The Power of Patient Podcasts in Modern Hospital Marketing with Bonnie Ward, CHI St. Vincent

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: Welcome, everybody, we’re going to have a blast today. I had a chance to catch up with Bonnie a few minutes, and she sent in some really cool topics for ideation today. Things I hadn’t heard of yet from healthcare marketers, so this is going to be really fun. Bonnie, where do you live? Where do you work?

Bonnie Ward: Hey, yes. I live in Little Rock, Arkansas, the state’s capital. I work for St. Vincent, which is a part of CommonSpirit Health, which is a national Catholic-heal healthcare system.

Alex: I love it. I love it. Very mission-driven, I assume. You’ve been in healthcare marketing for a long time, right?

Bonnie: Long time. Longer than I’m going to say I’m here, but long enough to see lots of changes, and to chuckle through the ones that I don’t like and to embrace the ones that I do like.

Alex: Yes. We’ve been chuckling and crying all the same time for the last few years, ever since HHS and all these guidelines started coming down. We chuckle because we can’t keep crying. That’s what we do here at Cardinal then. You know what, it’s been fun, all of the new guidelines and all the lawsuits and stuff, not the fun part, but it has forced all of us to become so much more innovative. I can already tell some of the stuff you’re doing. I don’t doubt with you what’s brought on by all the recent guidelines, but for a lot of healthcare marketers out there, they had to go get a CRM, online booking tools. They had to find a way to pass back information to ad platforms in a HIPAA-compliant way, so it forced everyone to realize, “Oh my gosh, we have to advance what we do and more retailify our market.” Very cool.

You have done one of the coolest things that I’ve heard of in healthcare marketing, which is launch a patient podcast. Someone told me yesterday, I was interviewing, “You should do that for your clients.” I said, “It’ll never work.” Then somebody has done it.

Bonnie: Yes.

Alex: I’m like, “Okay, now I’m eating my words. I need to call the interviewee.” What did you do? Why did it come about? Why did you want a patient podcast? Who do you think will listen to it and what’s going on with it?

Bonnie: Yes. I will say I’m very personally inspired by the patient podcast. The idea came about a couple of years ago because I personally had to have two back surgeries within a couple of weeks of each other. All those people, during my recovery started coming out of the woodwork that I worked with, that I knew in the community and were like, “Tell me the truth, would you recommend this kind of a back surgery because I need back surgery?” It’s not that they didn’t trust their doctor or their surgeon with the outcomes, but they wanted to hear it from someone who’s had the surgery because this is the reality, Alex.

A lot of our surgeons have never had the procedures themselves that they’re doing. Thank the Lord. I don’t want my back surgeon to also have had back surgery, but they can only tell you so much medically. They can tell you what’s supposed to happen. How you’ll heal. The time it takes to heal, what should happen based on your outcome, but what patients can tell you is the good, the bad, and everything in-between. They can tell you, “Do you need a caregiver to come stay with you? Can you wash your hair and take a shower right after? How does it affect your life? Can you make your own food? Can you make your own meals? How’s your energy? How are you going to feel emotionally, how do you feel?”

That podcast actually germinated out of my own personal experience and I brought it to my team. I had a small team here in Arkansas and I said, “Guys, what do you think about this?” They’re like, “Oh my gosh, we love this so much.” We took a couple of years because we were still in the height of what I call the COVID healthcare era. It wasn’t the right timing, but we started to work on all the grounds work. We did focus groups on what we could call it. We got opinions from these focus groups on what they listened to this a podcast. Alex, we actually did a little bit of a risque name. It’s called A View From the Bed: A Patient’s Journey. It truly is click bait because you don’t know what kind of bed we’re talking about at the beginning of it, but it’ll get you to click on it to see what it’s about. There are no doctors. Zero doctors, which is like [crosstalk]

Alex: I was thinking of a podcast. That’s what I thought. Someone was pitching me, “Hey, we’re going to have the providers here, talk to the marketer that’s going to host a–” It’s going to be boring. I love what you guys have done because I just had a procedure and they informed me of the outcome and stuff. I’m like, “No one told me I shouldn’t go host a philanthropy speech the next day. I shouldn’t fly to Jacksonville and do work in four days that I’m going to be sleeping, sitting up and my kids aren’t going to like that. I can’t pick them up.” No one told me and it was a really rougher recovery than it needed to be. I love that because someone can leave the office, and once all of the providers, and MPs, everybody’s armed with it knows it is around, they can say, “Hey, listen, I’m sure you have more questions, I’ll go check out this podcast, and hear from actual patients.”

Bonnie: Yes. I love it because we talk to all different kinds of patients. The one that we literally just draw this past Tuesday is around wound care. It’s this really cool story about this woman. She had been going through chemotherapy because she had colon cancer, but nobody told her that it could cause some immune problems that could slow healing in other parts of her body. What happened was she actually ended up getting an injury on one of her toes during a mission trip and it didn’t heal. Well, she ended up having to have that toe amputated. She connected with our wound care services because they were worried that the infection would spread to her foot.

It was all because the chemotherapy had suppressed her immune system. She actually had to pause the chemotherapy, started going to wound care many times a week to get specialized treatment. Now she’s a 100% recovered. She didn’t lose any more of her toes. She’s in fact, just came back from another missions trip down in South America. Cool little story, but that’s just something that you don’t think about. It’s you have a wound on your toe, it’s not healing. You put all the ointments on it from the store, but you don’t think, “Oh my gosh, this toe could actually have to be cut off,” and then what that means. We have really cool topics with patients.

Alex: Love it.

Bonnie: I will say though because we are healthcare, we still work with our doctors to pick the patient. To make sure that their stories are going to be stories that we do want to showcase, even if they’re challenging stories.

Not all of our stories are cookie-cutter-happy-endings. They’re endings that are appropriate for the condition and for that patient. We talk about how did that patient feel? What was the emotional aspect that they went through? Do they have resources. This one woman who was a breast cancer survivor shared this book with our listeners that said, “Go get this book from Amazon because it’s humor for those going through breast cancer.” It’s called When Boobs Attack. We talk about this awesome stuff and it’s all because these patients are so willing to share and we’ve seen great results. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback that were just honest.

Alex: I love it. I love it. We’ll talk about results in a second because I know you’re a big believer in CRM, tracking everything through. That’s going to be really fun. I was wondering, and you segued perfectly into it, tactically, how do we do it because you have so much health-protected information. What do you do? You have to ask the providers, “Hey, we’re trying to do this, can you personally ask a– like tactically, someone wanted to do this. How can they ask a patient?

Bonnie: Yes, tactically. I will say the first thing you have to do is you have to make sure that your whole senior leadership team feels comfortable with you doing this type of a podcast because if you don’t have buy-in outside of your department, your doctors are never going to agree to give you patients and they’re never going to feel comfortable. Yes, that was the very first step. Then we started talking to our doctors based on the calendar that we wanted to create for the podcast with topics and specialties and talking to our doctors, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing. Help us identify these patients that would be really good fits.” I will tell you, I have not had a doctor that’s like, “Count me out. Don’t want a patient.” No. In fact, they all want their patients on these podcasts because they have such amazing stories and such amazing patients. They’re so happy to provide us with the name and phone number. Then what happens is my team actually calls this patient. We talk to them about their story and we ask them if they’d be willing to share in our podcast. We let them know that the podcast is audio and video recorded. It’s in both mediums. We have them sign our HIPAA compliant release form. If anything ever comes back and they want to take it down or there’s any– we get a call from our compliance team, I can give them that form and say, “Yes, our T’s are crossed and our I’s are dotted.” Then, yes, we set up a whole media room within our office suite and we record them and edit them and everything in-house. It’s just a really cool resource. We also work with an outside vendor that edits all of our videos for us. They also do the broadcasting, which is fantastic.

Alex: Yes. I would find one of those because we pieced it with Upwork contracts, but it’s easier just to find a probably a company or something that can do all the editing and promotion and upload. That is awesome. Technically, I get it now. That makes sense. I have five clients I want to go and tell them like, “Hey, Bonnie told me this thing. You guys should go do this thing.”

Bonnie: Yes.

Alex: It is such a unique way for patients without going to Reddit or Quora some way that you have no idea what someone’s going to say to get actual advice on how the procedure is going to go. I could talk about this for the next 30 minutes. That is so awesome that you all have done that because I had just run into that issue this year with too many of my procedures. I’m like, dude, they gave me the standard recovery thing, and now my friends are like, “Hey, how did that thing go that you did?” It’s not that we don’t trust the doctors, but we want to hear from another guy or whatever, like, “Hey, man, what was the recovery rate?” Anyways, beautiful, Bonnie. I love that you guys did that. Let’s talk about results. You said, it’s been awesome. I know you believe in. Talk to me about everything you love about patient acquisition. I know you guys are using health codes, the HRAs, and then you’re tracking all the way through. Talk to me about how you start people off and then how you track them in your CRM and all that fun stuff. What are you using health quizzes for? Is it certain service lines or how do you deploy them?

Bonnie: Obviously we don’t do quizzes for everything, but I will say if there’s a marketer out there in healthcare that has not jumped on board with their online health quiz, do it, even if you just launch one for your number one priority service line. For a lot of healthcare entities that tends to be cardiology or cardiovascular surgery, that’s a real standard one, that across the board, you know your health system, if it’s viable it has heart services. We partnered actually with our CRM. We use Personify, now known as Personify. They used to be Virgin Pulse, used to be [unintelligible 00:10:41] used to be well-taught, but now they’re called Personify. They now offer online health quizzes and they’ve offered them now for a little over a year. They’re very cost economical to check them out. What it does is it’s a short three minute quiz that you can take online about what is your risk for heart disease? They’ll ask you, what’s your age, what’s your gender? Have you been diagnosed with high blood pressure? Do you know what your blood pressure is? Do you have a family history of high blood pressure? Has anyone in your family ever had a heart attack or a stroke? Have you had a heart attack or stroke? It asks you these questions that literally takes you 30 minutes to complete. Then what it does is at the end, it says, “Hey, put your email in here, tell us your name and we’ll send you your results.” It’ll also pop up a summary of your results on the screen. If you don’t want to give your information, you still get your results.

Alex: Good.

Bonnie: It’s like a little gas light meter like this. It’s like low-risk, high-risk. It tells you where your little meter is, like an old school gas meter, and then it says, “Hey, you’re at high risk,” or “Hey, you’re at low risk.” Then it tells you these are 100% customizable endings. They’re high risk. We have a customized, “Hey, have you not seen a cardiologist, this might be a right time for you.” It has links to go find a cardiologist on our website or find one of our clinics nearest you or some people don’t even have primary care doctors. It’s like, “Start your journey with a primary care doctor.” It cross links. The cool thing though, is if people do give you their information, feeds back into your CRM, and then you can track that patient to see, “Did they come in for cardiovascular services? Did they come in and see a cardiologist? Did they come in for a heart surgery?” The cool thing is so far, this fiscal year, Alex, I can track 15 cardiology office visits just to the health quiz, and I can track 17 heart surgeries-

Alex: Awesome.

Bonnie: -back to that. As a health system, those are dollars in the door, right? That tells your senior team– I take that information to the senior team and say, “Hey, from a marketing perspective, I have driven 15 CV appointments and 17 heart surgeries, which from a contribution standpoint, 17 surgeries has already paid for that health tool 10 times over. Yes, it’s a really cool tool that you could actually take to your executive suite and say, “This made a difference.”

Alex: Can I ask you a couple of dumb questions?

Bonnie: Sure.

Alex: We don’t work with a lot of health systems, I’m always looking to learn. Mostly for the health quizzes, mostly for high acuity type stuff, I assume like oncology, cardiology, orthopedics, is that right? There’s no dermatology health quizzes necessary or anythinthing, behavioral.

Bonnie: Yes. Some can be super simple. What I have right now is, “Does your back hurt?”

Alex: Okay. It does.

Bonnie: Yes. I feel you’re over a certain age, your back just starting to hurt, but it’s a, “Does your back hurt?” It asks me these questions because it identifies, “Is your back pain normal? Does your back pain might need to be seen?” There are some headaches, and you think of, “Oh gee, I get headaches.” How often? There’s an algorithm and they’re all vetted by providers and by doctors and to help guide you in the right direction. Yes, you can do it from emphasy all the way through high acuity.

Alex: I like it. A second dumb question on that. How do you promote them? Do you look at your PBC or Google ad campaigns and you say, “Hey, listen, I want to run service line ads for cardiology. I’m going to run ads on cardiologists near me and all the procedures that go along with it. Does a landing page have the health quiz stuff or do your ads or the health quiz? How do you do it? Do you just try to get people in the door, schedule appointments, or do you run health quiz on some of them or is it just like a Meta– it’s a Facebook ads type playing with the quiz?

Bonnie: It’s multiple tactics. We do have certain cadences because one of the things you and I talked about Alex before I came on is our strategies in healthcare, it can’t be one thing or another thing. It has to be all things. What we do is we look at, “Yes, we need our quizzes to show up in Google search.” If people are looking for conditional-based information, “My chest hurt, I have high blood pressure.” That’s when I want them to find the quiz. Yes, we’re serving up our clinics. Yes, we’re serving up our cardiologists. However, when people are searching conditional measures, they’re not looking to call a doctor right away. They’re looking to see, “Am I going to die? Is this heartburn or is it angina?” That’s when we’ll serve up a health quiz in Google search.

Absolutely, they’re on social. We want them on Instagram. We want them on Facebook. We want them on X. We want them on all of the places because people go through the black hole of quizzes on social. You’re late at night, you’re scrolling, you can’t sleep and this quiz, “Hey, is your heart as healthy as you think it is?” Let me see. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I know my mom had a heart attack a couple of years ago. Maybe I know my grandpa had heart surgery at one point, yes, let me go check.

The other thing, Alex, is what happened as a result out of COVID is people became very hyper-aware of some conditions that started rolling out after COVID. We saw a higher incidence of younger individuals that were showing heart-related conditions after they had a serious bout of COVID than we ever have before. People became very hyper-aware of, “I might need to get my chest hurt checked out.” Whereas, before COVID, they might’ve just thought, “Oh, I worked out too hard. Oh, I ate that chili dog. My kids are stressing me out.” Those kinds of things, and not really relate it back to a heart condition. People want this information. Yes, put it out on social, put it out in programmatic, put it out on display ads with a fun, catchy headline. Is your heart beating fast for all the right reasons, with a little lovey-dovey image.

Alex: I love where Bonnie goes with all of her taglines. If you’re from the bed, is your heart beating too fast? [laughs]

Bonnie: Yes, is it beating fast for the right reasons? Is it excitement or angina? No one knows. Take our quiz. We just make it very clear what the action is. It’s like-

Alex: You have fun with it and then you go to the action. I like it. That’s very cool. Guys, I’m wearing a shirt that says “The performance journey.” This is our patient journey-type system that we use. It’s so interesting. Bonnie reinforces what we think, which is PPC is not just for bottom of the funnel, find location, schedule appointment. There are upper mid-funnel terms in there, which is condition-based and you can build on them without losing your shirt. It’s sending them to a quiz, but you have to be able to track all the way through and that’s why Bonnie has her CRM in place and is tracking all the way through. That must’ve been a huge lift, huge health system CRM. Can it go across service lines? I came in for a cardio, I ended up scheduling a derm surgery, they can do it. Wow. [crosstalk]

Bonnie: What you do is you just set your own parameters for your campaigns and you can do this with your email marketing, with your postcard marketing. One of the things, Alex, I said is when you and I were pre-talking about me coming on is, what is a misnomer in marketing, especially in healthcare. You’ve seen these health systems move to digital only tactics. What I would say is ,don’t do that. Do not look past the power of some traditional mediums, especially direct mail because the reality is so many things are digital nowadays that when you get mail, it’s almost like, “Oh my God, I got something in the mailbox.” Mail is actually very effective.

Now, granted I’m coming from Arkansas, Arkansas there are areas I’m in the metropolis area, but there are areas outside of Arkansas that we have to use direct mail because it’s still very internet poor. We have some farming communities that you still have to go up to the mailbox by the highway to get a text message. We need direct mail and other tactics to reach those individuals. That’s why I say, if you come from systems, especially in healthcare that you have rural communities that you serve, which no matter what state you’re coming from, you’re going to have rural communities, add traditional tactics in. That’s where your CRM can still service you because our postcard campaigns there in Arkansas, I have quite a few campaigns that we run, they’re high performers. They bring in and I can track thousands of patients.

Alex: Let’s talk more about it because any channel can be done well, or it can be done poorly. People are going to hear direct mail, then I’m afraid they’re going to go do it really poorly. By the way, later today, I’m going to drive my tractor up to the mailbox and check my text messages. I can’t wait to tell my wife that’s what I’m doing. All right, direct mail. What do you use it? Is it service line? When do you use it as a reactivation? “Hey, you took the quiz. I know your heart sucks. Come in.” What is it? Is it an awareness thin, CHI is here. Tell us how you use it and how you track it.

Bonnie: All of the above. What we do too, is we identify individuals through our CRM. They’re at high risk of having a heart related event. I’m going to stay on the heart track for this one, but it can be done.

Alex: I’m there. I have a hard thing so I’m with you.

Bonnie: We have campaigns for weight loss surgery. We have campaigns for emergency services. We have campaigns for new movers. New movers is amazing because it’s purely new patients that come into your system. If you’re looking to build new patients, get a new mover campaign going. Here is the trick. You have to have a direct mail piece. I’m not talking about an envelope and a letter. Nobody wants to see that. You need to think of something that’s out of the box that’s going to stand out that they don’t have to open when they go to the mailbox. What we do a lot of times here in Arkansas is we do oversized, very cool postcards that catch your attention, have catchy headlines, that really let you know from the get-go, very little text except what you need to know about what we want you to know. It’s like, “Hey, how’s your heart feeling today? Did you know we just opened a clinic 10 miles down the road?” We have a picture of the doctor and we make sure that picture of that doctor looks nice and they look inviting. They’re not one of those that’s like scary. I’ll be honest, some of our doctors look kind of scary.

Alex: Yes. Well, some of us have a face for radio, Bonnie. We can’t [inaudible 00:20:42]

Bonnie: They do. There’s that resting face. I won’t say the rest of that sentence, but we all know what I mean. We make sure that people, it catches their attention, whether it’s heartcare closer to your healthcare.

Alex: How do you track it? Someone got that because you know everybody that got it, they’re in the CRM. Everybody that got the postcard is in the CRM because if they’re new movers, do you put them in the CRM?

Bonnie: Yes, absolutely. The quick way a CRM works, and I will say this in healthcare, you need to budget a CRM. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. It’s every penny is worth it because you can spend dollars in the door. What we do is, again, we work with our CRM vendor and we pull a combination of patients because we want to cross-sell services. If they’re in our primary care, but they’re not in our cardiology services, they have high blood pressure, they’re overweight, they’re a top two diabetic, you probably need to see a cardiologist if you’re around the age of 50. We cross-sell services.

Then what you can do is you take insurance data that looks like the people that you need to serve, and you can pull their information and send to them as well. Your CRM will tell you, “Here’s how many patients you’re going to cross-sell to. Here’s how many will be new patients, never used any of your services a day in their life.” That means they haven’t come to your ED, they haven’t been to prior care, they haven’t had a procedure in your hospital. We can actually track how many new patients are off of all of the campaigns that we run, whether it’s direct mail, email, social, or health quizzes, all of that. Then we track them.

Again, I’ll stick with the heart theme, we send a postcard about, “Hey, is your heart as healthy as you think? We have a cardiology clinic just down the road from you.” I can actually put that clinic’s information as a success criteria. You just get the code for that clinic from your leadership team or the clinic manager. You put it in your CRM, “Is that your success criteria?” It’ll tell me, Betty Sue, after they got the postcard came in for an appointment within this month. You can actually track back Betty Sue throughout her journey. It’ll tell me, “Hey, she went on and actually had to have heart surgery.” They have the CRM [crosstalk]

Alex: Hold. When they go there or it’s a [unintelligible 00:22:53] for the days?

Bonnie: This is just on the back end. The patient doesn’t see this at all. It’s on the back end. What you do is you work with your CRM account executive and you give them, whether it’s that physician’s NPI number, which is assigned on the back end. It’ll pull just information for that campaign for that one doctor, if there’s only one doctor in that clinic.

Alex: Brilliant.

Bonnie: What’s really cool is you can get hyper specific or you can do it based on condition.

Alex: Oh, I get you.

Bonnie: For example, ED services, there are billing codes with insurance that are just for emergency services. On all my ER campaigns, that’s what this success criteria is, did they come in for an emergency service? That’s how I track it back.

Alex: That’s so wild, Bonnie. You’re much more advanced than most people. I heard two things there, and I hate to say the first thing because I run a digital agency, but we are not the only type of marketing you should be running. Other things work, and I’ve heard the billboard thing works, introducing a service line or differentiating and telling patient stories to differentiate. I love that. That can work really well. Radio works. Podcast works. Direct mail can work if done correctly and tracked all the way through. Bonnie is the master of disaster. She tracks everything through. Guys, that’s how you get more budget every year as you go to the C-suite and you say, “Hey, listen, you gave me a million dollars and we got this many procedures. There’s $15 million next year. There’s plenty more room to run. Do you want to grow or not? Give me the money.” I love it. Bonnie, this was awesome. I found you on LinkedIn, so I know people are going to have questions. Are you cool with people coming to you on LinkedIn and asking you questions?

Bonnie: Yes, I’m in LinkedIn. Absolutely. We do this all the time. The number one thing in healthcare is our budgets are small. I don’t care what health system you sit for your market or your region, our budgets are smaller than they used to be. Anytime we can cross your ideas and ideation, holler, I’d be happy to talk to you more about our experience and what we’re doing. We’re doing great things here at the health system here in Arkansas. I continue to expect as we move into the new fiscal year here in just, gosh, weeks, that we’re going to continue to do even more cool, innovative things. The bottom line, Alex, is we have to stop thinking about healthcare marketing as healthcare marketers. We have to think about healthcare marketing as a retail marketers because these millennials that are now aged into the health system, they want to experience healthcare and be discussed and talk to you like they’re shopping for shoes. You have to think about it in those ways. Get partners with you, do brainstorming, ideations, listen to podcasts like this to get good ideas and reach out. Let’s talk about it. Let’s keep the conversation going.

Alex: Community is important, are you going to Stush mid later this year in October?

Bonnie: Yes, Stush mid?

Alex: We’ll see you at the game launch.

Bonnie: Yes, I’ll see you there. Also too, I speak at conferences all over. Hey, watch it out for me. I’m at all the healthcare conferences usually and hoping to speak at the next Physician and Strategy Summit in April of next year. I was just there speaking back in April.

Alex: Oh, HCIC? No.

Bonnie: HCIC will be in Austin.

Alex: Okay, no. What is HNPS? That’s the one our team was at.

Bonnie: HNPS, yes.

Alex: All right, guys, look out for Bonnie. She’s also going to speak at Scaling Up, the Cardinals virtual conference. That’s going to be later this year. She hasn’t gotten the invite yet. She’s about to, but she loves it. This was one of the most innovative, forward-thinking, and fun conversations we’ve had on Ignite, guys. Go find Bonnie. If not at a conference, please hit her up. We’ve got to share. Budgets are smaller. We’ve got to squeeze more from less. She’s here to help. Thank you so much, Bonnie.

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