Last week members of our team attended the 2024 Healthcare Marketing & Physicians Summit. Keaton, Jacob, and Reagan enjoyed three days of insightful lectures, panels, and networking! We know not everyone had the opportunity to partake, so we’ve gathered our key insights to share.
Conference Overview:
Our team could agree that this was not only an insightful conference, but a validating one. Every organization we work with is facing similar challenges from patient acquisition to staff retention to maintaining HIPAA compliance in patient outreach efforts. It was incredibly validating and inspiring to unite with organizations tackling these same issues.
Our team identified 3 key themes across the sessions:
- Do Not Let Marketing Become Siloed
This theme was so common from session to session. Every successful story highlighted partnerships with other departments within the organization. Building strong relationships with HR helped organizations succeed in physician acquisition and retention. Additionally, building trust with the C-suite and understanding the connection between data, finance, and marketing ultimately allowed marketing campaigns to be successful and improve patient outcomes. From piecemealing budgets to understanding clinical needs, having a marketing team that has strong relationships with other departments is fundamental.
- Keep the Patient at the Center of Your Efforts
This theme came up in nearly every single session we attended and while it may seem rudimentary, it may easily slip to the back of the mind. One panel showed how sometimes the brand promise and the patient experience don’t align and this creates a bottleneck in your organization. Building strong relationships on the clinical side and understanding the entire patient experience is a critical component to marketing across the entire patient journey into ascension and advocacy. Additionally, using behavioral economics allows you to create insightful messaging that connects with a specific patient’s needs. We loved a session that made the connection between community needs and social determinants of health. Nationwide Children’s Hospital identified the major challenges in their community that were preventing children from receiving pediatric care and started their efforts there. Remember, your core competency is the patient, not one service line. Framing your efforts on the patient prevents you from isolating yourself from patients.
- Data…Data…Data
Our team has met with many organizations whose marketing departments are siloed and are not using data to inform the best uses of their marketing dollars. The old theory when it came to healthcare marketing involved taking your most successful providers or service lines and investing more marketing dollars into them. The problem with this is that it creates a bottleneck and capacity problem. Marketers must champion their access to up-to-date data. Access to current data is a challenge in many organizations. Advocating for strong data partners and building worthwhile relationships with the data keepers within your company will go a long way when it comes to procuring the data you need. Ultimately this will allow you to build specific campaigns and see their impact on patient acquisition, retention, and reactivation. Organizations should utilize this data to determine high-opportunity providers and service lines to center campaigns around. Additionally, having access to current data will allow you to track the general impact of your campaign. Your campaign should lead to a lift in the service area you are advertising; if your look-back window data doesn’t indicate an impact, it is time to consider what might be the hold-up: ad fatigue, poor targeting tactics, weak call to action…
Our Favorite Sessions:
Read on to hear directly from Jacob and Reagan on their favorite sessions and key takeaways.
I see first-hand how sometimes CEOs have challenging requests for their Marketing teams. I loved this panel with Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer of Stanford Healthcare, Michiko Tanabe, Chief Marketing & Communication Officer at Nationwide Children’s Hospital Donna Teach, and Executive Vice President of Strategy at Bowstring, David Perry. These three did a great job sharing some of the steep expectations of their CEOs and how they have risen to the occasion.
One of my favorite themes from this conversation was centered around budgeting.
- Marketing Budgets are Hard
Donna put it well, when advocating for budget, its hard for marketing managers and CMOs to advocate in the same room as members on the clinical side who need new equipment or staff. Donna shared how this was a challenge that led her to self-advocate and develop a new budgeting process for her marketing department. This was key because patient outreach and education is critical and should be treated as such, without it feeling like a battle and competition with clinical needs.
- Repurpose Content
When budgets are tight, don’t be afraid to repurpose content! Michiko showed how her team repurposed designs from Heart Month to reach non-English speakers by shifting the content and cultural references of the piece. Additionally, her team has repurposed photos from their original focus to other service lines. Effectively repurposing content can build trust that your team is cost-efficient and free up space for other efforts in your marketing budget.
I also enjoyed hearing how each of these marketers built strong relationships with their CEOs so that they were valued and had a seat at the decision-making table. Michiko shared how sometimes this means digging deeper. Sometimes her CEO has big ideas and rather than focusing on the idea it is critical to dive into what the problem is that he is trying to solve. By digging into the problem, she has built trust within her organization and can develop solutions that best solve the problem.
Cleveland Clinic is leading the charge when it comes to implementing AI into outreach and education strategies. In this session, we heard from Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Paul Matsen, and Executive Director of Digital Marketing, Amanda Todorovich. What I loved most about this session is that Paul and Amanda were not afraid to break two common misconceptions about AI and Marketing:
- MYTH 1: AI can replace individuals on the marketing team
AI is not a replacement for individuals, but rather a tool to promote efficiency and performance. Affirming this to your team is critical when implementing AI tools. If your team thinks this is a replacement for their work, they are not going to buy in, wasting valuable time and resources. Cleveland Clinic overcame this sentiment by engaging all members at all levels of management and setting clear expectations and intentions.
- MYTH 2: AI is inexpensive.
Yes, there are some free versions of AI tools that organizations can certainly take advantage of. With this said, at an enterprise level, AI is not inexpensive. However, it can be very cost-efficient and cost-effective. Integrating an AI strategic plan will be an investment for organizations but done well can prove very effective.
In addition to their ability to break misconceptions, Cleveland Clinic did a great job of building a roadmap with goals when taking on the project of implementing AI into their marketing activities.
- Focus on a few select technologies with wide-scale application
Cleveland Clinic focused its efforts on five use cases developed by their team using AI for writing assistance & content generation, social media & brand amplification, podcast & video editing, and content analysis & keyword planning. They identified these pilot projects as opportunities to allow AI to do ‘busy work’ so that the team could focus on larger projects. I also appreciated that the team was clear that AI was a starting point for rough drafts and ideation; a human’s eyes and hands should touch every project before implementation, especially in healthcare where we are directly impacting health outcomes and lives.
- Assess vendors and prepare a change management strategy
Once they selected focus areas and use cases, Cleveland Clinic developed an implementation strategy and appointed leaders on each project to provide accountability.
- Activate pilot projects across selected use cases and teams during 2024
Setting a timeline to implement the projects was important, but Cleveland Clinic also specified that they were not more specific with dates because they wanted to get it right. They anticipated the likelihood of delays and included flexibility in their timeline so that they were not rushed through implementation.
There are a few different vendors and partners that Cleveland Clinic is using for AI integration that would serve as a great starting point for organizations looking to implement AI into their marketing activities.
Overall, a great session and I hope next year we can learn more about the results and next steps of this project.
Conclusion:
We were so glad members of our team had the opportunity to hear from organizations large and small and collaborate to improve health outcomes and population health. We made so many great connections and are looking forward to the opportunity to expand our strategic partnerships to better serve current and future clients. See you next year HMPS!