SHSMD 2018 Wrap Up

This past week I was able to attend the 2018 SHSMD Connections conference as well as the Executive Dialogue session on Saturday in chilly and rainy Seattle along with the Healthgrades team.  There were several key themes that I took away from the conference from my conversations with conference attendees from hospitals/health systems and the different sessions that I attended throughout the week.

While population health still came up in a number of sessions it seemed to be less of a focus than in the past few years. According to Kan Gacka from S&P Gloabal typically less than 5% of patients at a health system are considered at risk so the expected jump to population health may be slowing. There was also a significant amount of discussion around all of the mergers, partnerships and acquisitions and just how big some of the biggest systems have gotten over the last 18-24 months and the competitive impact.

Disruption
There was a large focus on disruption in many of the key note and breakout sessions. We may finally be hitting a breaking point with consumer and patient frustrations with the current status quo in healthcare. Indu Subaya’s Co-founder of Health 2.0 noted in her session that Health IT investment have doubled in the last year alone with some of the largest investments in telemedicine and virtual health.

Access
There were several discussions around the maturity of Access to Care plans and departments being formed to support strategic plans around access. While there have been strides to improve access for patients there are still huge gaps compared to expectations of patients.

Katie Miller, VP of Access to Care at Ochsner Health System indicated that they focus on three key areas when it comes to access.

1. Those patients seeking service
2. Coordinating Care
3. Post Care & Follow Up

According to Katie consumers would rather wait 30 extra minutes in a provider’s office than wait two weeks for the next appointment. Katie also shared that employees of Ochsner book approximately 30% of their appointments online which creates great evangelists of the health system and access strategy as employees share their positive experiences with others.

Culture
An unexpected theme for me that popped up in several discussions and sessions at SHSMD was the impact that your health system’s culture can have on the patient experience. Several executives in the Executive Dialogue session on Saturday mentioned how most strategic plans are extremely similar these days and that how your employees interact with patients can be a key differentiator for your health system. At one large health system in the New York area the CEO meets with every single employee at their first day orientation to stress how important culture and going above and beyond for the patient can be to the bottom line. When the culture at a health system is strong execution can be turned into a strategic advantage in a competitive market.

Consumer Experience/Consumerism
As patients we’ve all experienced frustration when trying to make appointments, come in for visits and get the appropriate follow up information. An executive at Saturday’s session quoted Dr. Klasko the CEO from Jefferson Health as saying “We are asking Primary Care Provider’s to be the quarterback of the patient experience but we are paying them like kickers” as PCP’s are typically the lowest paid groups of doctors at an organization but typically have the largest impact on the patient experience.

The other trend that was mentioned several times at SHSMD that may have a positive impact on the patient experience is that ownership of the patient experience is being taken away from the IT team and moved over to marketing at many organizations. This is an interesting trend that can have a positive impact to tie digital efforts by the marketing teams to the operations side of health systems to have a strong experience from start to finish.

As one of the presenters stated at the Executive Dialogue session as they talked about how Domino’s pizza has transformed their business “In today’s world digital strength is a strong predictor of revenue growth” it will be interesting to see which health systems can really make the leap and start to disrupt and impact healthcare in a positive way.

This was my first SHSMD in a few years and I really enjoyed Seattle as a new city on the conference tour. The Tuesday evening event at the Pop Culture museum was a great time and allowed for a ton of great conversations with colleagues and old friends.

Finally I felt the sessions were really strong this year and provided alot of great information and ideas to take back to our day jobs as we all wear our new Johnny Cupcakes t-shirts! See everyone next year at SHSMD 2019 in Nashville!

 

What does Digital Patient Engagement really look like?

Being in health care marketing for a while now I feel like this is year 10 or 11 of “This is the year of the Consumer in Healthcare” or “Consumerism will dominate health care this year” statements being made in the industry. While the industry has made incremental improvements in how health systems interact with consumers and patients (especially digitally) there are still huge gaps and opportunities to improve. So what does digital patient engagement really look like from the consumers perspective and from the health systems perspective?

Disjointed experience, better digitally now
Providence Health & Services published an article last year that states that their goal is to deliver a 10 times better online experience compared to offline for their customers therefore encouraging online engagement. (https://www.geekwire.com/sponsor-post/companies-shouldnt-exist-jobs-right/) Their thought process is that if you are able to engage a patient successfully online it is much easier to re-engage them on a continual basis throughout their patient journey.

The average patient visits their doctors 2.7 times per year, so how do we stay engaged with them the rest of the year? We all have experienced healthcare and know it is complicated and fragmented so how can we best assist patients through their journey? With consumers expectations of real time knowledge it is important that health systems are capturing data in as close to real time as possible. Having a marketing automation system and knowing where consumers are in their journey and knowing how they have interacted with your health system both digitally and offline makes it easier to provide appropriate content the next time they interact with you at any stage of their journey.

Customer Journey Mapping
One way that many health systems are working to improve the patient experience is by spending time mapping out the entire patient experience through Customer Journey Mapping.  Many healthcare marketing teams have built out personas of their key audiences in the past but the next step is to take those personas and determine how and when they will interact with your health system to determine the appropriate content, tone and ensure it is easy for them to continue to move through their journey.

Even determining how long a consumer or patient has been at a certain stage of their journey can impact the type of content they should receive. Someone who is researching a health topic for the first time is in a very different mind set than those who have been researching for several months and still deciding if they should meet with a doctor. Having technology and content that can support this type of segmentation is becoming more and more critical and patient expectations continue to evolve.

What does Digital Patient Engagement Look Like?
Over the past few at conferences and in meetings we’ve probably all heard the words “The Uber of healthcare” thrown out there. In my mind this is an unrealistic goal as Uber changed an entire industry very quickly. For those of us who have worked in healthcare we know it is highly unlikely that there is that dramatic of a shift in the way that health systems engage with their patients.

Instead an incremental approach is needed and I feel like we are in the middle of the first wave of change with more and more health systems leveraging CRM systems, marketing automation tools and making data driven decisions. However there are still huge gaps within organizations many times where operations is not tied to marketing and a patient can feel like they are not dealing with one health system.

To continue to improve digital engagement it will take not only improved technology choices but numerous groups and stakeholders within health systems to ensure all aspects of patient’s journey are covered. As we are all patients and have probably experience less than optimal experience in health care either online or offline we know that if even one aspect of our journey is disconnected it can cause frustration and angst. As we as a healthcare industry continue to evolve more than incremental improvements will be needed to truly satisfy our patients.

 

 

 

HMPSS 2018 Wrap Up

This year at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit (HMPSS) in Salt Lake City the focus of health systems seems to have shifted to more advanced marketing strategies and tactics. Nearly every health system seems to be targeting their patients and consumers now so the focus has shifted to how do it better than their competitors.

CRM Platforms, Marketing Automation, Paid Search and other strategies that were ahead of the curve a few years ago now appear to be table stakes just to be competitive in a given market. Sessions that I attended this week were focused around journey mapping, advanced analytics/data science and sophisticated tracking/ROI. Health systems are looking for what can differentiate themselves with patients in their markets and drive acquisition, engagement and loyalty.

Health systems also are shifting more of their time and resources towards maintaining loyalty of existing patients than in the past. By increasing loyalty by just 5% you can drive an increase in profitability by over 25% when you take into account the lifetime value of patients.

Focusing on what matters
The two keynote sessions from Gopi Kallayil from Google (The Internet to the Inner-Net) and Ron Tite from Church+State agency (Be the Brand. Live the Brand) were motivating with Gopi focusing on taking time for yourself in a busy world where there are now more smart phones that people in the world. His recommendation of setting aside time for yourself personally hit home and his recommendation that research has indicated 23 minutes is the sweet spot for focusing on one topic will drive some of my work behaviors.

Ron Tite provided numerous examples of how our brands are led by what the people of the organization Think, Do and Say rather than by vision statements on their web site. This reinforced that it is extremely important for everyone within a healthcare organization to be focused on improving the experience of the patient because one bad interaction can cause a patient to go to another doctor or system. His closing on the power of stories that we have access to as an industry in healthcare should drive all of us to dig deeper and share these stories in a powerful way to promote our brands.

The view from Monday’s Healthgrades event at the Grand America Hotel at HMPSS.

Developing an RFP a CRM System
Rich Phillips CEO of Customer Evolution led a great panel discussion with Stamford Health and Penn State Health on the key items to focus on when searching for a vendor partner for a CRM platform. Jean Hitchcock of Stamford said getting to know the support team and even interviewing that individual who will be leading the partnership on the vendor side is critical to ensure there is a culture match. Also thinking past the initial reference calls that vendors provide such as asking for a client who has left in the past 18 months can give you a stronger picture of the vendor. Jerry Griffin from Penn State Health indicated that it was extremely important to provide a detailed list of requirements so that vendors have to show the full functionality of their platform rather than telling a standard story/demo was key in their decision for a CRM platform.

A CEO on Twitter?
In Renown Health’s CEO Tony Slonim’s (@RenownCEOTonyMD) session they had to bring in extra chairs and there were still people standing to hear his presentation. Having a CEO so passionate about leveraging social media has really allowed Renown to get their brand out via social media as well as engage patients directly as Tony has had many patients ask for selfies with the Twitter using CEO.

More importantly as a cancer survivor Tony has been able to provide another avenue for patients looking for should to lean on who are going through difficult times. Renown has also gotten great exposure via CNN and the Washington Post for the work they’ve done in getting their CEO actively using Twitter and other social channels. Hopefully HMPSS is able to get additional CEO’s to present at future conferences as it is always interesting to hear an executive’s perspective during these conferences.

Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is another area that health systems are focusing on more and more to be a differentiator to provide a stronger patient experience. Many times journey mapping is health system focused rather than patient focused. Health Systems want the patients or consumers to conform how they do business. Shaun Gross from White Rino said that those working on journey mapping must adjust their thought process and focus on building trust with patients. We must gain their emotional trust (patients feel that we have their best interests in mind) and cognitive trust (basically the brand promise). One of the ways to improve trust is to focus on trust levers such as establishing credibility, making a personal connection, having a shared vision, minimizing uncertainty and managing expectations.

As always my favorite part of this week was reconnecting with friends and colleagues and seeing all of the sessions to bring back to my day to day work at Healthgrades. Thanks to Judy Neiman and everyone at the Forum for another great show this year in Salt Lake City and I look forward to welcoming everyone to my backyard at HMPSS 2019 in Chicago next year.

Will the doctor please see me now???

Earlier this year I turned 40 years old. I’ve been lucky enough to have been fairly healthy other than a few sprained ankles and minor bumps and bruises so I have not had to spend much time in a doctors office over most of my adult life but I decided it was time to put more focus on my health and get a physical/check up and start to build a relationship with a primary care physician.

I started my research on Healthgrades.com to find a doctor that met my needs and I felt comfortable as a partner for my health care. Living in the Chicagoland market there are a plethora of health systems that have physicians within a short drive from my home so my focus was more around background of the doctor, experience, ease of access in scheduling and getting in for an appointment relatively quickly.

While there was more than enough content available on Healthgrades.com and the health system web sites about the doctors I was considering I could not have been more disappointed in my experience trying to actually book my appointment.

Out of the 286 physicians that initially met my criteria (geography, specialty and accepted my insurance) only three offered the ability to schedule online and see the available times for appointments. Let me say that again, 1.05% of the physicians offered the convenience that consumers get in nearly every other industry available.

Only 40% of the top 100 hospitals and 10% of the remaining hospitals currently offer online self-scheduling (Accenture Patient Engagement Survey – 2016) but a recent  Greystone.net article show just how important self-scheduling is to consumers and how wide of a gap there is between consumer expectations and today’s reality.

• 80% of healthcare consumers prefer providers with online scheduling.
• 67% choose online scheduling over location.
• 33% say online scheduling will increase the likelihood of making an appointment.

Since there were such a limited number of physicians offering online self-scheduling I decided to try the “old school” method of calling to make an appointment and could not have been more disappointed. Over a three day period I called twice within “typical” business hours 8:30 a.m. and at 4:00 p.m. Both times I initially was connected with pre-registration who took all of my information (on both calls even though I had provided it the first time) and then transferred to the doctors office. In both cases no one at the doctors office even picked up so I was told I could “try back another time”. It costs health systems 5-10 times as much to acquire a new patient compared to retaining an existing patient and the office did not have a mechanism in place to answer a call for a new patient who had researched and selected their doctor.

Ultimately I decided to give up on my preferred physician based on my research and take the convenient route and I was able to schedule my appointment within a few days at a time that worked with my schedule. The physician I ended up seeing was part of another health system than where my initial research led me and I was satisfied with my experience and will likely see that physician again next time a need arises.

Do doctors and hospitals even realize on the financial impact of my decision? Recent numbers from CMS.gov show that someone in my age range is worth $260,000 to the doctor and health system during my lifetime if I maintain that relationship with approximately $157,000 of that total going to the health system.

Does the doctor I searched and found as a perfect match even know how difficult it was for me to try to schedule and picked another provider? Does the CEO of the health system from my initial search know that I ended up at another health system for all of my other services, lab work etc. because they were unable to pick up the phone during work hours for a new patient?

The technology side and user experience capabilities are improving every day for features like online scheduling. As an industry we must overcome culture/politics/physician push back and other barriers to make it as easy and convenient for a patient of our health systems and doctors to interact as they are used to in every other aspect of their life. It’s time for health care to make a leap and stop lagging behind other industries.

 

 

 

About Steve Leibforth
As the Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Healthgrades, Steve is a thought leader who travels the country working with healthcare organizations to develop their digital strategy and transform the way they conduct business. On a weekly basis he helps health care organizations with digital marketing strategy, social media, service line marketing, analytics, mobile strategy, and wellness initiatives within the context of an ever changing health care environment that is shifting from a pay for service to a pay for performance model (including Accountable Care Organizations).

Before joining Healthgrades Steve was the Director of Consumer and Employee Experience at Influence Health. He also spent over 10 years in the hospital environment in both IT and marketing at Loyola University Health System (now Loyola Medicine) and Provena Health(now Presence Health). Steve is a resident of Naperville, Illinois.

Top Five Takeaways from HCIC 2017

This year’s Healthcare Internet Conference in Austin was as always a great learning experience as hospital marketers and industry experts shared their ideas and successes to the largest group of attendees in the conference’s history. From the keynotes, the breakout sessions and conversations with health systems during the conference there were a few trends that stood out to me.

1. Digital Marketing is Marketing – As Paul Matsen, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer from Cleveland Clinic mentioned in his keynote “All marketers need to be digital marketers. Everyone on the team needs to understand analytics otherwise they will be obsolete“. There should be no more traditional vs. digital marketing in health care organizations. Other highly successful companies in other industries like Apple, Amazon, Google and Airbnb do not have separate traditional and digital marketing teams within their companies. They just have marketing.
2. More Focus on Patient Loyalty – Numerous presentations at HCIC focused more on improving the existing patient experience by ensuring patients have a better experience with their physician/health system. While driving new patients to the health system is still a focus there is significantly more attention being focused on maintaining the loyalty of existing patients. Given the cost of acquiring a new patient can be 5 to 10 times the cost of maintaining an existing relationship with a patient it makes sense to make this an area of focus for marketing teams. Also as health systems move to value based care there is also a much stronger demand to have marketing involved to ensure the communication with patients consistently represents the organizations brand and voice.
3. Chatbots, Chatbots and more Chatbots – Several presentations that I attended referenced the use of chatbots as an emerging growing trend in Healthcare but both Margaret Sabin, CEO of Centura/Penrose St. Francis Health Services and Aimee Quirk, CEO of Innovation Ochsner described how their organizations have made commitments to improve the health of their patient populations with chatbots being a key strategy. Both Penrose St. Francis and Ochsner are leveraging Healthgrade’s CareChats chatbot to drive patient engagement, loyalty and are improving the health of their patients who are participating. According to Margaret Sabin’s presentation 74% of patients want better access to key information while managing their health and of the patients who participated in CareChats 80% indicated that their health had improved after the first year of leveraging the chatbot on a regular basis. As an industry we are just scratching the surface of how chatbots can help improve the consumer and patient experience and it will be interesting to see how many health systems are presenting about their successes with chatbots at HCIC in 2018.

   

4. More Sophisticated Analytics – Carolinas HealthCare System presented the session Is Your Marketing Strategy Working? The Proof is in the Revenue. How to Track, Measure and Optimize with CRM and Analytics. In addition to their digital team and CRM team they have an analytics team to dig into their data to ensure all decisions are data driven decisions. They also have a sophisticated focus on Attribution Modeling to determine truly determine the value of the dollars that they are spending on marketing. As hospital marketing teams are able to become more sophisticated with analytics it becomes easier to justify the ask for more dollars and resources from the C-Suite of their organizations.

   

5. Owning the Patient Journey – There seems to be a shift to marketing owning more of the entire patient journey than in past years. Several sessions I attended referenced actual metrics of success around loyalty and the patient journey rather than just the traditional acquisition type metrics.  During Sunday’s Let’s Talk event Neal Linkon, Director of Digital Engagement, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, Todd Stogner, Digital Media Manager, Marketing, INTEGRIS Health and Allison Wendorf, Manager, Marketing and Web, Tufts Medical Center all discussed how they measure success at numerous stages of building relationships with their systems.

   Having the right technology, data and measurement tools in place allows health systems to make data driven decisions and focus on the impact they are having on patients during their journey.  From the Greystone 2017 Digital Marketing survey there is also an increase in staffing happening – “With regard to staffing, there is a distinct shift in staffing skills needed – from traditional and mixed responsibility staff – to staff with more digital and web development-focused skills (i.e., departments are beefing up their digital and web teams”.

While we still have a long way to go as an industry to get the patient experience to the level that other industries have established it does feel like there’s been a bit of a leap compared to the last few years in the level of sophistication and use of data driven decisions for health systems. Hopefully we continue to see great progress and we have another great round of lessons learned to share by this time next year at HCIC 2018 in Arizona!

 

About Steve Leibforth
As the Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Healthgrades, Steve is a thought leader who travels the country working with healthcare organizations to develop their digital strategy and transform the way they conduct business. On a weekly basis he helps health care organizations with digital marketing strategy, social media, service line marketing, analytics, mobile strategy, and wellness initiatives within the context of an ever changing health care environment that is shifting from a pay for service to a pay for performance model (including Accountable Care Organizations).

Before joining Healthgrades Steve was the Director of Consumer and Employee Experience at Influence Health. He also spent over 10 years in the hospital environment in both IT and marketing at Loyola University Health System (now Loyola Medicine) and Provena Health(now Presence Health). Steve is a resident of Naperville, Illinois.

 

Top Trends and Breakout Sessions at the Upcoming 2017 Healthcare Internet Conference

Every year there are several great healthcare marketing and strategy conferences but even back to my days when I worked for two hospital systems, Greystone’s Healthcare Internet Conference has always been my favorite conference and I’ve always taken back ideas and content that has helped me in my role and I could share with my teams. This year’s conference in Austin looks to be no exception with a number of exciting keynote speakers and most importantly the hospital led breakout sessions.

Setting aside the pre-conference sessions and keynote speakers here are a few of the sessions that I’m looking forward to the most at HCIC.

• Monday October 23rd
  • 1 p.m. – Step-by-Step: How to Build Your Campaign and Lead Management Ladder to Success – Platte Valley Medical Center
  • 2:15 p.m. – How to Define CRM Requirements: Demystifying the Path to Digital Marketing – @SEOPollyAnna Oregon Health & Sciences University (OHSU)
  • 2:15 p.m. – Taking the Next Steps in Your Transparency Journey – @robbirgfeld Inova Health System 
• Tuesday October 24th
  • 10:15 a.m. – When Meaningful Use and CRM Meet. It’s Magic – @winklermom OSF Healthcare
  • 10:15 a.m. – How DAM Helps Baptist Health Manage CMS Assets, Streamline Creative Production and Keep the Team on Brand – @kshedd Baptist Health
  • 11:30 a.m. – The Role of Healthcare Marketer in the Changing Healthcare Landscape – @Tulipzag UMass Memorial Health Care
  • 11:30 a.m. – Chatbots and CRMs for Healthcare: What, How and Why – Centura/Penrose St. Francis Health Services
  • 1:45 p.m. – Proving Marketing’s Worth to the CEO: Building KPIs – @danlevelle Lehigh Valley Health Network
  • 1:45 p.m. – Playing the Match Game: How to Successfully Select a CRM/PRM Vendor Partner – Memorial Healthcare System
  • 3:30 p.m. – Text Message from Dr. Brown: Stella, How Are You? What’s Your Blood Pressure Today? – @aimeequirk InnovationOchsner
• Wednesday October 25th
  • 10:15 a.m. – A Spoonful of Innovation Makes the Medicine Go Down – @stacykonline Renown Health 
  • 10:15 a.m. – Life After Relaunch: Renewing Your Strategy for Digital Consumer Engagement – Northwestern Medicine
  • 10:15 a.m. – CRM 2020: What You Need to Know and Do Now to Be Ready for the Next Decade – Panel Discussion moderated by @karencorrigan CEO, Corrigan Consulting
  • 11:30 a.m. – Right Patients, Right Place, Right Time: Leveraging CRM Across the Continuum of Care – UnityPoint Health

First I’m glad I will have other Healthgrades colleagues at the conference with me as there are numerous overlapping sessions that intrigue me which shows the depth of content at HCIC.

When I select sessions to attend at conferences there are always a few key trends that I like to follow including:

1. How strategy/marketing efforts are actually affecting patients and consumers
2. The role of analytics & measurement in marketing
3. How strategy/marketing teams and efforts are being affected by changes in the healthcare landscape
4. How leading edge technologies are evolving and having an impact

I look forward to seeing everyone in Austin! Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter – @sleibforth or stop by Healthgrades booth #49.

 

About Steve Leibforth
As the Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Healthgrades, Steve is a thought leader who travels the country working with healthcare organizations to develop their digital strategy and transform the way they conduct business. On a weekly basis he helps health care organizations with digital marketing strategy, social media, service line marketing, analytics, mobile strategy, and wellness initiatives within the context of an ever changing health care environment that is shifting from a pay for service to a pay for performance model (including Accountable Care Organizations).

Before joining Healthgrades Steve was the Director of Consumer and Employee Experience at Influence Health. He also spent over 10 years in the hospital environment in both IT and marketing at Loyola University Health System (now Loyola Medicine) and Provena Health(now Presence Health). Steve is a resident of Naperville, Illinois.

 

 

The Strategy and Technology Behind Communicating with Patients Between Visits

I was recently interviewed by @hgandreapearson on the Healthgrades blog to discuss the strategy and technology behind communicating with patients between visits.

Take a look…

https://www.healthgrades.com/blog/behind-the-bots-the-strategy-and-technology-behind-communicating-with-patients-between-visits 

Are you a giver or a taker at work?

One of my favorite television shows to watch is The Profit where Marcus Lemonis helps turn around struggling businesses. I enjoy his approach to business and respect the way he works and interacts with both the people in the businesses he is helping and other individuals that he interacts with during his business deals.

Recently I came across an article that referenced his dislike for most business books (I agree) but his recommendation to read Give and Take by Adam Grant so I decided to give it a read. I found it had great relevance to how I approach my day to day job and gives insight into the many individuals I interact with both within my company and our clients and potential clients.

The main premise of Give and Take is there are three types of individuals in the business world.

• Takers like to get more than they give. They tilt reciprocity in their own favor, putting their own interests ahead of others needs.
• Givers prefer to give more than they get. Where takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are others focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.
• Matchers strive to preserve an equal balance of giving and getting. Matchers operate on the principle of fairness: when they help others, they protect themselves by seeking reciprocity.

Personally I see traits of all three types of individuals in myself but would classify as more of a matcher than a taker or a giver.

Givers vs Takers in Sales
Of the three types of individuals which do you think would be the least successful in sales? If you guessed givers you would be correct. Givers brought in two and a half times less annual sales revenue than the average salesperson. Givers were too concerned about what was best for their customers and weren’t willing to sell aggressively.

If you then had to guess which type of individual was the most successful in sales you would probably say the takers (which was my guess) but you would be wrong. Givers were not only the least successful in sales but the most successful. Sales people who were classified as givers averaged 50 percent more annual revenue than the takers and matchers. In one study of opticians the average giver brought in over 30 percent more annual revenue than matchers and 68 percent more than takers.

Givers dominate both the bottom and the top of the success ladder in sales and other industries. Similar trends was seen with givers at both the top and bottom of their classes of engineers and in medical schools.

Pratfall Effect
One other interesting dynamic of how individuals are perceived is the Pratfall effect. When an individual is perceived to be of average intelligence and is clumsy (the example from the book was spilling coffee during a presentation) they are liked even less by the audience. However when experts were clumsy in the same manner audiences liked them even more because they were perceived to be more human and the audience could better relate to them. If you are interacting with a new audience that does not know you it is important to demonstrate both that you are a subject matter expert but also show that you are relatable to the audience.

Ways to be a successful giver
There is a fine line between being a successful giver and one that gives too much and ends up personally unproductive. Success as a giver involves more than just capitalizing on the strengths of giving; it also requires avoiding the pitfalls. If you give people too much time, you end up making sacrifices for their collaborators and network ties at the expense of your own energy. Givers need to ensure they continue to advance their own interests or you end up exhausted and unproductive from constantly assisting others in ways that do not

Givers get to the top without cutting others down, finding ways of expanding the pie that benefit themselves and the people around them. Whereas success is zero-sum in a group of takers, in groups of givers, it may be true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Ways to stay motivated as a Giver

Dormant Ties – reconnecting with individuals who you do not have regular contact provides stronger recommendations than those who you area in contact with on a regular basis. Many times your dormant ties have been exposed to new ideas and perspectives and are more likely to share knowledge and viewpoint that is different than what you already posses. Reconnecting with dormant ties also has a mutual trust due to past interactions so they are comfortable sharing ideas.

Asking for advice – Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice. Giving advice makes takers feel important, and it makes givers feel helpful. Matchers often enjoy giving advice for a different reason: it’s a low-cost way of racking up credits that they can cash in later. As a result, when we ask people for advice, they tend to respond positively to us. But the one catch is that advice seeking only works if it’s genuine.

Five Minute Favor – Being a giver instead of a matcher can be a subtle difference. One idea brought forward in the book is the idea of a five minute favor. If you are a matcher typically there is an expectation of a return for helping others. For a true giver you should be willing to do something that will take you five minutes or less for anybody.

By virtue of the way they interact with other people in their networks, givers create norms that favor adding rather than claiming or trading value, expanding the pie for all involved. When they truly need help, givers can reconnect with dormant ties, receiving novel assistance from near-forgotten but trusted sources. The key to success in one word is generosity. If your interactions are rules by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.

According to the book there are two primary paths to influencing others and the end result of how you are perceived varies significantly.

Research suggests that there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance and prestige. When we establish dominance, we gain influence because others see us as strong, powerful and authoritative. When we earn prestige, we become influential because others respect and admire us.

The book, Give and Take, solidified many thoughts I already had about interacting with other professionals but also had several new concepts that I can bring to my day to day job. My goal is to work at organizations that have a strong culture of givers who are willing to work for the greater good rather than takers who are out for themselves more than the overall success of the company and hopefully some of the lessons from Give and Take can help me positively affect the culture at my company.

 

About Steve Leibforth
As the Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Healthgrades, Steve is a thought leader who travels the country working with healthcare organizations to develop their digital strategy and transform the way they conduct business on the web. On a weekly basis he helps health care organizations with digital marketing strategy, social media, service line marketing, analytics, mobile strategy, and wellness initiatives within the context of an ever changing health care environment that is shifting from a pay for service to a pay for performance model (including Accountable Care Organizations).

Before joining Healthgrades Steve was the Director of Consumer and Employee Experience at Influence Health. He also spent over 10 years in the hospital environment in both IT and marketing at Loyola University Health System (now Loyola Medicine) and Provena Health(now Presence Health). Steve is a resident of Naperville, Illinois.

 

 

10 takeaways from the 20th Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC)

This year’s Healthcare Internet Conference again set the bar for healthcare digital marketing conferences with great presentations from a number of healthcare systems to enjoyable and educational keynote speakers like Scott Straton of UnMarketing (who managed to wake up the room at 8 a.m. in Vegas!). Thanks to the team from Greystone including Mike Schneider and Kathy Divis for putting together a thoroughly enjoyable and valuable conference.

The two main themes that I took away from the conference this year were the transition to MarTech (marketing technology) and the challenges associated with the move and the move away from “Vanity Metrics” to more actionable metrics.

The annual Healthcare Internet Conference kicked off its 20th year with a Sunday evening event entitled “Let’s Talk Engagement”.

1. Let’s Talk – Transitioning to a MarTech Mindset: Why It’s Important. How It Happens. Karen Corrigan (@karencorrigan) and Kathy Divis (@KathyDivis) have more experience and expertise in healthcare marketing than anyone I know in the industry. During their round table session they focused on the shift to MarTech (marketing technology) and how it is affecting healthcare organizations and marketing departments.

Some key takeaways from the session:

• How are marketing departments leveraging technology to cultivate customers? A different employee skill set needed than most marketing departments have today. – Karen
• It can be difficult to prove value of marketing technologists to HR Systems due to traditional mindset of IT resources – Karen
• Kathy is still seeing silos of digital marketing and traditional marketing in hospitals. Hospitals must be marketing in a digital world. – Kathy
• Karen is seeing a trend of IT willing to offload MarTech projects to outside vendors due to internal resource constraints with other IT projects – Karen
• It’s important not to develop a separate digital brand than your traditional brand – Kathy

2. Let’s Talk – Engagement: Lessons Learned from the Hospitality Industry. Mike Schneider (@greystone_mike) next interviewed Scott Booker (@hgscottbooker) the CEO of Healthgrades and former president of Hotels.com.

• Attracting key customers is a combination of science (data) and art (optimize user experience)
• At hotels.com Scott Booker was running over 100 test a day to optimize the customer experience
• You have to be willing to break even on first transaction with a customer if you can predict a profit on future encounters (based on CRM data)
• Your doctor should be part of you inner intimate circle in terms of communication. Huge opportunity for health systems to influence patient behavior with the right technology.

3. Let’s Talk – How Caesars Entertainment Uses Personalization and Email to Drive True Engagement. Next Tonya Carpenter (@tonyac) from Caesars Entertainment talked about how the gaming industry leverages digital marketing to attract customers to it’s properties.

• Where is the intersection between communications? Focus on areas where consumers digital actions intersect such as consumers searching and posting on social channels which allows for great personalization.
• Does Amazon have the best products? No, but they talk to you in the way that you want to be talked to and treat you the way you want to be treated.
• Email is Direct. Email is Invited. Email is Actionable.
• Tonya said that they do not cross into the personal space of cell phones with text messages in the gaming industry.
• When people disengage with the conversation it presents an opportunity for you. A re-engagement strategy is always needed.

4. Let’s Talk – Using Real Time Big Data to Drive the Monetization of Guest Relationships. Rich Phillips formerly of Tampa General then interviewed Mark Shipley from Epsilon on consumer trends and behaviors.

• There needs to be a match.com for hospitals and vendors. It is extremely important to ensure that your vendors have the depth and breadth of MarTech experience to ensure they can support your strategic goals.
• 3 big trends currently – Consumer experience outside the home
  • Technology is changing at a remarkable pace (AI, Machine Learning)
  • The amount of data being tracking on a daily basis is increasing significantly. Previously data could be tracking on a weekly or monthly basis and still provide strong consumer experience. Now it’s needed immediately.
  • Consumer are more educated and smarter than they’ve ever been. Consumers are evolving faster than the technology used.

5. The Digital Decision Maker: Captivating and Influencing Consumer Behavior in Healthcare – Rob Birgfeld (@robbirgfeld), Chief Digital Marketing Officer, Inova and Ryan Donohue, Advisor, National Research Corporation

• Healthcare consumerism feels new because the constituency has been largely ignored
• Those who trust or highly trust hospitals has dropped from 66.7 to 61.4 in the past five years
• Only 8% of consumers have visited a local hospital web site while 39% have visited webMD.com
• 63% trust or highly trust information received from hospital social media sites
• 18% of consumers want to interact with a hospital EXCLUSIVELY on a mobile device.
• 75% of consumers feel it is important to see reviews left by actual patients of the physician in question
• 58% of consumers who received a response from hospital were willing to remove their negative review online if their complaint was addressed in a manner they saw fit

6. Protecting the Digital Transformation of Healthcare – Tim Eades, Chief Executive Officer, vArmour Jon Russell, Senior Vice President and Associate CIO, John Muir Health

• Mobility becomes more important as hospitals take on more at risk patients but it creates more stress in supporting the technology
• 42% of U.S. hospitals are using digital health technology to treat patients
• When it comes to cybersecurity you need to be faster than the slowest bad guy

7. Everything Has Changed and Nothing is Different. Scott Straton (@unmarketing) from the Unmarketing Podcast. This was probably my favorite session of the week as Scott not only brought energy but demonstrated the power that the web and social media can have on consumers/patients with many real world examples but also summed it up that we work in an industry that affects lives when others many times have to find motivation we should have it every day.

• Consumers are making decisions based entirely on interacting with the company’s app on their phone (scary thought)
• We as healthcare marketers are in an industry that affects lives. Most others in other industries have to find that motivation elsewhere.
• No one cares how your business prefers to communicate. We need to meet patients where they are and make their lives easier.
• When consumers complain online they’re looking for validation. If they know you’ve heard them you’ve won most of the battle
• The worst kind of the patient complaint is the one you do not hear.
• We need to get away from Vanity Metrics and focused on actionable metrics that drive business.

8. An Integrated Digital Communications Strategy to Advance a Key Hospital Clinical Priority– David Feinberg (@davidafeinberg) and Takla Boujaoude  (@taklab) from New York Presbyterian Hospital (@nyphospital)

• Integrated Communications strategy is needed. Not a digital or a social strategy that competes with each other
• Contextually targeted display banners driving to the landing page yielded click through rates 21X industry average for @nyphospital

9. Make Your Health Content Smarter Than Google – Mike Maloney from the University of Vermont Health Network and Ahava Leibtag (@ahaval) from Aha Media.

• It is extremely important to have unique clinical content on your site both for SEO purposes and the patient experience
• Content always needs to evolve due to the changes that sites like Google and Facebook are making
• As the home page of sites becomes less and less important in a multi-channel world the value of landing pages and content becomes more important

10. See you next year in Austin! – The 2017 HCIC will take place October 23-25th at the J.W. Marriott. Austin is one my favorite cities to visit and I look forward to seeing everyone there and eating some good BBQ.

 

About Steve Leibforth
As the Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Healthgrades, Steve is a thought leader who travels the country working with healthcare organizations to develop their digital strategy and transform the way they conduct business on the web. On a weekly basis he helps health care organizations with digital marketing strategy, social media, service line marketing, analytics, mobile strategy, and wellness initiatives within the context of an ever changing health care environment that is shifting from a pay for service to a pay for performance model (including Accountable Care Organizations).

Before joining Healthgrades Steve was the Director of Consumer and Employee Experience at Influence Health. He also spent over 10 years in the hospital environment in both IT and marketing at Loyola University Health System (now Loyola Medicine) and Provena Health(now Presence Health). Steve is a resident of Naperville, Illinois.

The New Healthcare Marketing Department And What It Means to Consumers

Over the last year since I joined Healthgrades I’ve had the opportunity to attend several major healthcare marketing conferences (Forum for Healthcare Strategists and SHSMD in  Chicago and Healthgrades Healthshare Symposium in Austin) as well as interact with a number of healthcare organizations in my day to day work and it is very apparent that there is a shift in focus and resources within healthcare marketing departments in how they are managing their digital marketing efforts.

Terri McNorton (@terrimcnorton) who was presenting at Healthshare Symposium very succinctly summed up the change in focus for healthcare marketing teams.

 

Past Marketing Focus
Healthcare marketing departments are evolving and evolving quickly. When I first started in healthcare in the late 1990’s the majority of the healthcare marketing departments I interacted with focused on key priorities around external communications (mainly press releases), employee communication/newsletters and branding of the organization.

Before digital marketing became more prevalent healthcare marketing teams typically fell into three three unique categories of marketing efforts:

• Community Developers – focused on building the hospital brand name through local community involvements and events.
• Emotional Connectors – focused on developing a strong brand locally that would motivate patients to leverage their physicians and services.
• Performance marketers – focused on campaigns to drive service line volume but did not have strong measurement across multiple channels.

Current/Future Marketing Focus
The new model of healthcare marketing teams is extremely focused on the consumer journey rather than just pushing the hospital’s marketing message out to patients and consumers. The focus has shifted from general brand promotion and hospital awards (that look like every other hospital’s marketing efforts) to actually improving the consumer’s experience at each step of the journey and ensuring the hospital’s messaging is consistent across all touch points with the organization.

Expectations are that every channel will be measured on both the number of leads and conversions. A different type of marketing employee is needed to understand the data flow and analyze what is working and what needs to be improved across ongoing omni-channel campaigns.

Budgets
For some health systems who have realized the value of digital marketing, budgets have increased as the digital teams have been able to demonstrate a strong return on the dollars spent. In the digital world it is also much easier to measure the true marketing spend for a campaign and the success of each marketing tactic. Previously it was very difficult to prove that a billboard was working or track individuals who attended classes all the way through becoming a patient due to lack of sophisticated tracking tools or CRM systems.

Believable Return On Investment (ROI)
As some organizations have built larger digital budgets it is extremely important that the marketing team is able to prove return on investment (ROI) across digital campaigns. It is not enough to leverage a vendor created report that shows a ROI that is not believable and will be easily dismissed by executives and the finance team. The marketing team must be aligned with their CFO and work at the early stages of any project to ensure ROI is being calculated in a way that aligns with the CFO’s way of thinking to ensure ROI is a believable number when showing success or lack thereof.

FTE Allocation
As marketing teams have become involved in looking at the entire consumer/patient journey  their responsibility has increased as teams continue to promote and define the brand as well as campaign development. Today’s Chief Marketing Officers are investing across the entire journey – from discovery to learn, try to buy, use and advocacy – and based on a recent survey from IBM (see chart below) are planning to increase their spending across every stage of the buyer journey over the next two years by an average of 50 percent.

This shift in spending requires the appropriate marketing resources to support a broader marketing effort across the entire consumer journey. Many digital directors are being brought on board from other industries that are further ahead on digital initiatives than the healthcare industry. These individuals have extensive experience developing a sophisticated digital platform and accurate measurement tools. It will be interesting to see how these digital experts that move from other industries are able to perform given the complications and budget limits in healthcare marketing.

As the scope of marketing’s work has increased there is a greater demand to have a broader and more robust marketing team in place. The ability to truly measure ROI on digital engagements has made it easier for marketing teams to show the value of Omni-Channel (always on) campaigns and gives Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) ammunition to use in their requests for additional FTEs and demonstrate the value of the dollars they are spending if the appropriate technology and resources are in place.

At the recent conferences I attended there were still numerous healthcare systems represented that have only stuck a toe in the water when it comes to digital. In one session at SHSMD that was focused on CRM use over 50% of the attendees indicated they still do not have a CRM system in place. The shift from Marcom to Martech is still in its infancy in healthcare but we are seeing more and more health systems adjust their team and push the envelope when it comes to digital campaigns and measurement.

It will be interesting to see which healthcare systems are able to translate their move to digital to improved patient acquisition and loyalty and have an impact on a value based system over the next several years.

The Effect on Consumers and Patients
The good news for consumers and patients is that as healthcare marketing departments change we are seeing improvement in the “patient journey”. First the omni-channel approach now taken by many health care marketing teams means that they are “always on” across multiple channels so likely to be where consumers are rather than expecting consumers to come to their web as the only source of information.

Also as many health care marketing teams have focused on the entire patient journey many operational inefficiencies have been discovered.  As a patient if you fill out a form online requesting an appointment expectations are to receive a response within 24 hour if not sooner and marketing departments have had to push to ensure the appropriate level of responsiveness are available at every stage of the journey.

The new hospital marketing department  knows that patients are living a digital lifestyle now and it is extremely important to continue to interact with you as a patient in between your visits to the doctor and hospital in order to build loyalty and maintain a connection to their patients.

 

About Steve Leibforth
As the Vice President of Solutions Consulting at Healthgrades, Steve is a thought leader who travels the country working with healthcare organizations to develop their digital strategy and transform the way they conduct business on the web. On a weekly basis he helps health care organizations with digital marketing strategy, social media, service line marketing, analytics, mobile strategy, and wellness initiatives within the context of an ever changing health care environment that is shifting from a pay for service to a pay for performance model (including Accountable Care Organizations).

Before joining Healthgrades Steve was the Director of Consumer and Employee Experience at Influence Health. He also spent over 10 years in the hospital environment in both IT and marketing at Loyola University Health System (now Loyola Medicine) and Provena Health(now Presence Health). Steve is a resident of Naperville, Illinois.