Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co-founder and managing director at BWG Connect where a networking and knowledge sharing group of 1000s of organizations who do exactly that we networking knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it is shaping digital as a whole, that's up multiple different verticals, just you know, 1000s of great professionals across the industry as a whole. Hey Ashleigh how are you doing sorry for the little, you know, go to gave us some hiccups. But anyways, glad you you're able to make it over. But we're networking knowledge sharing group, I talk with 30 organizations a week to stay on top of those trends, when the same questions or comments come up over and over again, that's how we get the topics for these events as a whole, we're gonna get close to 240 virtual events this year. And next year, we're hoping to do closer to 300. And then do 100 in person events as well. So if you're in a tier one city, you know, around the US, you know, reach out maybe why an event in your area, more than happy to put people on the invite list as a whole couple of housekeeping items. We want this to be as educational and informational as possible. At any point in time. If you have any questions drop into the chat, q&a or email them to me Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. The other thing is, you know, we're starting this, you know, three to four minutes after the hour, and we're going to wrap up with three to four minutes to go on the hour as well, we're going to give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and kick this off. You know, the idea like service line marketing has come up over and over again, a lot of different you know, thoughts on it, how it's changed over the past 18 months the impact it's having an organization's as a whole. And so we got some great friends, partners, supporters of the network as a whole that agreed to kind of jump on and just have a candid candid conversation across the board. So again, you have any questions or comments, you know, drop in the chat q&a, or email them to me, Aaron, aaron@bwgconnect.com but, you know, why don't we do a quick, you know, roundtable here. And oh, let's go Lynn, Dara, Ashleigh, and then Tom will kind of go around there a brief intro and yourself role organization. And you'll go around the table here really quick, and then we'll kind of kick off the conversation. So I'm good. All

Lynn Purdy 2:31

right. Yeah. I'm Lynn Purdy. I work for Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. And I'm coming to you from my home office. Then with Vanderbilt about a year and a half and I am director of market development.

Dara Krueger 2:47

Awesome. Hi, everybody. I'm Dara Krueger, I'm at Cleveland Clinic and I met our very quiet administrative campus. I'm probably one of a handful of people that came into the office today. I've been at Cleveland Clinic for 14 years. And I'm the executive director of international marketing as well as marketing Account Services, which could also be market development, service line marketing, and we have responsibility for all of our hospitals, service lines, and enterprise marketing.

Ashleigh Killian 3:21

I am Ashleigh Killian, and I'm coming from Baylor Scott and White Health and I'm coming from my home office as well. I oversee our hospital marketing, service line marketing, folks and in our business development efforts are marketing.

Tom Hileman  3:40

I'm Tom Hileman with the Hileman Group, we're a healthcare marketing agency, and I'm privileged to work with all three of these ladies in their organizations. Looking forward to the conversation. I'm in the office today, like Dara, very quiet here, but privileged to be here today, Aaron to talk about this topic.

Aaron Conant 3:58

So if I kind of like kick off the conversation as a whole, and for those of you who joined drop any comments or questions in the chat or the q&a, you know, service line, you know, marketing, it covers a lot of domains, a lot of different areas, it'd be great to hear, you know, because it's like this, it was this buzzword that's popped up, was signing up more so across different organizations as a whole, I think that the the main root of it stays the same, but you know, we kind of I wouldn't mind that hearing from each of you, you know, we'll kind of do that that same order, again, you know, Lynn from your standpoint, you know, service line marketing, you know, what does that encompass for you?

Lynn Purdy 4:34

You know, I'm coming to Vanderbilt. The first thing that struck me was, you know, like most organizations were organized kind of in silos, so by service lines, and we're trying to think more broadly, about how to really tap into synergies that are kind of in those cracks between the service lines. And so trying to get all of us to think more broadly, both with the services we provide and the patients and what their needs are because a patient isn't just a cardiac patient, you know, they have multiple issues. And so how do we really address that? In what we call service line marketing and get more synergies?

Aaron Conant 5:24

Awesome.Dara love to hear you know, your kind of your, you know, definition of it and how you view it and approach it.

Dara Krueger  5:30

Great. Yeah, our service line marketing team, as I said, is service line is our regional hospitals. Even though geographically, our Florida team is separate from our Cleveland, Ohio based team. And we've got more than 40 people that are divided across those key areas of responsibility. And, and the focus is, as I'm sure it is, with Lynn and Ashleigh, you know, heart cancer, neurological orthopedic services, and pediatrics. So as being the top areas so that they have that primary coverage for service line they get from our team, and annual marketing plan, they should always come to us for central resources. It's great because by and large, we're a our physicians are employed. So it is pretty easy to manage that centrally, as we've been acquiring new hospitals where it's not fully employed model, we're having to to negotiate that a little differently than negotiations also comes in from what our regional facilities are interested in doing, and what our service lines are doing. That's usually service line first, and then our regional facilities, if they have needs to jump in to help them as well.

Aaron Conant 6:47

Yeah, a quick side note, my father-in-law is having heart surgery down there today.

Dara Krueger 6:51

He's in great hands. He's doing well.

Aaron Conant 6:56

Ashleigh, we'll kick it over to you.

Ashleigh Killian  6:57

Yeah, I think we really look at for our service line marketing, we have a few goals around acquisition. So really aligning with our strategy team around what they want to achieve for the service lines for the enterprise. But also knowing that retention is so key, and understanding that following that visit, and understanding that is so important to our organization, what are those key moments that matter for the patient. So in really honing in on that to retain our patients, we know that we can spend all day on acquisition acquiring new patients. But if we're not keeping the ones that we already have, and we're, we're we're losing it as a team. So we're really looking at those key efforts around acquisition, retention, and then just shining a spotlight on our phenomenal specialist, team, physician, team, clinician team and in the thought leadership that they provided.

Lynn Purdy 7:52

It's interesting. Dara, you mentioned as you're acquiring hospitals, and having more in the community. Vanderbilt has recently acquired three community hospitals and just learning how to leverage that service line knowledge and how to service those, we actually brought on a small team to focus on that. And then working with the folks who are in the communities to build their own service line strategies. And that's been a really great and heavy lift for us to learn how to do this over the last 18 months or so.

Dara Krueger 8:34

Yeah, jump in, I think would actually also talk talks about is like, what are those key strategic priorities? That is patient acquisition? Right. I think we're a little less involved in retention. For a couple of reasons like we've we're working with marketing automation to do some follow up with leads, people who've raised their hand, those people that are on Google every day, the billion searches for health care every day, we want to be there when they raise our hands looking for information, to connect them with our our content, and then also do to follow up. But we're probably not as far along is actually in the team there on how your marketing can help cultivate and help move your patient through their care or retain them for care. We do a little bit of retention. And I think maybe the the other objective here that's worth bringing up at this early point in the discussion is national reputation of our hospitals and our providers, right. We have our product as our amazing physicians, they're either at the bedside, or in the labs, doing things that just are so close to all of our missions, advancing health care. And a big part of our job is taking those important moments and working with our media relations and corporate relations team to amplify those through social media or physician conferences, but physician reputation it Another huge bucket of what service line is responsible for doing.

Tom Hileman 10:07

For sure that mean you guys hit all the major areas that you go across, right? I mean, reactivation, I know, Dara that's to their team does a lot of work getting people back in from that side kind of a retention activity, but certainly reactivating people after certain timeframes, and whatnot. And we see a lot of our clients, as Ashleigh talked about, really focused on retention and kind of share of care, and how much of the total lifetime care and the annual care you're getting with that, since there's so many options for primary urgent care, telehealth and kind of more of a retail setting or some of those, some of those, some of those competitors to towards traditional academic medical centers and whatnot.

Aaron Conant 10:48

And it's really interesting, as well as just when you're talking about engagement, it kind of tie into together you do have the patient engagement, but right that when I hear like physician reputation, is that, like, physician engagement is too, right. It's how are you getting them engaged with the whole process to help promote their overall reputation? And the full spectrum of physicians that are out there and and getting them engaged? Because, right, it's a it's a huge part of it, right? The physician reputation?

Ashleigh Killian 11:16

Yeah, absolutely. I think part of that is, we have so many thought leaders, and so just being able to understand like when those important studies are coming, or if we hit a particular milestone that we know about it, and that we're amplifying it through those physician channels, and getting that getting the word out there.

Dara Krueger  11:33

And I think that comes practically speaking from having our team members now virtually, connect very consistently with physician and administrative leaders by Institute. So the highest priority areas are the areas that churn out more content, you probably meeting with them at least monthly. So even if between those meetings, something comes up that you're getting it or again, the corporate communications persons getting it, and we have to we connect very well with them. So often, the marketing corporate communications team are going to be Institute leaders together, so that they know that you can call either one of us and we're going to help you figure that out. And that's, that's critical. And we can fan out in that way. But you know, it's like, the bigger your organizations are, they don't always know to come to us when they're working on something. So being the eyes and ears is because we bring on new people, that's what we would train them to do is it's going to take you nine months or a year to figure out what's going on. Around here. It's it's big, it's technical, you're not a doctor, it's gonna take you some time to figure it out. But it's so important to sit down with physicians and say, Tell me more about that. And they're all teachers too. So they're always happy to tell you what they're doing.

Lynn Purdy 12:51

I think where I've seen the most success on our service line teams is when people when I hear the service line, say, hey, so and so is really embedded in our team, they're part of our team, they're part of our staff. And that takes obviously a lot of communication, building trust. And being an advisor, really to them bringing information and helping them feel like they're part of the decision making and and really lending their expertise, but relying on us for the marketing savvy. And that partnership really can be very, very productive.

Ashleigh Killian 13:31

I think that's so key Lynn is understanding because many of our clinicians understand like the patient journey better than anyone, and what are those key entry points. And so really relying on them to help us, you know, do the right thing for marketing and hit the consumer at the right time.

Tom Hileman 13:49

I think it's key. I think across the folks we work with that is the to me, the collaboration between the service lines of physicians, and the marketing team is critical and viewing each other like working together. Often the service, the physicians don't necessarily understand the ins and outs of digital marketing and what that means. There may be a lot of history, there are billboards or different things that they want to talk about. We've probably all heard that our physician billboards stories all day. But I mean, having them understand the measurement and what we can do with the power of those tools, marketing automation is there as our alluded to. I think that's one thing that that we've seen a lot of success from our organizations, but helping kind of lift them up and teach them a little bit about the basics of what marketing is. And they can share, obviously, the clinical aspects and then what they see from the real world position in patient interactions.

Lynn Purdy 14:38

Yeah, Tom, I think that's interesting that you use that education. We recently heard from our CEO, Dr. Ballser are talking to our team at a retreat and he asked us to make sure that we put on our radar, helping demystify marketing because everybody thinks they're a marketer. They come with great ideas and, you know, learning how to do coaching and educating along the way, and sometimes having to say those tough, you know that tough word no. or Yes, and depending on, you know, the approach you're going to use, but really, really trying to educate all of our service line partners so that they understand, you know, how do we best make the investments and get return on it? And I think teaching them about digital is really critical. You tackle that,

Aaron Conant 15:35

then? That that the educational side, because I agree, I everybody thinks they're a marketer. And then everybody in the absence of knowledge oversimplifies right, like, oh, it's super easy to run different marketing campaigns, right? You just hit a button, and they go and you use assets you already have, and, you know, is so in that training? Is that, like a monthly training session? Do you have a team that goes out and helps educate?

Lynn Purdy 16:03

Yeah, it's interesting, we're just starting on this journey. And one of the people that we recruited recently, is our Associate Director for our children's hospital, Monroe, Carroll, Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt. And she's also an adjunct professor at a university that she came from in marketing in a health care program. And so we've talked about building actual modules, and she started to institute that in some of her monthly meetings with the leadership at that hospital. And I think, you know, it is pretty, you know, one on one, but also using, take a case study, you know, that's been successful at that hospital, and showing the other service line leaders, you know, what success looks like. And then, you know, they do have a little bit of a competitive spirit. And so they want to jump on. And that's kind of, I think, the the path that we'll be taking,

Dara Krueger 16:59

that does work like a charm, when you know, when you say, we tried this for heart, and we'd like to fight for cancer, you try this for ni, and we'd like to try but and always adapting it right, because maybe it's bigger, better different for you. Because as Lynn said, early on, you could create some solutions with them. So ideas come forward, you peel back the wipey. Why do you like that idea, billboard, or otherwise? What is it that you think is going to help you help with the practice help with elevating the service line, and then offering those other solutions? But still helping them understand? You are the marketing expert? But you can't say it that way? Right? It's got to be, well, here's how I would advise, here's where we've done something differently. So part of the other thing that I think is really critical to those individual team successes is as you're having those individual meetings, with Institute's and administrators, sometimes it's just, Hey, Ashleigh, tell me what's been going on with the business right now. And you have a little more or less formal conversation. But you have to just as often sit down and say, let me show you the dashboard of the tactics, and the measurements for those tactics. And where, you know what this program that we thought was going to be successful for this particular service, isn't polling the way we thought it was. And we can do that very well on the lead generation side of campaigns, on the advertising your tracking awareness, and improve your tracking impressions and overall awareness, but having those dashboards and so we share these across our service line teams, and really come up with the best of the best, not reintroducing it every time but kind of settling on a model and then using that to guide her.

Ashleigh Killian 18:46

Completely agree I think sharing the metrics and communication is so key, like at the beginning of the year, we really tried to focus in on what are those key things we want to accomplish? Because I don't know if you're like our teams, but we have different things kind of enter into that request. So we focus in on what are the key things we want to accomplish, and then continuously circle back to that that agreed upon goal set, and then showcasing the metrics out? How did we move the needle there. And I think having those metrics and dashboards has been really helpful in kind of pausing some of the Billboard requests and other things that we get.

Tom Hileman 19:28

I think one of the things that that I was like to talk to the physicians about and the service lines is their scientists kind of by nature, right? So data and dashboards, if you can get them to understand a little bit of the process model, but education that Lynn Endora talked about, and then them and then the dashboards to show that data and what's at the conversion points, whether it's advertising or landing page or email conversions, or are then measuring the returns and being able to show it kind of as a science like the data perspective, they get that in the heartbeat because that's how they have been trained forever, right? They look that they look at diagnostic tests all the time. So if we can kind of show them a bit of the diagnostics of marketing, that helps to get the buy in. And then I think, as you mentioned, for some of the traditional pieces where they're not, you don't necessarily have the measurement capabilities that you might have in the digital, to start to see why that's important and how that model fits together. So we've seen great success when you really take a data oriented approach with a lot of the physicians.

Lynn Purdy  20:23

It's also I think, you know, before you even launch into any kind of campaign, it's important to do sort of a pre mortem, like, let's think through, you know, first of all, what problem are we trying to solve? What's our goal? Are these you know, and outcomes, the metrics? Are they going to show us success or not? And what problems might we encounter even before we launch it, so that we get everybody on board understanding and setting expectations properly? There's nothing more challenging than launching a campaign not having those conversations. And then the first time you meet with the service line leadership, you're looking at results, and maybe they aren't so stellar. But you know, if we kind of bring them along on that journey, right from the beginning, I think it again, developing that trust and partnership was really critical.

Aaron Conant 21:24

So we talked a little bit here, you know, about, you know, the metrics and all what, what are they, you know, the data, what are the ones that you find the most meaningful? You know, there's the physician side, right, there's the the service line leadership side, there's also the executive team side, right? It's, you know, you know, the different ones for both, you know, how do you guys kind of look at that

Lynn Purdy 21:46

as a whole? You really, this past year, we sat down with our executive teams, and what, since so we had a variety of different goals that we look to and marry to is, from the acquisition side, what how many leads are we bringing in how many patients, we have brand health metrics, but also, we introduced with that team efficiency metrics. So trying to benchmark and understand like, what is the cost to acquire a patient in these particular areas, and in getting better and more sophisticated in that, but they seem to understand what level of investment we might need to make in order to accomplish the acquisition goals that we're setting, and continuously circling, circling back to them with that information and, and really proving out that M Roi. We're trying to position our team as a revenue generator. And so being able to report back on those metrics has been key. Or everyone wants the ROI. Right. Yeah. But I think that also looking at it from an operational point of view to to show where, in the funnel, you know, we're having either challenges that need to be addressed to improve that ROI, are every bit as important as the outcome metrics, and so figuring out a way to make sure you're reporting on the challenges, you know, whether they're operational or you know, from a technology standpoint, or targeting, I think that it's really important for the leadership team, both the executive and positions to understand sort of what that that journey looks like, and where we can make improvements along the way to increase

Dara Krueger 23:38

the ROI. And so maybe just on top of it, thinking a little differently about metrics around physician content, like we've all talked about physician content, we don't always know we can't set a goal that says we're going to have 15 NEW HEART articles in the year. But we can go back and track and demonstrate the levels of engagement with some of this content. So we have a channel called console QD, which is our physician portal. It has verticals by specialty area, as well as leadership and global. So when we post things there, we can demonstrate, you know, how much traffic is coming to those articles? What are those, and we're also driving traffic to those, right, so we deploy emails to drive traffic, and we can see click through so we're using that to demonstrate where you might be really excited about a piece of research that you're doing. And sure there's a target audience's needs that but maybe not as global as for cancer as a breast cancer article, you're going to get a lot more traffic than a sarcoma article. And then further, our physicians are taking this content, and they're tweeting it, we're training them on social media, again, to further amplify. So we're measuring who's involved with social media. What kind of followers do they have, especially at a leadership level, the Institute chairs are taking a look at that And then again, how much engagement are they going to get on their content? There's a lot of different

Tom Hileman 25:06

metrics depending on who the audience is, right. So the executive metrics that Ashleigh mentioned, the volumes, conversions, contribution, margins, or ROI, as Lynn mentioned, also, I think there's a lot of value at the marketing kind of manager, marketing director level of of being able to look at peers and how your campaigns are, how they're performing relative to each other into your own internal benchmarks, I think you can get a lot of juice out of that squeeze, if you can look at what you're doing well, and say and cancer and apply at age, Heart and Vascular apply to other areas. And I think that's obviously a more detailed marketing level metrics in terms of more conversion levels, and kind of the intrinsics of how the campaigns are running. But we've seen a lot of success for organizations, we're kind of sharing that knowledge amongst the marketing departments. And of course, the service lines are associated with that as well.

Aaron Conant 25:56

So Tommy, just to go down a little bit. So you're mentioning, you know, you share, you know, the data, you need to execute on the campaigns, you need to, you know, do a whole variety of things. It's all it's just a it's all a lot of it's technology driven on the back end, they premiere experience, or they're like must have, like, so I want to kind of start off here like what are those must have? And then the next step is then what does the team look like to execute with all that different technology that's out there? What does it look like across multiple different service lines? So

Tom Hileman 26:27

I assume you must have some kind of on the MAR tech stack?

Aaron Conant 26:29

Yeah, exactly. I mean, COVID changed so much, right? And it's accelerated us so fast that we couldn't just walk down this path at a nice slow place pace like we were before, it's like, Hey, you have to have it in place. Now. It's just everything has changed. And then I just hear a lot that the MAR tech stack has drastically changed, or the players in the space have changed. Love to hear kind of what you're seeing in that space, and then we can kind of tackle, okay, then what is the team look like that needs to be built to handle that?

Tom Hileman 26:58

Sure, sure. From my perspective, and I welcome everyone else's comments, typically, you need to have some kind of automation platform to be able to connect with the patients and I made a matt manner. So there's typically some kind of marketing automation or marketing platform that you have there. Underneath that, you'd have a couple things DARS mentioned many times content, you have to have content for the engine, to be able to put out and to be able to engage folks with so content is a critical piece of that. And the underlying underlying data is very important. So that you can date whether it's a data warehouse, or a CDP, or a CRM, where you're getting your information around the patients, or the EMR integrations, perhaps as well, some of the clinical side stuff so that you understand what the data about the books that you target. And personalized to them is another important piece, of course, the analytics platform to measure all that stuff, whether it's dashboarding, whether it's Google data, studio, whatever, whatever the tools that you might use, they're pretty important. And then typically, things like online scheduling, which is becoming more and more important to make sure that we're getting people are our direct calls to action are getting answered, as well as perhaps in the conversational marketing tools that we can probably talk a little bit about as well. But those are some of the core pieces that I see. But I'd certainly love to hear what Dara you have to say,

Dara Krueger 28:15

I hear you talk about the conversation, we asked the question here about then how are we structured just as a team to use those tools. So if we just think about marketing automation, like all of the team has to have a level of ability in Google Analytics, right to go in and look at reporting. We also have an amazing data science team that was pulled that was assembled about 11 years ago. And we've continued to evolve that they post reports with frequency that intersect with the finance team so that we're looking at the real cm for our campaigns. And we all need to know how to draw down those reports, and package them for upcoming meetings. But the marketing automation tool became one of those tools that we felt the complexity to use it and the risk to using it incorrectly the damage you can do by getting into we use Marketo. And tweaking something incorrectly was such a risk that we created what we call the digital optimization team. And we have a small group of experts that each of us as directors have at least one or two of these people that meet regularly to talk about governance of that tool, share best practices, and then help with any of our campaign adjustments. As well as Tom at Hileman helps us as well, externally. But we have a small group what we call a digital optimization team that have to be expert in marketing automation. Yeah,

Lynn Purdy 29:48

our team really depends on we have an insights and analytics team, who really advise us as we're working with tools like marketing automation, how to optimize our campaigns. And we have a awesome search team who also advise us, and then our content team. So it's kind of, you know, we're, we can't do it alone, of course. And we bring all these folks together to get the best thinking, what's going to make a campaign successful. And without any one of those, our creative team, our content team, our social team, I mean, it's it's so integrated. That technology is the foundation. But really what everybody brings to this is what makes these campaigns really either success or failure.

Tom Hileman 30:51

I think I mean, technology is great data is great, too, right? But it's the people who put the campaign to put the thinking together that makes it happen, right? I think if, if I've learned anything in the last decade in this business, it's all it's integrated marketing, right? Multi Channel, multiple skill sets, both the creative side, the creative, the technical, and the business side, kind of pull those together is where you get your best of your best campaigns, and your best marketing programs come out of that. But to me, that's the power of all this,

Dara Krueger 31:18

it certainly is, we're recruiting new, new team members, they're bringing to us from their undergraduate or their early career experience with marketing, automation, experience, and social and very eager to put those to use for us and, and we get to learn from them. But yeah, it's like when you're a service line person, your relationship and your strategy, and you have to be able to interface with all of these different important team members. And then just finding out Are there people who have an interest in a particular component like social that they could, they might run point for several social campaigns across service lines, because they are very interested. They've demonstrated an expertise, they've built a relationship with our other subject matter experts across the division. And by the way, our subject matter experts in let's say, content, love to work with somebody who knows and understands how hard their job is, and the and what makes it difficult. You know, like our web team, people think that they send you an email on a web change, like, I need you to change this on the website. And magically, it has changed. Of course, we all know that there's just time and effort, or I need a new web page, which is the worst. So knowing that our team members who are the interface, outside of like a forum, a process that you fill out an interface with the digital team, to say, here's a request, and I've negotiated this timing, how does that work? They always appreciate

Lynn Purdy 32:53

that. You know, that reminds me, I left out an important component. And that's project management. Because these are, these are complex campaigns. And without good project management, forget it. We, we just would really struggle. And I think that the devil is in the details on these campaigns. And so definitely don't overlook having good product project management as part of your, your

Tom Hileman 33:28

team. Yeah, for sure. Actually, one thing I left out and I think you could probably chat on is the the mobile apps of the US and made a large investment around the mobile app and integrating that and then probably the audience would love to hear some of kind of your approach on that.

Ashleigh Killian 33:42

Oh, sure. Yes, we have a digital health office that focused primarily on the mobile app, and has been for quite a long time. And when COVID It, it was significant for how we actually survived and got through in getting our patients in through virtual health visits, but also being able to

Ashleigh Killian  34:08

help connect people and patients with vaccines. So we scheduled all of our vaccines through the mobile app. The mobile app allows our patients to schedule appointments, find appointments, speak to their provider, they're able to manage family members health records through a proxy. It's been really helpful in a sticky future for our consumers and patients and in building probably retention or patients because it's so easy to utilize. And it has been a really key effort for us in formulating that retention strategy, but also kind of guiding us through the pandemic.

Lynn Purdy 34:47

Really. Ashleigh, I have a question for you. I'm constantly amazed at how some older patients are adapting to all the Tools? Are you seeing any shift in age groups? So who are using the mobile app? Especially with COVID?

Ashleigh Killian 35:08

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I will even speak to my father in law, who will put that piece are very comfortable pulling out his mobile app and emailing his provider with a question or scheduling an appointment. So we definitely have seen a level of comfort in utilizing the mobile app. It's just kind of the way we do things now. And it's been really nice in integrating that into our whole experience as well.

Lynn Purdy 35:36

That's going to be so critical, especially I mean, telehealth, is here to stay. And you know, getting really good at that, I think is going to be another quiver and our ability to market service lines. Well, and just being, you know, all digital all the time, that front door.

Ashleigh Killian 35:55

Absolutely. We've even seen some of our providers, because they become so comfortable during COVID Being able to do follow up visits through the app and a virtual health experience. So it's, it's interesting, and how, how it's changed.

Aaron Conant 36:14

Look at the patient acquisition side, right. I mean, the app is almost you've already have them acquired, what is the front end is, you know, what has changed? How do you look at that across? You know, all different service lines, but you know, different, you know, markets, different regions,

Ashleigh Killian 36:31

as a whole. Oh, in terms of utilizing acquisition through different markets?

Aaron Conant 36:37

Yeah. Yeah, in different venues. I mean, it seems like the app is going to be, you know, loyalty, retention, interaction engagement. But I also know, a lot of like, marketing is around, you know, the new, you know, new patient acquisition as a whole.

Ashleigh Killian 36:51

Yeah, absolutely. And we're seeing a lot of disruptors in that space, utilizing virtual primary care as the way in and as the acquisition tool. So I think just being able to have that app, and having the ability to conduct those virtual health visits through our app has been also play as the partner acquisition strategy.

Aaron Conant 37:12

There, Dara I kick it over to you, how do you guys view, you know, patient acquisition, you know, across multiple resource lines, different regions, does it vary by markets regions?

Dara Krueger  37:22

Absolutely. We have some pretty interesting direct response television, and direct response digital campaigns for heart, cancer and neurological services, services. And we're doing those regionally. So if we're sitting here in Cleveland, your dad's here, getting great care, maybe doesn't live in Cleveland, and people will drive from about six hours away to Cleveland. So this, what we've done for hurt is push out a television spot, which we built in house that has a trackable phone number, we understand the day parts that people are calling on, we have a back end process to answer those phone calls or those emails, and get those people in for for care. But again, these are areas that we know people will travel for care. And we do that, like I said, on digital, digital display, digital native, and television, all trackable, which is why we did a pilot, it worked, we get organizational funding to continue to do that. Then we have, again, nationally, regionally locally, all of our paid search campaigns, which are at least 150 By now, that can be at an individual level, like for cleft palate, all the way to coronary artery disease, and everything in between. And we use Google Search to do that. And again, it depends on we can track the ROI at a regional level because of our search team. And those campaigns are how far are people going to travel? How far do we see them traveling? And then what are the campaign ROI, and then locally? Locally, we've really gotten I think, to a good place with a number of our campaigns to we have nearly 100% Awareness were preferred in all service lines with in the seven county market. So we've gotten it down to a smaller number of service line campaigns here and just tend to focus on on branding and why you can get Cleveland clinic care at any one of our facilities, and you should trust that care, regardless of your main campus or one of our regional facilities.

Aaron Conant 39:39

They're super cool. They drove five hours. So it's, if you're doing the six hour radius, they fall and just feedback, so nicely done. Lynn that, is that true?

Lynn Purdy 39:51

Yeah. So I'm new to Tennessee, but what I've learned is we've all known you know, health care is local er, that was the mantra, right. But this is a state that gets rural very quickly right outside of Nashville, for example. And we have three community hospitals that are further out. And patients would really, they trust the Vanderbilt brand. And so going to their community hospital, now our job is making sure that they're aware of these services. And using digital, first if we can to create that awareness and drive patients to those facilities versus coming into Nashville, because like every big metropolitan area, we have lots of challenges with traffic. And you know, we'd have decades of building that great Vanderbilt brand around Nashville, but we're doing the same thing out in the communities. And we have ongoing sort of what we call foundational search ads for our service lines, again, to drive awareness, and then we do more targeted ads. And we are regional, we also have done some things in airports and TV that are at more of the brand level driving people into our entire enterprise. And that that's proving to be very successful.

Aaron Conant 41:22

Tom I love to hear your thoughts here. I mean, this is like, right in your wheelhouse, right? Working aspect and everything.

Tom Hileman 41:28

Yeah, we love patient acquisition. So whether it's specialty care, primary care, it's, uh, they lights us up. I mean, so I mean, it's to me, it's fundamental right service lines want patients and I think there's an Ashleigh's point, a retention, and reactivation is critical. But often for many of those specialty conditions. It's a, it's a one time kind of entry, cough powder is a good example, that epilepsy surgery, things like that, that are kind of very narrow and very niche. So those things fit incredibly well into this highly digitized world, especially when you have data for targeting and for your geographies. I think that's a challenge for all three of these health systems is they have very urban environments and very rural environments. And actually, in Texas, I mean, I don't know, it's hundreds and hundreds of a mile. I mean, you have a huge state like. So there's a lot of diverse portions of that. And I think, Aaron, what we're seeing a lot of is just people using the digital tools to really highly segment and target where they're going, looking for specific types of patients and specific types of services. And also, it can be patient acquisition. BLC uses effective lever for planning. So as people add hospitals or facilities and you're standing up a new practice, and you want to make sure that you have enough volume to fulfill to pay for the building and all the physicians and clinicians that come with that having a really well defined patient acquisition model can grant can give you great comfort to know that you'll be able to drive the value in that you need for those facilities. So it's a huge area, we get to be probably talking about acquisition all day, for certain, but it's certainly for service lines, it's paramount. It's one of the key pieces that we all have to deliver as marketers. So a couple of things that

Aaron Conant 43:13

come to mind. We've mentioned like, you know, what's happened over COVID? You know, if we kind of want to go around a little bit into here, it'd be great to hear, you know, actually start with you is what's changed for you the most over COVID in service line marketing, are you approaching things differently? And if so, you know, how so? And the next phase of that question is going to be like, what do you see what's coming next? What are you prepping? For for 2022 2023? You know, we'd love to hear your thoughts there. So what's changed the most over the past 16 months? And then what do you think is gonna change the most over the next 16 months as

Ashleigh Killian  43:52

a whole? Sure, I think what changed the most, you know, we had to pivot really quickly. And so I think, understanding pivot based on our marketing efforts, some of them we had to put on hold entirely and now we're starting to see the business come back. We're starting to see people getting those prevention screenings, but we're also seeing some things taking a little bit longer to bounce back. I think some of those elective surgeries, I think nationally, we've seen elective II surgeries, you know, take a little bit longer to bounce back. So understanding one is how can we be more agile and what we do I think we all took a lesson from COVID and how to be a child and quick, quickly pivot.

Ashleigh Killian  44:36

We've had to put, I guess, pilots in place and learning from her pilots and then scaling across our different regions. I think looking forward to really see a new emphasis on personalized content and getting really building out our content strategies, but looking at ways we can make that a little bit more personal To the individual as as they're receiving either receiving care or for a searching for care and how we can apply content on an individual level. So I see a need for that, and a real strategy needed for that. Now, I

Aaron Conant 45:15

love it because that is like, it's the, the shift, right? I mean, that's what happens in the direct consumer side. And all the online shopping we're doing. Everybody wants everything incredibly personalized from what's showing up and you know, an offering or a search query, or whatever it is, that's completely moving over into the healthcare aspect of it. Right. I want your

Dara Krueger 45:36

very carefully Yes, very carefully. Tell me what kind of shoes I want. You tell me when they're on sale. Yeah, but if I've been searching for cancer care, and you're going to follow me and I see something, then I get concerned. And as you said, these, we represent three very trusted brands in our markets. And we have more than just our own markets, we have the reputation, I'd say all of this nationally. And we have to tread very carefully, because people do want customized content. They also this is a low interest category, I don't want to sign and maybe I'll sign up for health information. And so we have strategies there to build our brand using Shouldn't you know, general health and wellness information? But when when I suddenly have a risk, I've been identified being at risk for something, the loved ones been diagnosed? How do we give them care? How do we personalize the care with making it so they feel that their privacy is protected? That will be a huge challenge for us going forward? That's a very huge important point. Yeah,

Aaron Conant 46:43

it are. So Dara what's changed the most for you over the over the past 16 months? And then, you know, what do you what are you looking at going forward?

Dara Krueger 46:51

Yeah, I think we've talked about like virtual care, it's really exciting. Virtual second opinion, I think we've got more traction, there, we have a we have a better something that's better operationalized. So at the beginning of COVID, virtual care was a big push just being there and allowing our providers to see their patients, especially for follow up. That's still being sorted out, so that there's reliable platforms for patients and caregivers. So I think that's still all getting figured out. Or, like I said, our virtual Second Opinion is probably the best established technology there. I think going forward, the challenge is a little basic, but primary care providers. There are just the ebbs and flows, trying to keep primary care practices, trying to work with nurse care nurse practitioners, and being the referral source for them. This, we're just there's so many doctors, and there's so many people changing roles and changing locations as we grow. And we and going forward, as there's more pressure and fewer primary care doctors out there. And there's pressure on all recruiting for all types of health care providers, making sure that those referrals, that they know how to make those referrals easily they can do so with trust, I actually think that's in the next 1218 24 months is going to be a challenge that we have to try to address. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 48:20

Lynn over to you. Yeah. Biggest silver COVID And, you know, coolest things coming up. Yeah, or two things.

Lynn Purdy  48:31

Right. I think what we've learned from COVID is we have to be nimble, and we can't forget what we learned about being nimble and opportunistic. I think these are some new skills that all of our teams have learned. And it's going to take us into the future. For Vanderbilt, you know, really building that telehealth. Practice, I kind of like to call it you know, Would you like fries with that? Making sure whenever we see a patient or we put out, you know, any kind of marketing content, that we're reminding them that this is an option. It's convenient, they're learning how to do it, assuming the stimulus package goes forward, and we get really good infrastructure with broadband, we know that this is only going to grow. So we have to continue to, you know, make that option known to patients and make it always constantly thinking about how can we make it easy for our patients to access this? And I would say in parallel, we have to do a good job of making sure that we make it easy for our referring providers to get patients into our system. Make sure they understand what we offer, again, highly specialized care. But sometimes these complex systems is just difficult to figure out. You know how to have an actual access those from a referral standpoint, and I think we have to get, you know, really good at that. And that's a, that's always a challenge, right? Because these people are constantly bombarded with information from all sources, whether it's pharmaceutical companies or other providers. And so we have to figure out a way to be relevant to them and help them. It's not just we want your patients, but here's what we can do to help you. So finding, finding different avenues for that, and being helpful, I think, to the referring providers is going to be in the future really more and more important to us.

Aaron Conant 50:44

Tom will kind of kick it over to you kind of wrap it up the you have the, you know, you sit in the cool seat of working with a ton of different, you know, you know, health organizations and health systems as a whole, to kind of have this, you know, catbird seat on what's going on, I'd love to hear from you. Are you seeing, you know, change the most over code? And then, you know, what should people be aware of, from your standpoint, over, you know, the next 16 months or so?

Tom Hileman  51:08

Sure. Now, I'm really lucky to be working with all these great health systems. So I learned, I learned more from them. And I think that that then I often give back, but certainly, I think what I've learned from COVID, I think that many panels already hit on most of these points, but it's just agility, right? The ability, I've never had to have clients, my clients asked to spin up campaigns or spin down things so fast, right? So based on capacity based on perhaps even availability of healthcare facilities, or government regulation. So that ability to be nimble, I think Lynn talked a lot about that, I think we can't lose that like that. That's a lesson that we don't want to forget. for that. I also think the ability to be proactive to know what campaigns are going to work and have models for that. So that when we know that the children's value returns, right, children's was really pushed back hard, because people didn't want to bring their kids in the facilities that may have COVID patients, right or perceived to have those things. So the ability to be nimble to be able to be proactive, and plan. And so when we need to turn the volume up, or turn the amp up, as Stuart might say, well, then that we were able to do that, right. So that we have we have this thing's built and ready to go and scale and plan models for that. So I think that agility and plan and the ability to scale up and scale down is gonna be more critical, because unfortunately, I don't think COVID is down with us anytime soon. So I think we're all going to be living in a little bit of a lumpy world, when it comes to specialty in primary care for a while. So the ability to handle that. In the forward looking space. I'm really excited about a lot of the artificial intelligence offerings. We mentioned personalization, and personalization at scale. If we're going to be able to do that without having to hire lots and lots of people and spend lots of lots of time we're going to have to be able to use some machine learning to be able to do that kind of targeting in a non creepy way as Dara would probably not or had to for sure, right? We certainly retargeting is not necessarily what we want to be doing all the time in healthcare, like you might do with shoes or other things. But I think conversational marketing is another area. So chat box, any of that self service piece that you can offload, from your call centers, access centers, I think, I know the labor shortage there is hard for all of our health systems that we interact with. So the ability to use these digital tools to help people interact with health systems and get their fundamental questions answered, I think is a really important thing. And I think finally, I agree with Lynn on the b2b side, I think that referral pattern, there's channels like, there's a huge amount of opportunity that we have to make a lot of influence positively, obviously depends on whether employed and contracted positions in different models. But I think for all health systems, there's a lot of Greenfield there, that we can certainly influence the referral pattern, you influence everything in terms of that patients care for the ongoing thing. So it's a super exciting time to be a marketing tools and technologies are exploding all the time. And then COVID has really taken us and made and driven for the digitization, and we're not going back anytime soon, like so. We're never going back, I should say. But we're, we've heard the word remove the word soon from that. So awesome.

Aaron Conant 54:14

You know, thanks so much, LynnDaraAshleighTom, you know, anybody wants to follow up connection? Let us know for sure. If you're looking for any help in this space whatsoever, Tom and the team over Hileman just awesome all around Rei, people come highly recommended from a ton of organizations within the network as a whole, you know, strategy, guidance, you know, help across the board. 100% worth putting some time on the calendar to chat with him. The team over there this they're just fantastic people as a whole. With that, I think we're gonna wrap it up again, if you want any connections, just anybody on the panel stages, let us know, networking, knowledge sharing, that's what we do here. With that. We're going to wrap it up. Thanks, Tom. When are actually Yes, fantastic. This has been super fun with that. We're gonna wrap it up. Hope everybody has a fantastic rest of the week. Everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. All right. Hey, everybody. Thank you