people to come into the office and come into the clinical space, and really understand experience that business, because we everybody is relying on us on our team to make sure that we're articulating the business need properly. That way, whether it's a digital tactic or something else, you can make sure that you're choosing the correct paid owned and earned strategies. And we heavily heavily lean towards digital, of course, and a lot of that, of course is think of the metrics that are available to us now that were never available to us before. And and because when we have those metrics that drives our funding, and to be blunt, you know, we can get more marketing fundings when we can provide the value of the marketing function. And that's been really great. So I think our team, I would say, organizationally, we're really closest to that business. But everybody's depending on us to make sure that we understand that business properly, we understand the journey and the point where we can make the most impact in that journey, the appropriate impact. That's really, really important as well. And then the so that's really, we can be in kind of a the greatest honor to be in that sort of linchpin position, you know, for us. 

Aaron Conant 17:51

Yeah, Karen, I see your head like nodding the whole time.

Karen Stone 17:53

No, I totally agree. I think, you know, what I have seen through the work that we're doing really mirrors that too, it's really about, you know, really fundamentally understanding the business that we're in, and then what, what's really working, what's not working, where can digital play a role to really make that experience better, and to really help to drive the business forward. So there's, there's a win, for the for the business, there's a win for the patient. And in our case, you know, in the b2b world, a win for the employer, we're looking for the win, win win. And we're really trying to bring all those pieces together. And, you know, some of what we've we've been able to do on our team is to try to really think about the business and some some of the bundles work has actually had implications for changes within the service line that are experiential, you can't do it just for the bundles patients and not from all the patients. Right. So we're seeing a lot of really great thought and, you know, again, collaboration back to that word, around new ways of doing things, and there's a greater acceptance, because they see it's working. And it really is data driven, you know, to Sue's point you when you can show the impact people were much more willing, especially physicians, you know, to to say, oh, let's try that.

Sue Omari 19:19

Well, don't you think we're a better strategic partner when we understand the business, but also we are that partner and operations, you know, because it is funny, but we've definitely we've seen things almost a little bit of an outsider from the clinical area where like, well, if we made this little tweak, it would be an inpatient improvement for you. It'd be an experience improvement for everyone to your point. And I think that we become much more of an equal player over the years when I think about even my time at Cleveland Clinic, I've been in service at Cleveland Clinic for over 25 years and We've become so much more of a proactive strategic resource and a lot to do with these digital tools that we now have. And it wasn't just that we're reactive before. But more than ever, we just, we work so much with operations with dashboards. I mean, it's just, it's amazing over the last, you know, 5 6 7 years how much we rely on our operations partners.

Karen Stone 20:31

Couldn't agree more. We were seeing such transformation occur. From a digital standpoint, since I got to Vanderbilt nearly five years ago. I mean, we didn't have marketing automation, when we first got there. And so that was a game changer for us. And the way that we could even begin to think about the work that we're doing operationally, I think, you know, initially, a lot of people were thinking of, you know, our marketing automation as being just for marketing, right. But as we began to apply, we apply it more in our teams for operations than we do actually for marketing, in many cases. So. So we're seeing a real, you know, synergy between the operations teams, and you know, marketing, we don't even call our team marketing, we call our team business engagement strategies. And, you know, marketing is a core competency of what we do. But it really is fundamentally kind of looking from the business lens, how can we support operationally a better patient experience? How can we support better business outcomes by using digital tools to create efficiencies and productivity and, you know, being able to do a lot more with a lot less in some cases, which we all know, that's the name of the game and a lot in a lot of ways, because you're always fighting for budget, you know, to be able to do these things. So marketing automation has been a real change, a sea change for us. And I think there's even more that we haven't, you know, we've yet to do with it, quite honestly.

Sue Omari 22:16

I think we feel that way, too. Tom, Tom and his group have been our operations partner with Marketo, our marketing automation platform for a number of years. And I think, Tom, we feel like we've still barely scratched the surface of Marketo, and what we can do with it. And you probably have examples from other organizations where they may even use it to a greater advantage than we do. And I think we do a lot with it. But

Tom Hileman 22:40

yeah, it's I mean, it's a very flexible tool. So it's interesting, I think we're terrible, you were going a little bit at maximum, probably almost half of our campaigns now are not traditional acquisition marketing image. They're either reengagement campaigns, their educational campaigns or all kinds. I think that I think the sea change is also that as the clinical folks see what we can bring to the table. If we think we flip the table around and look at it from a patient perspective, they don't really care about our departments, right? Yeah. They don't care an iota about this department, this institute, they don't differentiate between marketing and communications and the clinical, they want their engagement with the board with the brand, right. And so I think when we look at it, and we flip it around, and we orchestrate, and I think Carrie, that's where you were going with a little bit of the personas, the journey mapping, right, when we put the lens on them, we actually then can automate kind of our the interactions and provide really highly personalized and customize information to them, and help them engage with our work or organizations. And I think that's where we think about marketing automation is really just engagement automation, in terms of and then doing that scale, because we can't hire another 20 people to do these things. We have to, we have to be able to do some of it. But I mean, an example of care. And I think maybe you could talk a little bit about is the patient navigators and how we how the automations help support their mission to make them more effective.

Karen Stone 24:03

Yes. Well, when we were first doing bundles, we had only one navigator, you know, and I was terrified about how this one navigator was going to be able to manage the influx that I felt certain would come from a zero out of pocket maternity bundle. And so, you know, we began to talk about that. And so that's when we started to reimagine how we would use you know, marketing automation, how can we extend the ability of this navigator to be able to give personalized touches to these patients who are coming into the program because they can't just, you know, use the phone constantly to call these people. It's just a very inefficient way for them to do it. So they still talk on the phone, let's be honest, but they're able to manage those relationships and really build the engagement with those patients using automation. So when they enroll a patient and they in the patient gets, you know, a welcome packet. And then, you know, months later they get another piece of information that's really relevant to their experience because we journey maps, what would what would I maternity experience be? What kinds of information do people need at different points in that journey? And how can we deliver that through an automated experience and always giving them the option to call their navigator contact their navigator, they can certainly do that. But it just reminds them constantly that someone's there to support them. And the testimonials that we're getting from the patients are very strong, because they really feel that they have been that they've had that personal connection all the way through their journey. And it's, it's pretty powerful.

Tom Hileman 25:47

It's mostly automated, right, they don't even care, the the interactions are automated from the individual, even

Karen Stone 25:55

their navigator, whatever navigator they have, it's from their navigator. So the patient feels, I know, my navigator, I've seen my navigator. And they're reaching out to me, you know, continually with with relevant information. So

Sue Omari 26:11

We have great experience with navigators as well, in particular service lines. So hard is a really big one for us. Cancer, those are two that come to mind immediately. But we have when we use a navigator, the experience is so phenomenal for the patient. But I think of even with automation years ago, when we first started and Tom's group was helping us. I think that your point about understanding what people want when that was a really early learning for us. And even when you're thinking about developing those content streams, it's like how fast are people consuming that content? What kinds of things seems to be most resonant with them? And no matter? What's kind of what stage you are in an automation program, those real fundamental things of watching building those streams, you know, are you a treatment seeker versus the patient, you know, versus information gathering. And we have just learned so much with understanding how people are consuming the content that we're providing to them. Yeah,

Aaron Conant 27:18

awesome. Just to remind us, we're kind of halfway through here. If you have questions or comments, drop them in the chat or the q&a, and we'll get to them and a couple of popped in. I think they're pretty relevant. The first one, just because we're talking a lot about, you know, digital, as a whole says, hey, Ron, great conversation, I'd be interested in hearing from the different groups, the definition of digital, you know, sometimes they struggle for clarity on what that means for healthcare in particular. So, you know, how do you think about digital as a whole, there's, you know, five different ways to spin it maybe more.

Karen Stone 27:50

When we talk about digital, typically, we're talking broadly about the digital ecosystem that we have built, and that we leverage, you know, so it could be, you know, we're looking at, you know, marketing automation, we within the journeys we've been talking about for patients, we actually are using Microsoft bookings. So when we want to kind of get activation among an employee population, we want them to book time with the Navigator. So we've kind of built that into the process. So we're kind of stitching together, different types of, of, you know, digital tools to make a whole experience, even Smartsheet. We use in some ways and forms and things that we don't, we can't do in a Marketo situation. So we're always thinking about the full spectrum of digital tools that can be, you know, mashed together, and to build this, this really powerful experience. And then of course, everything is trackable. So we really want to think about using that digital at every touchpoint that we can so that we can truly see just like Sue said, You know how people are consuming? You know, how we use Wistia, for example, as another digital way to track our videos? Are they watching the whole video? Or are they only watching part of the video? So digital to us is kind of a broad set of tools. That's how I see it to you. I don't know if you would agree or maybe you have a different definition. Yeah,

Sue Omari 29:19

No Karen. That's such a great explanation. And that's the way we see as well, because we, you know, years ago, Paul Matson our chief marketing officers used to say all marketing is digital marketing, you know, everyone is a digital marketer. It's not like you're gonna hire a digital marketer and then hire a marketer doesn't make any sense. Like, if we think about the funnel, the marketing funnel, there's digital, that ecosystem comes into play at every stage of the funnel, you know, right. Well, from awareness down to, you know, the patient activation to the appreciation after, you know, whether that's even philanthropy or whether that's, you know, Star rate games and things like that. I mean, because that's the, you know, the world we live in now. But we owe it to our patients and our potential patients to really fully leverage those tools to get the best. They want what they want, when they want it. And they want a great experience. And digital is central to that.

Tom Hileman 30:16

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think you think digital, you have apps, you have your mobile apps, you have your web experience, you have your advertising platforms, marketing automation, and you have all types of things that go into that. So patient, once again, patients don't patients don't think about channels like we do. So what channel we're going to use for this right, we are marketers, so immediately what we think they think about, well, this is just another touch point, whether I'm picking up the phone, or whether I'm walking into a facility or virtually engaging with that. So I think when you think digitally think all those aspects of, of how do we connect with those patients, and then all those touch points that feed into it, Nikki mall, the CMO at Baylor, Scott and White, she's she always says similar to what Paul says, We have to be where they are, right. And our patients are in a digital ecosystem, vastly. Now there's certain populations, some of the Medicare Advantage perhaps and whatnot, where we do more traditional phone campaigns or things like that, we temper it to the audience, but they expect us to be digitally wherever they are. Right. And we have to be able to meet them where they are.

Sue Omari 31:16

And I don't even think that people, I think they it's almost like they don't even we don't think of them as having a digital experience. Because they don't think of that point. You know, it's it's just it's like everybody's using their phones. So why wouldn't you make tools and content that are easy to access and use on the phone? You know, so it's, it's almost like a really seamless experience. And I mean, when we think about the tools that we have online scheduling, for example, or, or easily finding different things related to a single patient app or something, you know, your medical records, people don't think I want a digital experience. They just want what they want. And so we've really tried hard, we one of the things, I think, at Cleveland clinic that we do really well and always have, you know, over the decades, actually, is market research. So we really fully leverage our patient panels, we fully leverage our provider panels. And we are constantly testing just yesterday, I was in a meeting where we were talking about how can we continue to further enhance our single patient app? You know, because and then we're just asking people, What do you expect when you go on a healthcare app? What are you expecting? And is that that the answer is surprise you so much, but I think it's you can't just offer it, it has to be a good experience. You know, it's not enough to say you can have you can schedule, it has to be easy to schedule an appointment, you know, it's just not enough to just be there, it has to be an excellent experience for people. 

Karen Stone 32:54

I'm so glad you said market research too, because I couldn't agree more with that. You know, voice the patient, Voice of employer, even voice of provider in everything that we're doing is really important. And we try to start there. We've also added a user experience expert to our team in the past two years who come out who really challenges us to think about how the experience is unfolding. How are we measuring continually the experience that our, you know, patients and our employers are having with us digitally? And how can we make improvements? What new tools are out there? It's not a set it and forget it, right? It's really always thinking about the performance of the tools that you have in your ecosystem and how they're working together? And are there better ways, you know, to use them. And so the user experience is paramount and formed by the voice of the patient voice of the employers or any customer that you have, that you're interacting with. So market research is foundational. I'm so glad you said that.

Sue Omari 33:59

Thanks, Tom, as you travel with other clients, what do you find? What new technologies are they looking for looking at? I mean, what's, uh, what's maybe something we're not thinking about as

Tom Hileman 34:11

well, I was demonstrating I was playing, I was working with some of my team or team or putting together a martec planning session for a CIC. And we looked at chief Mar tech, and folks may as well maybe Aveiro, well aware of it, but it's an organization that groups all of the marketing technologies in the broad categories, and it tracks the growth of tools and what tools can disappear. And believe it or not, we're up to almost 10,000 Mark marketing technology tourists. So it's 9980 or something I'm getting the number wrong. This was like a 14 through a 23% growth over last year 14% Or what the double digit growth, but also about 10% of the tools that were here five years ago have also disappeared. So not only is it grown a lot, but there's churn in that so so it's a broad a broad ecosystem. So but I guess like I'll hazard a few guesses here. One of the things that we're seeing a lot of interest in is, as we talked about automation here with whether it's Marketo, or one of the marketing automation platforms like Salesforce or whatnot, we're also seeing a lot about kind of that personalization that ties into it. So how do you customize that journey? And it really comes down to like, if we're gonna do it at scale with the millions of patients that you both serve, we need some artificial intelligence and machine learning. So that one's top of mind for everyone. So in healthcare, I would argue with more data and maybe Financial Services is more about their customers than anybody else. Financial services might argue that, but will will say healthcare is pretty, pretty data rich, right? In terms of the other thing we know about our patients and prospective patients, right? So we have this wealth of data, but how do we know what to say to them next, right, what's most important to do next? Because our all of our departments would argue, primary care with our union for primary care put up on screen screening, so maybe a breast cancer screening mammography or colonoscopy, what are you something different, right, then as well, there's wellness and the great content, you have to add on, on the on with a lot of your daily content that goes out through the wellness channels, and the blog posts and all that. So health and wellness stuff, right. And there's a myriad of other specialty institutes that may think that they that they're the number one priority, right? So I think I think at scale, what we really need to think about is how do we leverage all this data to to have this personal, important communications with our patients and prospective patients. So that's a set of technologies, the AI and machine learning stuff is really key on there, then there's a lot of the digital work that's really worked well chatbots at first may, we may have ups and downs on them, but they can offload a lot of value from your call centers, and let your call centers do more valuable work, as opposed to what's the phone number for this facility, or get me there, right, or hours or any of those kind of basic, that 20% of the communication requests that take up maybe 40 or 50% of the time in the call center, you can move a lot of that out and then have them focus on higher value things. So I think we're seeing the machine learning AI and applicant applying that to it is really, really, really important. And then things around retention right now of employees are unemployed. But well, that's important to our retention of employees, but also retention of the patients and reengagement. Their retention and loyalty are another area that we're spending a lot of time with data and technology to try to pay off.

Sue Omari 37:28

I saw there was a I thought I saw a question come up with our CRM. And I mean, what are you seeing in CRM? Integration with some of the platforms like Marketo?

Tom Hileman 37:38

Yeah, and I think the question was for you, clinic, you guys think I can say you guys, yeah, dynamics, right? I think everyone knows that if you if you look. So Microsoft Dynamics is the platform, although I would argue su for you operationally, most of the information isn't there. It's in the data you invest in a long time ago to build the enterprise data warehouse, where they have all of not all but most of the data on interpatient interactions and measurements, financial stuff. So so we see a lot of a lot of our clients across the spectrum are using CRM are starting, it's pretty early. Most folks aren't very long in the path, the two big ones that there's three main paths, but the two big ones I see are Microsoft Dynamics is is very large and large healthcare organizations just given Microsoft footprint, Salesforce has a footprint there. And then there's more of the point solutions that are healthcare specific solutions. So you can think about, well, healthcare, zero variants, he leaves all those folks coming together, right? Just focus on loyal software out there that has an offering in the digital as well. So those are the kind of the different pieces that make up most of the larger customers we work with are typically a marketing automation platform, some type of data platform, enterprise data warehouse in your case, and then a CRM, and this year, but serums are just starting. Because CRMs are such, I think I'll use Karen's word see change. If you think about just getting Mark marketing automation is a sea change. And that touches several departments, but certainly not the entire enterprise. But for CRM to be successful. You mean you literally need every touch point in the organization from call center to clinical to marketing, to every ops, leveraging that and that's a big lift. That's a lot of change management. Yeah.

Karen Stone 39:24

Even just the discipline of using it, right, is a huge part of it. I mean, you have to have a strategy for how it all comes together. But you also have to have the discipline for how you're going to use this and how the teams who interface with CRM are going to use it we're seeing early, we're in an early stage kind of what we call CRM light that actually Tom and his team helped us to build for some of our business units. And it's just it's more of a contact management platform at this point, but it does, does it have some of the CRM Type capabilities in it and just getting the teams acclimated to using that, you know, in an ongoing way, keeping the data fresh, and even just pulling the data out and finding ways to use it. I mean, that's, that's just the tip of the iceberg. And so I think about that change management piece that you were mentioning, Tom, it's, it's, it's not for the faint of heart, that it is worthwhile.

Tom Hileman 40:25

And I would argue the two most important things that CRM project are not technology oriented at all right, the technologies, mostly, there are some integration, fire stuff that needs to be solved, but it's really governance and change management.

Sue Omari 40:37

That's no gray, you mentioned that Tom, I was, I was just gonna pop in and say one of the things we learned, oh, I guess it's been about a year ago, as we wait to really fully leverage CRM, just from the context standpoint, and how to honor people's preferences because you can't ask people how they want to be communicated to and that honor those preferences. But we developed a patient patient communication committee, that really was an outgrowth of this of the CRM conversations, because to your earlier point about everyone wants, everyone is very appropriately concerned about their own business unit. And whether that's primary care, or digestive disease, or heart or whatever. Everybody wants to communicate with a group of patients. But we really felt the need to have some sort of air traffic control over how many messages pate patients were getting from us and in what format? And where are we really trying to get to is it is honoring people's preferences. If I only want to ever get a text from Cleveland Clinic, that's how I should be communicated to, we're not really there yet. But what we have done very effectively, is we developed a multidisciplinary patient communication committee, and at least we're monitoring all the messages that are going out to patients, whether that's a reminder of a screening, or a parking garage is undergoing, you know, some renovation or something like that, we really do have a pretty good handle on message, outgoing messages to patients. And some of that was really a discussion around that early CRM work, you know, texting, we really weren't doing a lot of I think you worked with other organizations who were doing a lot more with texting than we were. But now everybody, it's like one of those, you have to resist that check the toolbox, you know, like, oh, yeah, if this department is texting, I guess I should be texting too. And it's so you really, we've built this committee has really done a great job of keeping things really reasonable, and where everybody understands the rules of the road of how to communicate. And that's been very, very helpful. But governance is such a big issue. When you're dealing with so much technology and so many opportunities for touch points, you do need some governance, I know, we have a Marketo Governance Committee, you know, where all the stakeholders are in the room at the same time, how's everyone using? Uh, how often are we reaching out to patients? And that's been I think that's really an imperative. You know,

Tom Hileman 43:06

you have to because if not, you get sprawl. And then, and CRM is equally if not more important, because everyone was doing something before CRM, yeah. And people want to revert to what they were doing before. So, man, marketing automation is the same way like we want it, we've invest in these tools. We centralize communications, they can manage that so that there's not communication overflow, and limit the number of messages that go to to a patient during the day. But we all have to agree to use it. And I think it's the discipline, as Karen said, to stick with it. Right. And so that's, that's something that's not not a technical issue, but that's a organizational process, a little bit of a culture change, too, because we're not all individual departments, we're trying to speak cohesively.

Sue Omari 43:46

100% Yeah, it's an enterprise tool. It's not a department to use this plan. And however you want to call

Aaron Conant 43:59

this a question that just because we've done so much in marketing automation in Marketo, for the patient navigator communications done through Marketo, how are those integrated into the HR?

Tom Hileman 44:07

So I can speak broadly to that. I will speak to patient navigation specifically, but typically EHRs and most of the large ones epics, typically the big one epic, and Cerner. Typically, there's a two way communication. So one of the data warehouses, the data warehouses that we're usually interacting with are storing engagement data, which is the Marketo information in terms of the touch points and whatnot. And then there's also the the EHR data and sometimes financial data to depending upon what you're tracking ROI and things like that. So usually they're integrated, either from an external data warehouse, or sometimes there's a file what's called a fire connection, FHA, IR, which is the which is the interoperability platform that you can use to access different EHR. So that's the usual suspects. There's still some less polls and different ways that people have done it more more historically. It was some of the analytics tools has happened as well. But usually people are way more automated for their actions.

Aaron Conant 45:08

Awesome, awesome. And others, if you have any last ones drop in the chat or the q&a, we'll try to get to them. Or think about just a little bit, you know, like best practices across the board for collaboration across departments. Right. And I think there's, there's two things in there, like best practices are, hey, these things worked really well. And then a these were big pitfalls that we need that people need to think about. Would love to hear, you know, okay, do you Karen first.

Karen Stone 45:36

For us, you know, it's really been great to have a champion. So we have a, we have a champion model that we've used very effectively, within the episodes of care team, in particular, the the physician, leader of the bundles work has been a huge advocate and bought in very early on the importance of, you know, building these experiences and using digital as, as a part of what we do, and using that in an informed sense with the voice of the patient, as we talked about previously. So getting a champion to really become a peer to peer advocate for using tools and working collaboratively to even build the experiences and the importance of that enrolling their colleagues, and if you will, has been very important for us

Sue Omari 46:30

Yeah, I think one thing I would add on, certainly, I 100%, agree, Karen the champion is so important. We call it executive sponsor, or its champion, whichever, whatever. And, but I think one of the things that has always worked well for us too, and makes, it's a very culturally aligned way to do work. But we're big fans of the pilot, let's do something small, test it, see if it works, and then keep expanding and then expanding the circle of people involved in it. And that is such a great way to try new ideas. The other thing we do is we do as tight as budgets are, we try to always keep a little bit of our budget back for test and invest, you know, we are always looking for new opportunities to be the leader. And, and everyone loves to be part of a test and invest too, I can tell you, you know, there's not a clinical area that I can think of, they wouldn't you wouldn't bite on that all day long. So those are two things that we've we've tried. And it worked very well within our culture. 

Tom Hileman 47:45

I'll take I guess the pitfall side, since you guys are taking the best practices. Take one for the team. So things to avoid met. So typically, and I think I think the champion model or executive leadership is imperative you have to have, you have to have someone carrying the flag and it needs someone typically from the clinical side is saying this is the right thing to do. Because typically, we're pushing the clinical side more than the clinical side is pushing us. I think it's a pretty fair statement. But I think I think when you look at these collaborations, these cross department tools, I think there's a couple aspects, one, some clear roles, responsibilities, so people understand, because the clinic folks don't always understand the business side. And then we certainly don't understand the clinical as well as they do. So trying to set some boundaries around that. This communications and who's responsible for what I think is always good. I think the one pitfall I see folks do is when they go to the clinicians without data, or because the clinicians are scientists. So if you come to them with your conversion metrics, they don't even understand all marketing. I'm not asking for that. But they get data and if you can show them that your measurement that you're measuring, that you're showing the impact that we're testing here, and we're optimizing, they live in a world where they order lab tests, right, and they look at the data and then they make decisions. And the more we can can position our mindset like that, the more they'll they'll accept those pieces. So I've seen a lot of success. When we come to physicians, clinicians with data and say, Hey, you asked about putting a billboard outside with physician space on it right? But classic ask, but look at the data. And it shows that these types of personalized campaigns work better. And then that their heart they understand that right. And so I think pitfalls when you don't kind of embrace the physicians and clinicians for who they are kind of data driven science folks. So you present them with a lens that they understand. If you don't you do it at your own peril, specifically surgeons, surgeons, specifically the cardiothoracic surgeons, they tend to be the most feisty of all the groups. But if you show them data, and you show them why you did what you're doing, then they almost always agree, because that's how they live. For sure.

Aaron Conant 49:52

So maybe one last question that comes in here, Karen and Sue, can you talk about tools you use to monitor your brand, and how they inform your work? Thinking about offerings like Qualtrics, if you use them out ago, you know whether you can see a clear return on investment, then we'll kind of get to the wrap up here. 

Sue Omari 50:09

Yeah, I mean, I can just start with a general. We do local trackers, we do national, we use you gov, for national trackers as examples. And then we do lots and lots of custom studies. And we monitor those very, very carefully, because so I guess how we use it is we're constantly monitoring and making adjustments. And that's what's so great about the tools that we've been talking about today is you can make adjustments in your strategy or in your, you know, your tactical execution. And, and I think you have to be brave enough to make adjustments. I mean, we never get so we never get so married to an approach that we aren't listening to the data, you know, if we can have a firm belief in one direction, but we watch those trackers all the time, we watch our you know, acquisition strategies all the time. So we really listen to the data, we don't just look at it, we really understand what it means. 

Aaron Conant 51:23

Karen I’ll kick it over to you and also like for key takeaways is, you know, we get to the end of the hour here, we always like to wrap up a few minutes early. Yeah, key takeaways, you think I'm coming out of the chat today. And then I'll go to Sue, and then we can wrap it up with Tom, does that sound good?

Sue Omari 51:39

Sure, sure. Um, understand the tools, understand the business, and learn and react appropriately. Karen do you have key takeaways?

Karen Stone 51:54

You know, I really start where we began. And that is just being a great collaborator, being a great listener, and also using the data, I really do think that's foundational to help drive conversations and decisions and and, you know, engaging those early champions to help you kind of move things along, especially as you try to drive adoptions and change management. It's really, it can be challenging, but you're up if you're always, you know, seeking first to teach and help people learn something, and also you're learning from them. I think that's the best way to drive collaboration and change management.

Tom Hileman 52:35

I guess I'll wrap us up. And Aaron, thanks. It's been a it's been great discussion

Aaron Conant 52:38

This is awesome. It's been a blast. 

Tom Hileman 52:43

So it's been a great discussion. I think when I when I think about it, I always start with, I guess I'm a big coffee guy begin with the end in mind, and what are we trying to do? We're really trying to influence patients and help them in their care journey. So I think that's where I always start. So understand the patient. I actually think this is a new course, a unique responsibility for marketers think there's no one in a healthcare organization that understands the patient journey better than the marketers do, because they have an opportunity to see everything from beginning to end where some of the clinicians only see episodic care. So I think us as marketers can can carry the patient can carry the banner for the cut for the patients, and a unique communication, understand that so search first, seek to understand them collaborate with clinical folks like the more the tighter remember involved with that, the better the outcomes that we are, collectively, but for the patient, but also for the effectiveness in it. And then final, finally, is this test, measure and optimize, right. That's the beauty. And I think we've talked about this throughout the we know we never had more data and let's make sure we use it. Let's make sure and we test based on it. And then we figure out what works best and optimize and then share that knowledge out. Those are those would be my my key takeaways.

Aaron Conant 53:48

Awesome. Thanks. This has been a blast, Karen. Thanks so much. Thanks, everybody, for sending in the questions, great comments. It's been a blast. If you're looking for any kind of follow up help whatsoever in this space, you know, reach out to Tom and his team. They've been great friends, partner, supporters of a lot of organizations in the network as a whole and they just been fantastic all around. Thanks so much for everybody sharing today. And with that, I think we're gonna wrap it up. Everybody take care of stay safe. And Tom Hileman is my favorite because it really is awesome. Bye, everybody. I hope you have a fantastic Wednesday everybody. Take care, stay safe and look forward to having your future event. Scary next year. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.