The viewpoint of someone new to healthcare  

• Heather transitioned from her role as SVP of Global Brands at Hyatt Hotels Corp to Chief Marketing, Communications, and Experience officer at Henry Ford at the beginning of 2020.  
• While differences were apparent between industries – particularly regulation – she found that the value of experience is similar between healthcare and hospitality.   
• Healthcare has a huge opportunity to think more broadly about experience beyond in-patient care.   

Could healthcare be more similar to hospitality than we think?  

• Loyalty is about driving increased engagement, preference, and choice to maximize lifetime value. We can increase loyalty by catering to the consumer’s experience of our brand.   
• In healthcare, lifetime value could encompass a 50-60-year relationship with a patient and everyone they influence. Considering the power of word-of-mouth referrals in healthcare, that’s a tremendous lifetime value opportunity.    
• We don’t need a tiered approach like hospitality, but what we do need is a way to retain consumers by recognizing their loyalty with value. In our space, rewards can include things like remembering preferences or proactive scheduling.    

Your brand is your greatest asset  

• To build our brand, we have to ask ourselves how we can create an experience that differentiates us, matches what people are looking for in their experience, and ensures that we’re delivering on that experience from an operations perspective.  
• Henry Ford is a 105-year-old brand with an international presence. That comes with great opportunity and responsibility because its team must maintain brand equity earned over time while also building its brand to be relevant in the future.   
• A brand promise that is understood and executed organization-wide is the key to staying relevant in the present and future.   

How control fits into the healthcare consumer experience  

• We all have an inherent need to control the things we can’t control. When we feel out of control, it creates stressors and anxieties which negatively impact the experience.   
• The way our health system is structured now doesn’t give patients much control, offering health system marketers the opportunity to differentiate their brands by placing control back in the hands of the patients.   
• For example, we can help patients navigate decisions by anticipating their next actions and understanding their stressors and feelings. This understanding ultimately allows physicians to focus on what they do best – healing people.   

• CEO of UPS in NY times 
• Lego makes strides in sustainability 

Two sides of the same coin: Purpose & brand experience 

• Health systems need to approach branding differently than they have in the past to compete with powerful consumer brands establishing footholds in healthcare. One of the ways systems can embark on a new path is by rethinking "purpose.'
• Most health systems and hospitals assume they have purpose down pat – after all, they save lives every day. But there can be more to purpose.
• FutureBrand looks at the balance of purpose and brand experience. To them, purpose means nothing if it is not substantiated through a brand experience – regardless of audience.

Redefining brand purpose 

• What brand purpose is: A promise lived in every action or engagement – it has many hands, many stories, and is felt by all of your customers and employees. It is the tangible and enduring mark a brand leaves on the world, how it lives in the world, and makes it better than it found it.
• What brand purpose isn't: A compulsory mission statement on your website, a promise you make 1-2 times a year in a campaign or activation, or the words that are referred to now and again in company town halls and stakeholder presentations.

What it means to be a sustainable brand 

• COVID-19 and climate concerns have up-leveled what sustainability means today.
• Sustainability is no longer taking siloed actions for the good of the planet; instead, it's a full-court press to improve the well-being of the planet, the lives of people who live on it.
• Brand purpose goes beyond consumer experience
• The difference between a high-performing brand and a low-performing brand depends on the brand's ability to balance purpose and experience.
• The P&G brand does this well by actively living up to its corporate promise of "Touching lives, improving lives."
• A brand-led approach lessens the need to react to heightened public expectations.
  
   

Takeaways

• Throughout his career, Matt has taken on the mindset of a disruptor. He was an early adopter of the title, Chief Consumer Officer, technologies like chatbots, and star rating systems.
• Matt now works for Summit Health, the byproduct of a private equity-backed merger between CityMD and Summit Medical Group.

Advantages of working in a non-hospital system 

• Because Summit Health operates largely in the urgent care setting and doesn't own hospitals, they're not bogged down by fixed costs or financial dependence on high acuity admissions.
• Instead, Summit Health can focus on delivering the best possible care and experience outside of a hospital setting. Summit Health, however, does partner with hospitals and physicians to accommodate high acuity cases.
• The transition from fee-for-service to value-based care forces hospitals to replace lost revenue from the top of the funnel with revenue from high acuity settings.
• Summit Health has low acuity access points with retail-like infrastructure in denser urban settings to provide easy access to high-quality care. This network infrastructure works because care and financial incentives are aligned. 

How to leverage consumer data and understand the consumer  

• For the first 5-10 years of his healthcare career, Matt listened to doctors, administrators, surveys, and focus groups, to understand consumers rather than listening to the data.
• He found that this produces a skewed understanding of our audiences because the patient may see – or report – preferences different than they are in reality. For example, patients may weight quality higher than their behaviors suggest.  
   

A little healthy discord on the importance of brand 

• According to Matt, in healthcare, brand don't impact patient decisions and needs. Instead, he recommends direct response advertising meant to drive people into your funnel and downward.
• Matt concedes that healthcare brand advertising can be effective when introducing a new brand or if your system has a large, easily accessible, low acuity service line such as urgent care centers.
• Brand advertising, in Matt's opinion, may serve internal purposes, however. For instance, some physicians and staff members may derive value from advertising because it recognizes their accomplishments.
• Chris agrees that brand advertising for clout is not productive but believes that brand is about driving people to take action to engage with you.

Focus on physician relations 

• Doctors play a huge role in keeping patients in a system because they're making the referrals. To improve, we need to understand what drives physician referral behavior.
• This is a "ground war" approach that is extremely difficult but yields a high return.
• Marketers should consider operational blockers to simplify referral documentation for doctors.

Using data to better understand our audiences 

• Last week we discussed the use of ethnographies to better understand our audiences by experiencing their lifestyles. In this episode, we expand on that topic sharing how data can supplement ethnographic research.
• When working with Community Health Innovations (CHI), we used data to scale the findings from our ethnographic research to encompass the community rather than the select households interviewed.
• We pooled the data from the full county to identify who might be susceptible to diabetes by comparing it to SDoH characteristics defined by the National Institute of Health. The ethnographies were applied to this data to make channel and messaging decisions.

Using data to identify and understand opportunities for growth 

• One of our health system clients wanted to know the viability of expanding into a new market in Manhattan by acquiring a physician practice.
• To understand the viability of this acquisition, they needed visibility into ROI potential, the practice’s current patients, where the patients come from, and how willing they are to travel to a new location.
• To clarify these unknowns and define market potential, we analyzed survey results, patient data, claims data, and consumer demographic data.

Using data to better target our marketing efforts 

• Another health system client is continuing its path towards aggressive growth and expansion, emphasizing the need to understand the nuances of consumers across markets.
• ReviveHealth provided detailed market research focused on analyzing demographics, health behaviors, media preferences, and competitive insights for each new location.
• We were able to answer questions such as “where is the concentration of growing families?” “How can we best reach them?” “Which competition is close by?”
• Armed with data, the marketing team was able to position itself as a proactive strategic partner to the organization and provide marketing strategies to support growth.

What is ethnography, and why is it valuable? 

• Surveys and focus groups can result in a “contaminated” interpretation of the truth in which the context of the survey or focus group influences participants’ responses.
• One of the best ways to learn about your audiences is to observe their words, emotions, and actions in the context of their daily lives – this is called ethnography.
• Living and following your audience’s lifestyle offers a more accurate picture of what they’re thinking and doing, as it reveals unconscious actions and interpretations.
• For example, if you are evaluating product placement in grocery stores, observing someone shop in the context of their daily lives – every item they look at, reach for, or put back – may reveal more than the participant is aware of.

When to use, when not to use 

• Ethnography should be performed at the onset of a project because it allows us to understand human motivations and behavior that can then guide analytics and strategy.
• Ethnographic research offers rich opportunities for health system marketers to understand their patient populations because so much of health happens every day.
• For instance, a chronic condition can affect a patient’s everyday life – what they can and can’t do and the decisions they make. Understanding these lifestyle challenges allows health system marketers to cater to them.
• Ethnography is not a good approach for tactical tasks such as A/B testing creative or messaging because it can overcomplicate more minor decisions, making them more cumbersome.

If you like people watching, you’re halfway there 

• Don’t talk too much, and let the action unfold in front of you. Try to make your footprint in the research as minimal as possible.
• Much of the time, ethnographic research means going into someone’s house, which is very personal. This is a privilege, so marketers need to do everything they can to make subjects feel comfortable.
• Interviewing populations without conditions can be as powerful as interviewing those with conditions because it offers a more holistic community perspective.
• For example, ReviveHealth and Community Health Innovations (CHI) partnered to perform ethnographic research on diabetes in Monterey County, CA. We spoke to 10 families around the county with similar education levels without screening for diabetes.
• Interviewing independent of diagnosis revealed patients suffering from diabetes without a diagnosis. It also gave us an understanding of the community dynamics diabetics live in.

Setting the stage  

• Healthcare is way behind in the consumer space. Fortunately, we have other industries to learn from when merging online and in-person experiences.
• Chris DuFresne, Vice President of Experience and Marketing Operations, draws from his experience at e-commerce giants Target and Macy's for inspiration at Allina Health.
• Dufresne acknowledges that health systems aren't just businesses but states that they need to bolster their businesses to support our missions. To do so, we must redefine patients as "consumers" because patients represent just the person receiving care when other stakeholders – consumers – are involved.

Transferring retail knowledge to healthcare 

• Our industry was built for the provider, forcing patients to navigate a complex ecosystem. How do we deconstruct this physician-centric model in a way that puts the consumer first?
• Chris DuFresne challenged health systems to use consumer-centric industries as benchmarks. For example, health systems can ask themselves, "How do we make patient scheduling as simple as OpenTable?"
• Part of becoming consumer-centric in healthcare is honoring various consumer preferences and needs without overwhelming consumers with options. For example, some people may want to call in to schedule an appointment, while others may like to schedule online. The art is making each option convenient and personable even if utilizing call centers.

When does a connected experience matter most? 

• The consumer is ok with asynchronous virtual care for minor ailments like sinus infections that are somewhat isolated.
• Patients requiring both digital and onsite experiences offer opportunities for health systems to prove their value to patients through connected experiences.
• For instance, a digital encounter may require labs. How can a health system get these labs without leaving and redoing the whole visit again? How should that visit be billed, and which services are covered by insurance? How does the consumer know that the price of a virtual visit matches the value they receive?

Decoding alphabet soup 

• With so many applications, and numerous models to be built upon, it can be challenging to understand Artificial Intelligence (AI) and where it fits within the care delivery landscape.
• AI is a broad umbrella describing technology’s ability to execute human behavior.
• Machine learning is a type of AI in which technology that learns from data sets without the need for continual programming. Machine learning identifies trends and correlations in data, using these as benchmarks to set its course of learning.
• It’s common for AI to get compared to sophisticated excel sheet algorithms. The difference however, is that the excel sheet doesn’t learn from the data, but instead executes the exact functions its instructed to do. AI, on the other hand, takes data and executes functions based on trends in the data.

Today's opportunities to improve care delivery with AI 

• As humans, we’re inherently biased. We filter the world through a lens that reflects our unique experiences. AI helps to remove biases from data analytics by making decisions based purely on data rather than human assumptions.
• When it comes to diagnostics and preventative outreach, this objective analysis is crucial because it expands our understanding of who is at risk for which diseases.
• In cardiology, for example, we commonly assume that those over the age of 55 have an increased risk of heart attack. AI could disprove or build upon this assumption, to include other at-risk populations.
• Chatbots also present an opportunity for health systems to improve care delivery because they offer an accessible way for patients to interact with their health system. With the right authentication layers and connectivity to other data sources, AI could address the user’s intent and channel it in the right way without burdening staff.

AI advancements to keep an eye on 

• While Elon Musk may have predicted 2025 as the “year of singularity,” Chris Hemphill, VP Applied AI & Growth at SymphonyRM says it’s too soon to tell because unknowns will undoubtedly appear.
• One direction AI could take us – a direction we’re just on the fringes of now – is proving direct causation, being able to definitively identify why certain things are happening.
• Domain experts and clinicians will need to be increasingly involved in AI application to make sure learning models are founded on a true understanding of the practice and context, utilizing the right questions and labels.
• There will likely be an increased focus on weeding out biases from data collection. If the data that AI analyses reflects biases, it will embed those biases in all of its outputs. In the future we will see increased focus on collecting unbiased data.

Who are you, what is your brand promise? 

• Mount Sinai Health System is different from many academic medical centers because the school was born out of the health system.  
• Their primary commitments – a defined brand, commitment to growth, organizational excellence – all roll up to facilitating a quality patient experience where the customer journey matches the expectations set by the brand promise.  
• Brand encompasses more than advertising – it should serve as the "soul" or DNA of an organization, driving each function with purpose.  
• Mount Sinai committed to an organization-wide rollout to define its brand position, including a series of workshops, one-on-one interviews, coordination with HR, testing, and iteration.  
• Definitions are critical to the success of brand positioning because not everyone has the same baseline understanding of marketing. Teams must define core concepts like positioning, brand, and logo. 

Organizational feng shui: Centralizing the marketing function 

• Value-based care, digital health innovation, and consolidation have created a significant debate on centralizing the marketing function in health systems.
• Mount Sinai saw an opportunity to drive organization-wide efficiencies by centralizing its marketing function. However, to execute, they needed to stay aligned with business goals and develop a scalable strategy while maintaining chair relationships. 
• The Mount Sinai team needed to demonstrate that decisions made in silos result in disconnect from a larger mission and a loss of efficacy. For instance, some facilities were bidding on the same keywords in their SEM programs, ultimately driving up costs for everyone.   

The real digital front door 

• Most health systems' real digital front door is google, as 80% of customers start online – even if they've already received a diagnosis and referral. Health systems need to show up with content that meets these research needs. 
• Once you've assisted the research process, you need to make the decision easy for them with convenient access to your services. Patients with diagnoses will likely be emotional, and a challenging provider selection process makes for a stressful experience.  
• Each diagnosis is unique, meaning patient research needs per diagnosis are also unique. To accommodate patients, we must build numerous decision-making pathways based on diagnosis without overwhelming the patient. 
• Technology is valuable because it offers a virtual experience. It's valuable because it's convenient. Don't over-invest in technology that doesn't serve the goal of a convenient patient experience.  

Canoe vs. speedboat 

• Transformation in healthcare before COVID-19 was like a canoe – slow and steady, but after we were operating like a speedboat, trying to merge our normal operations with a sudden influx of COVID-19 related demands.
• Banner Health had invested in the technology that prepared them for when those boats changed speed. These investments focus on reducing friction points for patients.

The pursuit of consumerism perfection 

• Banner Health is using consumer benchmarks across industries to set their pursuit of a better consumer experience.
• Banner Health shifted from a traditional hospital mission statement to “making healthcare easier, so life can be better,” to align their efforts in a way that serves the consumer experience. A digital front door was critical to live up to this new mission.
• The team started writing content for engaged consumers who aren’t necessarily patients today but could become patients in the future to build a relationship with people before they become patients.

Optimizing the digital “back end” 

• Health systems need data to personalize marketing, but much of the information they collect is PHI.
• Banner Health implemented Salesforce as their CRM because they needed a way to use consumer data instead of patient records to improve the consumer experience.
• Banner Health integrated Cerner and Salesforce to empower call centers to deliver a more informed, more efficient patient experience.
• “Return to care” emails were personalized and automated to be sent from each patients’ physician with the date of their last visit — the result: a 50% open rate and a spike in direct bookings.

Feedback loops are a must

• Banner Health has a weekly cross-channel communications meeting based on constant polling such as return to care hesitancy and receptiveness to advertising.
• This meeting allows them to monitor consumer sentiments and how marketing should be talking to consumers.

• Five long-term consumer behavior changes due to COVID-19
• The Joe Public Retreat 2022 

The "untouchables" 

• Making room for new, high-ROI initiatives could mean retiring old practices that no longer make sense in today's changed (and continually changing) world. We call these old practices the "untouchables" because they're often repeated on behalf of leadership without a clear business case.
• We discussed three "untouchable" marketing initiatives, including open enrollment campaigns, disease of the month campaigns, and the U.S. News & World Report.

Modern brands are human brands 

• The way people interact with brands has changed, and health system marketers must be more creative and relevant in how they connect with their audiences.
• Staying creative and relevant means we have to become human brands, prioritizing honesty and authenticity while listening to our audiences at every opportunity.
• Patients' experience of your hospital or health system brand must match your brand promise – what your patients can expect from you at every step of their consumer journey.
• Today's consumers have more options, and those options often offer low-stakes trial periods, resulting in waning brand loyalty. To counter this trend, health brands must become human brands.

Thinking different, differently 

• Creativity means taking risks and ignoring unfounded doubts. But don't just be different to be different. Be different to resonate.
• Between COVID-19, social unrest, and election turmoil, events within the last year created stressors and ignited new fires. The result: changed behaviors.
• Multiculturalism is no longer a nice-to-have. It has to exist in the data we pull, the strategy we employ, and the creative we develop. It's not just about language.
• Can you still have a single brand slogan? Will a broad slogan resonate across audiences? What are the implications if that is the case? Hospital and health system marketers must consider these questions.