Overcoming Budget Woes – Where’s the Money Going?
Originally Broadcast: November 15, 2022 @ 2:00 PM EST
We’re excited to share exclusive highlights from the 2021 By the Numbers: MarCom benchmarking program. This program, unique in its design, enables healthcare marketing and communications leaders to define and defend their budgets. Many of the country’s leading healthcare organizations participate. Join our special guest, John McKeever, as he reviews highlights from current results, how you can contribute, and the implications for physician marketing programs.
Good afternoon and welcome to another broadcast made original webcast today. You folks have the pleasure of not having to listen to me ramble on for the next 45 minutes as are joined by a very special guest John McKeever of Endeavor Management. I was first introduced to john through a mutual friend and healthcare marketing legend, Dalal Haldeman. Ever since the lal introduced us have been absolutely fascinated by john's insights and not just the health care marketing world, but the marketing sector in general. His strategy and joint partnerships has been nothing shy of impeccable and he's talked today by the numbers Mark. Um, I had the pleasure of first listening to this at a recent conference and not only was there standing room only, but every person in that room was engaged and learned new insights. So without further ado, I'll pass it over to john, the new folks are in for a treat, john take it away. Well, thanks so much scott. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you what we've learned from the, by the numbers Markham benchmarking program. Um, what we'll talk about today is, where's the money going? What I'd like to do is share with you essentially um, create the sense of urgency for you that the storm is coming. So there is a threat, particularly for your budgets for how you're allocating resources um, being from Houston, you know, re recognized storm threats. Um, you know, there was a hurricane just last week in florida for us in Houston we've been spared. But we know preparedness is the key And so what are the things that you need to prepare for as the storm is coming as your budgets are being threatened. And then how do you live through the storm? And then we'll also open it up at the end for Q. And A. Uh and so what I really want to talk about today is you know, how do you get ready? What I hope to in part is a better understanding of the benchmarking program by the numbers, go through some of those components and some of the things that we've learned. Um I'll also describe it as a basis to compare your marketing, communications resources um and allocation. And so I'll highlight some things. I think you'll find interesting things that you can take back to your broader teams as well as to your leadership um to ultimately make the case for change. Um what are the resources that you need particularly as it relates to broadcast mid audience members for physician marketing and outreach. What are the ways in which you can actually build a stronger business case to show and demonstrate that these are resources that your competitors are actually using. And then how do you actually uh inform your decisions with data, particularly on a comparative basis. So why is benchmarking important? Um I want to thank Alan shoebridge from providence who delivered this presentation with me at the shipment conference a few weeks ago. Um and of course, you know, one of the key quotes that we used in that presentation was about being honest about the environment. Um we all need to be realists. We need to adjust the sails. We know that there is a likely recession coming if we're not already in it. Uh there are a lot of headwinds as they relate to the things in which healthcare organizations are having to spend money on and so we've really got to think through how do we make stronger cases to keep the pedal to the metal as it relates to demand generation and brand awareness campaigns? Um those financial challenges are clear. Um I've just gotten off the phone with, you know, several different health care systems, um most of whom already contribute to this process, who are dealing with defending their budgets. Um they're using out of industry benchmarks or um non comparable data um to, to really establish for the CFO, to establish a change to start cutting budgets. Um there's been a decline in Markham budgets I'll share with you some data that we found very interesting as relates the size of your healthcare system for the total beds in the hospital. That does play a difference. What we've seen in terms of the decline in Markham budgets, I think most of you will agree that we have had somewhat of a interesting situation over the past several years with covid and using and having more slush funds if you will around Mark on budgets and now things have actually become more pressing as it relates to decline in margins? There's been a lot of headlines and Becker's in particular around decline in margins And of course that affects us as marketers as well. Uh there's workforce changes to, to deal with. There's been a huge talent shift within marketing. And so this is something that the benchmarking data can highlight for you in terms of where your competitors are, your comparables are actually spending their resources. And then finally, a lot of this has to do with managing leadership expectation as we know as marketers. There's a constant battle, particularly with clinical leadership over the definition of marketing, what it includes, what it doesn't, but also its purpose. Uh and so, you know, as we're as those budgets continue to be scrutinized managing their expectations of what marketing can do and what it can do will be particularly important. So your preparedness, The interesting thing about marketers is we're really good about communication, but we don't do it as well with internal audiences. And so think of the purse string holders as just another audience, what are their needs? How do we how do you align with business goals? So the more that we can align the budget areas there, your expenditures, how you're out reaching to physicians, how you're essentially spending those dollars across the tactical marketing mix? How do they actually impact the business goals. Um, There's also an opportunity to demonstrate efficacy. And so how do you relate where you're spending into a decision model around not just the marketing mix, but actually the impact from call center volume through operational treatment issues all the way to encounter volume. Uh And then of course, in terms of preparedness sharing comparable data is very powerful. Um and so the reason that this benchmarking program was created initially was to enable you as healthcare leaders to identify and choose your own peers to be able to have those critical conversations with your CFO and your Ceo. So how this how this entire program got started is I want to also thank Cleveland clinic for being the initial funder of this whole thing. Um we really needed to think bigger than a survey. Um This was initially an initial request for um budget information from Cleveland clinic's competitors. And my response was, well, I don't think they're gonna share anything with you, but let's actually create something of value for everybody. And so what we wanted to do is think bigger than a survey. That's why we call it a benchmarking program and it becomes a steady resource for information over a period of time. So it's blinded. We are the third party administrators of a database for marketing communications resources. Um as I mentioned before, it provides comparable data. So this is enabled, this technology enables us to ensure that the benchmarks are true peers on a variety of dimensions. Those dimensions could include US news and world report rankings. They can include the size of the facility. They also can include the level of competitive intensity in certain markets. We actually have some participants who are are present in markets where they dominate that particular market. Uh and so they want to actually look at other markets with similar circumstances and then vice versa, highly competitive markets or maybe markets where you have a strong academic medical center and two or three healthcare system competitors. We also wanted to be meaningful. So asking the right questions of the right people. So part of this program is ensuring that we're actually tapping into the high, highest level marketing communications executives team to actually create the broader scope of system level mark on budgets and then finally making it accessible. So one of the things that we've created in the dashboard is the ability to share licenses across your team, create different user logins and in particular making it making the data downloadable, particularly for internal conversations. One of the interesting use cases for this is actually sitting down with your CFOs and choosing the the benchmarks together. And then that way you're actually establishing a basis of conversation between you. So what is it essentially what we're doing is we're conducting for this particular module um an annual survey of Markham leaders, we're including hospitals and health care systems. We the data is shared anonymously. Um and essentially as I mentioned before, you can filter the data on a variety of different dimensions from hospital type, like freestanding cancer centers, academic medical centers, inpatient bed size or even organizational type. One of the key things about this dashboard and and this may disappoint some of the vendors on this call um like ourselves as we do not allow those who do not contribute data to access it, access data in the dashboard. And part of this is an incentive for health care systems to contribute. And then part of this is really to ensure that um consultants and others aren't using the data as a means to bludgeon as one of our clients is our our actual participants. Uh and so the participation levels include contributors. And so it's actually free to participate in this in this program. You can you basically fill out the survey and you get access to the dashboard and some limited features. We also work with to produce a report each year based on the number of the data that we bring in and produce that report in the aggregate and anyone can purchase those reports and then probably most importantly we have subscribers. And these are the folks that really helped keep this program going. They fund it and subscription levels are based on the hospital size but essentially it's a sliding scale but subscribers get access to all of the data still blinded but the features and functionality like the peer selection, benchmarks, etcetera. So where we are today, kind of the history of what's brought us together. So many of you may recognize that by the numbers name from the initial title slide. Um That's a consequence of us merging our efforts, endeavors efforts with she's made over the last two years and so over those years she's been had produced six editions by the numbers and it was usually a pdf report about four years ago. Um we, as I mentioned before, we worked with Cleveland clinic to actually established this benchmarking program which includes the dashboard. Uh we thought our partnership would actually result in a more comprehensive benchmarking product. So by working together, she's been an endeavor are seeking to expand the footprint or the data store from our endeavors, primary clients which are large integrated delivery systems and academic medical centers to include the smaller and medium sized hospitals that are the typical Shipman members. We also use this as a, as a opportunity to refine, refine the collection and the reporting dashboard and also want to take a moment to thank our steering committee because this is a program designed for and by health care leaders. Uh and so it's not endeavors way it's actually um what your peers have said they're really interested in in terms of the questions and the glossary that we've established. We go back to our steering committee for for that and our steering committee includes providence health system, Cleveland clinic. Ohio state. Um we've also included more of the ship's mid representation in this past year that includes brookings, health Norton healthcare queens and currently regional. So what what can you expect from this uh from the overall program? And I'll highlight some of these uh answers as well. What are typical budget amounts? So you know, what if we're spending, you know, 10 million in Markham, how does that compare to others? How are those Markham budgets deployed across the marketing mix? So how much am I spending vis a vis my peers as it relates to um sports sponsorships or digital marketing or physician marketing etc. Um To what extent are Markham staff being resourced? So what types of roles are being filled? What's the FTE count across those? And interestingly, we also look at how many people who are supporting marketing sit outside of your Markham organization. Um and then finally, you know, just understanding what other organizations are focused on. You know, for several years, we've been talking about how the there's a greater need to utilize digital marketing. Um what I'll share with you is that the digital marketing mix has actually increased. We attribute a lot of that to covid uh and certainly now is the time to examine where those dollars are being spent? Um a lot of the time, especially with our academic medical center clients were recommending using partners like broadcast meant to really drive the physician part of the communications through your mark on budget. So just to give you a sense for who participates. Uh this is just for the last year were in field right now. So there's still an opportunity to actually include yourself in our current program. This is from last program year. Um, and this just gives you a sense for, you know, our composition, academic medical center's having really the lion's share. We include teaching hospitals, even Children's hospitals and cancer centers. Um, For the most part, the current sample includes large and very large organizations. And as I mentioned before this year, we're hoping to improve those numbers using the she's made membership. So in terms of overall budget, uh, these are the results from the 2020 program year when I mentioned years is essentially these are the data that we collected uh during that calendar period. And the system obviously has a way to um address fiscal year overlaps and uh Cody cox or program manager and Karen Lemke um can actually help you to determine where you fit into that calendar reporting cycle. Um and so, but the system does recognize the fiscal year periods. Uh and you can see here in 2020 based on the sample that we collected essentially budget amounts for around the $25 million on average for the larger hospitals and dropped down to about 12. And then you see some of those smaller hospitals in terms of their system size of beds dropping down even further in 2021. The most interesting thing that we found is that the larger hospital systems were the ones who actually increased their mark on budget. And you can see there's been actually a pretty significant increase um, even on a percentage basis between those two time periods while the others remain flat for the most. For the most part, this is probably the most interesting slide when I deliver this presentation every year at different conferences, everyone wants to know how do we make the case. So if there's one thing that I leave with you, it's, it's this uh, and I'm gonna put a link in the chat to a downloadable pdf where you'll be able to calculate your own mark on budget as a percentage of revenue. So when we look at this over the course of the years, essentially what we did is we looked at um In a patient revenue and contrasted that with your mark on budget overall, uh, and these are the percentages and in no case during no year are we seeing that percentage go up above 1%. And you may say, well, you know, that may not be so bad. But let's take a look at overall industry averages. So if you're to ask someone outside of health care, what percent of revenue do you spend on marketing and communication? And this is based on the CMO survey. The answer would actually be something more like 10% with the only decline being in 2020 and so and this was obviously due to covid. And so what's very interesting about this is that as an industry we are underspending and really under re sourcing the marketing communications um function. The other thing that these data show is that in contrast to non healthcare industries, the healthcare expenditure on marketing communication in general remains flat. So that is somewhat of a good thing. We don't have the spikes, the ups and downs in the contractions with things, you know, pandemics like covid happening and hopefully that won't happen again. But with the upcoming recession, this may be another defensive point to make in terms of that longitudinal flat trend. So in summary, when we looked at in 2021, that average of mark on budget as a percent of net patient revenue is .7%. So nothing changed again. Uh and that broad industry average started to pick back up and so again, if you contrast those two things, uh it's a pretty strong case for change. And and usually during these conferences, people ask things like well, how does that compare to other industries. So let me give you a sense for what that is. Um healthcare and and services. So this is the broader more than just health care and hospital. That percentage based on the CMO survey is 2.5%. So we're still not even close yet. Um pharma 14% Software, and more of us are moving into digital experiences, but probably one of the most telling things. And the strongest advocates for increasing your budget is consumer services. So, healthcare services, what we do in hospitals, what we do in large, integrated delivery systems is definitely consumer services. So if you agree with that, your mark on budget should actually be more like 20 of revenue. Uh, and so again, we're nowhere close to that. Um, and and hopefully the pdf link that we put will help you make that case for change. And I'm happy to talk to any of your Cfos about where we got these numbers. Let's talk a little bit deeper into the marketing communications mix and where budgets are being spent and this is fairly consistent across years and across the board. Um from from that perspective we look at a variety of different um, avenues to uh, to reach audiences now keep in mind that this is the budget that is included in the typical marketing communications organization. The senior most executive is the chief communications officer slash chief marketing officer. So some of these things are low because it may not be part of that budget, but nevertheless, and that would be like call center, for example, or community outreach. Nevertheless, what we see consistently is that advertising media is the large expenses by far it's the has the lion's share of where you're making those expenditures. When we take that out of the equation, there's a couple of other areas that actually pop up. And one of them is digital media management, marketing account services and sports sponsorships. Um to focus our remarks really on, on this audience, I'm gonna really talk about this physician outreach piece. Uh and then also I'll talk a little bit about digital and how those two things in our inner interconnect. So from a physician's relations perspective, if you saw in the slide before that level is very low. One of the things that we see consistently is that healthcare organizations undervalue the role that community physicians play in generating revenue, and this includes those physicians who are aligned whether they be employed or otherwise affiliate As well as referring physicians. Um and so making the case is very important. And, you know, our research from, you know, looking at call center data from talking to physicians from talking to consumers is that, you know, at least 50% of your patient volume can be attributed back to physician relationships. Um, and so, you know, it's, it stands to reason that having a higher level of investment in that engagement would be very important. However, most marketing budgets are directed to consumers. My hypothesis with that is that, you know, your executives actually see the advertising that you make to consumers because their consumers to um as we get more sophisticated as an industry in terms of digital marketing, some of those pressures are going to increase because, you know, from a targeting perspective, your executives and decision makers aren't going to see that outreach and and those communications because they're simply not going to, they're not the target audience. Um, this is even true, even truer with physicians. So um really making the case using data to establish that case is very important. We've created models for some clients to demonstrate how important that volume is. Um, in one particular case, what we showed is a 20 times return on physician directed marketing um, in a, you know, in a short period of time, I think the the delay on that was maybe six months. Uh and so this is very important. And again, one of the reasons that we partner with broadcast med because we are able to reach those positions. Um, getting with the times is also another important piece. Um, I forget the exact statistics, but I believe that um, you know, only half of our physicians today are over 50 and certainly being 50 myself, I think for sure we're becoming bigger consumers of social media, but the next generation of physicians really expect digital tools to be a seamless part of their experience. And so how does that relate to somewhat, you know, potentially antiquated ways of physician outreach and going and making visits and without a lot of digital marketing support. Uh and certainly without an operational component to all of those things. Um, a lot of organizations that we work with are now trying to modernize, you know, the messages, the content and even the channels that they use to get with the times and reach more of those younger physicians who are actually aggressively trying to build their own practices. And then finally, as it relates to physician relations, you know, addressing their emotional needs. So it's really not just enough to send them information about uh, why you're the best, but also giving them things that they could actually pass along. Um, giving them a human relationship to connect to. Uh, these are all important pieces and when we talk about digital, this also means humanizing the experience internally through those physicians. And so rich media like video is extremely important. Um, so investments in outreach and targeted collateral ideally when they need it, uh, should really focus on meeting some of those emotional needs. One of the things that we find pretty routinely in the research that we do with referring physicians is that, um, they're looking to know by name and have some understanding of who it is they're referring to. So they look good in front of their in front of their patients and so simply a name in a directory doesn't cut it anymore. So how can you humanize that experience? The other thing that we understand and talking with physician practices is that they're too busy to call to bring together and to curate content for their patients. So there's a big opportunity for health care systems to brand content that they can repurpose for use by their patients. I want to talk about digital again, you can see the distribution here across the board. Um Everyone's increasing their budgets for digital. Um that's the point with this particular slide, but let's let's talk about why that's more important than ever. So one of the things that endeavor did during Covid is we acquired an online gaming marketing firm and part of the reason that we did that was to get into the cutting edge of uh where where is the conversation going online gaming teaches us that it's more about conversation influence than push communications. Uh It's also about community building and it's also about launching things quickly and being much more adaptive. Um So part of our lessons learnt and working with our clients along with this new capability from online gaming is that, you know, influence matters. Um digital marketing strategies really need to look at how to build a coalition, how to actually influence the conversation, um how to listen a lot better than we than we typically do. Um We also know that video is key. Um and so a key focus for social media marketing is really video content. Um as I mentioned before, physicians are getting younger. Um and so how do you engage them in a way that as consumers, they're accustomed to engaging content. So live streaming is a powerful tool um and just as a, as a, as a note to consider with physicians, um, consumers are spending about 540 billion hours streaming mobile putting community first, gaming is constantly innovating and how they manage communities, how they nurture them, how they engage them in marketing. Um, there are a lot of opportunities in healthcare to do that. We've seen that before, certainly with patient communities, things that are um self sustaining around their, their particular condition. The next generation actually of community might include those, um, those patients who are interested in uh have interest in similar things across non healthcare areas as well as physicians in the same situation. And then the other emerging trend that we need to pay careful attention to is that there become, there becomes more restrictions on data collection methods. So we have to create a lot of value in the content. We have to actually make sure that people are signing up to receive that content, you know, So this further harms the effort of a lot of push. And so one of the things we like about working with broadcast Met is that there's enrollment and there's profiles about interest and there's actually the development of community within their, within their products and within their channels. Um, the other interesting thing that we've worked on along those lines with Broadcast Met is actually building a community amongst their physician physicians to have an advisory board for for some of our clients. And so now we're able to actually assemble an advisory board of physicians for you to test things like advertising, strategic thoughts for expansion, different ideas and actually influence the conversation amongst them. Uh, to understand better where the puck is headed. So in terms of living for living through the storm, get ready for the storm. Now, if you haven't already compiled your data for your budgets, if you're already getting threats, uh, the time is now, um, we're still collecting information. We're still collecting data for the mark on benchmarking study. So if you'd like to participate, the link will be in the chat for that monitor the projected path. Um, it will be interesting to see where things shake out next year. Uh, and then, so certainly looking at what competitors are doing, looking at where they're spending their dollars, uh, and then also, you know, addressing, you know, where your organization wants to be and making those shifts. I think that that that agility will be very important for next year. Um, ensure you're well equipped. So whether it's this presentation, the pdf that I mentioned or even participating, uh, in the program, um, you know, having those, those facts at your fingertips will ensure that you're prepared for the conversations that are about to occur if they haven't already. Uh, and then of course be prepared to respond. So what's plan B look like? We work with a lot of clients around. You know, if this is your strategy and this is the ideal, what's the, what's 50% of that look like? What's next to ideal? I want to share with you a cute a few key um tools, things to kind of frame your thinking around um physician relationship management, the first of which is operating on on the three different dimensions of physician relationship management, the first of which is outreach, we find that most organizations do this pretty well, um hiring people from outside of pharma doing detailing all those types of things. Um what we see an emerging need for is marketing, So who owns marketing to physicians? Uh is that a Markham uh exercises that a physician relations exercises their appropriate connectivity between those two. Um And then are you using, are you leveraging the right content in in order to engage those audiences? And then the other piece and this is often the forgotten pieces operations, uh and that's why we put it in red. So uh if marketing and outreach do the job of bringing everyone to the funnel, what happens once they get there? Often we find that there's not necessarily a clear path in terms of call center management in terms of scheduling uh to get physicians the appointments that they're seeking to make that process as seamless as possible. And so there are best practices from outside of health care to follow as it relates to that type of operational management and then knitting all this together is crm tools. So does your crm actually focus on only top of the funnel or do your liaisons who are actually in the physician offices have connectivity into the, not just the the volume of referrals going in, but also the velocity. So how quickly are they sending referrals and how does that connect back through the call center and then of course, are they getting the appointments or just making calls and not being satisfied with them? Another tool that I think might be helpful to this audience would be, you know, what does good look like? And so as I mentioned before, most organizations do a really good job of promoting uh and so this is a lot of the, you know, one dimension or one way, you know, with marketing materials and collateral clinic visits, communications for program and events. Um the next horizon, what we found pretty consistently is having operational integration, so your liaisons and the function of physician relations actually is more connected to the rest of the organization, but you don't necessarily lead it. What you're doing is you're actually pulling information stakeholders together internally to create a better channel back out to the physician community. The final horizon really is about seamless collaboration with the physician. Uh and so as an experience owner, you the physician relations function would actually be those who are conducting free satisfaction measurement. This is what's interesting to me is that we as an industry we still haven't tapped into monitoring physician satisfaction as frequently as as we ought to and in fact what I've seen is that most organizations kind of choose october a survey month and maybe every other year conduct a survey and so there are, there are sophisticated tools um some of them we deploy to make sure that you're actually monitoring transactional satisfaction as well to escalate issues for service recovery. Um The other ideal state here would be the community physician forum, the platforms like I mentioned with broadcast meant to help actually nurture that um looking to customize the digital experience. So what does that, what does the physician's office really need at their fingertips. Uh and then of course, you know online scheduling. Um and this is a holy grail or the third rail of healthcare, you know, how do you mess with templates and how do you actually get a referral appointment scheduling optimized. What's interesting here is that leading organizations we work with are actually looking at data models to essentially create recommendations engines too balance the organizational goals with the physicians desires in terms of when they want things scheduled and the types of patients with consumers and their demand even from a personality profile perspective. Um and this assessment will is something we use to help organizations really think through what the different um components of their business are as it relates to physician relations and outreach and operations and really, you know, taking some time to ask yourselves these questions. Um, you know, what is your shared vision of the function? Where can you make the biggest impact? And then how is that demonstrated through the different uh, you know, eight components of what makes a business function work. Just a couple of highlights here, um, mentioning before, you know, how well do you identify at risk relationships and recover them? You know, physicians represent multiple referrals and encounters and a lot of downstream volume. Are you doing enough to stay in front of that? Um, from a leadership perspective, how well is position, marketing and outreach prioritized and what's your, what's their view of your role? Um, and then from a process perspective on the other side, what are your core referral processes and are they consistently executed? Um, and then also I want to share this with you. This is dr K. Um you know, what's interesting about building excitement is there are so many new opportunities now to engage folks in, in uh, in online communities in this particular example. DR K is someone who is passionate about online harassment, mental health, particularly amongst gamers. And so he's been somewhat of a celebrity amongst gamers really, and using this as a mechanism to engage them where they are and to understand through his podcast, um, what they're dealing with and how to actually address some of those, um, those issues like self criticism and depression. So in summary, you know, by the numbers, Markham is still open. It's the only benchmarking program designed for and by national healthcare leaders. There's a Q. R. Code if you want to just pull out your phone and scan. That will also include a link in the chat. Here's an example of the dashboard but I won't go through all of that. Um but I would really encourage you to to participate. We again, we're in the midst of data collection, we've already garnered a lot of responses but we could always use more uh and of course, you know, will be available to answer any questions about that. But for now let's open it up to questions and answers scotch. Thanks john appreciate you sharing that talk with us in our audience listening now is an absolute delight and to that audience just remember that you can submit your questions for john using the adjacent panel if you haven't already any that we don't get time to today, we'll be sure to follow up with offline and then anybody that is watching and had colleagues that may not have been able to tune in today, be sure to check back here for the on demand video that will be coming soon. So john something that you mentioned in your talk was this focus on consumer marketing nowadays in an ideal world, what would the split be between consumer marketing and physician marketing? That's a great question scott I think, you know, from my perspective, it's hard to say the ideal because I think that will vary based on the overall business objectives. So one of the things that we know is that the, the physician component plays a bigger role, the greater the geographic distance, uh, and certainly the level of special, So the answer, the squishy answer is it depends. I think the more direct answer is it's got to improve significantly. Um, so I would say that, you know, ideally it's probably at least 25-50% of the consumer budget. Um, you know, that's not necessarily 50 50. 1 of the interesting things, I think valuable things about physician outreach and marketing is that it lends itself to be much more experimental. And so one of the things I would recommend is looking at uh channel and content experiments. Um, and I think it's got as you know, you know, broadcast that does a lot of that to demonstrate, you know, what is the efficacy of specific channels and so being able to carve out budget to in order to do that. Um, and then of course that's going to vary too by service line priority. Uh, so from a big bucket perspective, certainly 25 to 50% of consumer budget. Uh, and then from a tactical perspective that's going to depend on where your service line um, needs are excellent. Thank you, john, you had a note here in your talk, someone highlighted about humanizing the experience and not just hitting up your audience with refer refer refer um in terms of meaningful content news insights that the audience could then share. What type of content do you think has had the biggest impact. So that's a good question. Um what let me describe, let me answer that in terms of evolution. So I've been with the firm for 25 years and when we first started doing this work with um in particular academic medical centers um the main concept was well we are a B. C. Health care system and were awesome and you should just send your patients to us and so is a big master brand play. Uh and then it became, well here's our list of physicians and it was very static and it was black and white. Um a big part of to humanize the experience early on was okay, show us a picture. So referring physicians told us consistently, I actually want to see what this person looks like. Uh and again it wasn't to evaluate them or judge them. It was more about, I need to feel like I have a human connection in today's day and age. That human connection can be done with prerecorded video. It can be done with introductions. We've actually worked with some health care systems to build personality profiles of physicians. You know what some of their interests are. You know, think about what you would want to know about someone before you started dating them. Um, you know, there's actually concepts in the market. Uh, and I think there's a very interesting idea, you know, things like eHarmony for physicians, you know, how do you actually create a profile, a rich enough profile of your experts in the field that, that truly allows them to introduce themselves as a, as a, as a person? Um, we did some recent work, for example, with a health care system looking to increase their fellowship enrollment. A big part of that was going moving away from the static website and the traditional, you know, onboarding process, recruiting and onboarding process and more into um, videos from current fellows as well as from the fellowship fellow ship leadership, the fellow leadership to really talk about what it means to them to work in that particular environment. So much more personable, much more, really much more human. You're right on the money there, john and this, this aligns completely what we've seen. We did a survey and we found that four out of five physicians if referring outside of their own institution, the external facilities, that the biggest factor and you know, making that happen was understanding that the insights and seeing some of these personal profiles and expertise and physicians that they were trending out. So that way there was, you know, some level of comfort there and it wouldn't just be a random lottery, okay, I'm sending this physician in this particular region and I have no clue. So, so having that personal fingerprint is very important and along those lines, think about the reason for that is the level they need to build a level of trust. So, you know, do I trust a name on a on a website or do I trust some of I've interacted with and that is the ideal. So really we want the interaction, but the next to ideal is how do I open up the doors to the organization and allow you to get to know me without actually having a conversation with me? Oh you're exactly right there, johnny, I mean, you you need to showcase your top providers for your institutions in order, you know, convince anybody, why would they move from from that institution and something that, you know, we've seen in in in your corner of the world there for that as webcasts that have a similar format to this where we will connect top, you know, providers and a similar service line from a particular region or group of regions to discuss this and maybe have it as a more open format where it's dialogue driven and everybody can, you know, chime in, have their cameras turns on, it's it's less passive than this and it's more a virtual advisory board format that's something that we have seen in the pandemic era. And it's definitely worked for this cross collaboration and convincing institutions where they need to work amongst themselves while adding that personal edge. Um the next question that we have here is how have you, you know, helped institutions convince senior leadership in this paradigm shift for strictly consumer markets marketing to your physician model. You know, obviously that the numbers speak for themselves, john but is there any other techniques or or presentation tactics that can help you know, make the shift? Yeah. So the way I would look at is there is a functional component which is about the numbers and then there's an emotional component. And so the emotional component um I call the billboard problem, which is when the ceo sees that your competitor has a billboard, they want one too, when you're chief physician see that their peers have billboards with their faces on them? They want one too. And of course you all can kind of chuckle about that. Um and so what are what are similar ways that you can actually tap into that competitive, emotional, you know, ego driven um decision making. Uh and so some of that has to actually do with making them feel like the consumer. And so one of the things that I found pretty successful, particularly in overcoming negative issues is you know, asking them okay for for these types of things as a consumer, how have you actually engaged marketing? You know, so did you actually pay attention to the billboard? Did you, did you go to the website, what was it about that website or that digital experience that really made you become an advocate for it because just just as patients are becoming consumers, this trend of consumerism is taking hold so our leaders and so tapping into their pain points with respect to experiences that they didn't like or experiences that they love and want to tell others about. You know, we often talk about you know, amazon and Uber and Uber rising health care and all those type two things. It could be a source of pride for them as well. Um the pain points are pretty simple. I mean from a physician perspective, you know, some things that we often do in terms of connecting outreach marketing and operations is to say, okay, so what I'd like for you and all ask, well what I'd like for you to do is make an appointment with yourself, so call your own system, you know, click on these emails, follow that journey through and then let's talk about what your experience was like and all too often, what they come back with is that was horrible. And we're asking physicians and their office staff to go through this just to get an appointment with us. Like well, yeah, and that's why we need to really look at this and and improve our experience and you're right on the money there again, john and I've heard you say that in our conversations, you know, like having that and inward look at your organization and how it's functioning or as we like to call it here, eating our own cooking. And I think it's something that's so valuable that institutions often overlooked, they have this, you know, internal bias about how they operate and how they're perceived and often don't take the time, take that step back and and and look at ourselves from how an external referral or customer would, would approach them. So I really think that that is, you know, invaluable advice there and with that being said, um, we are up at time here. Any questions that we didn't get time to today, jOHn and myself will make sure to follow up and and get those answered in a timely manner. And I'd just like to remind folks that today's talk along with everything else in the series can be viewed at the same link here and the links below. So be sure to check them out and thanks again so much for your time here, john and and your insights. We really appreciate it. Along with your partnership. Thank you
