Transcription:
The Importance of Patient Engagement on Achieving Positive Health

Intro: The following SHSMD podcast is a production of DoctorPodcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth (Host): This is a special podcast produced onsite at SHSMD Connections 2021 annual conference in San Antonio as we talk with keynote speakers and session leaders direct from the show floor. I'm here with Jack Vance. Jack is the Vice President of Digital Strategy Marketing Technology at Mercury Healthcare. Jack, thanks for stopping by our podcast booth today.

Host: You betcha. So, tell us about Mercury Healthcare.

Jack Vance (Guest): Sure thing, Mercury Healthcare, the former technology division of Healthgrades is a technology and data analytics company that empowers health care organizations to engage consumers and optimize provider networks to accelerate growth. Our customers benefit from more than 30 years experience, driving intelligent engagement, aligning physicians and enabling personalized healthcare journeys.

Host: I love it. That is so good. And thank you for everything you've done here at SHSMD Connections 2021. So, you had two presentations. Can you give us a little information on each of those that you did?

Jack: Sure, both kind of had one major thing, which is data is critical. Right. And I think that's kind of the main story for everything that Mercury Healthcare has said here at SHSMD. But the two different presentations, one really leaned into having the right patient journeys and the right patient touchpoints, really creates more positive outcomes, right? It's not just about the clinical care. It's about making sure that you've touched those patients and had more engagements with them along the way. The more you're speaking to them and more you're speaking to them in a customized way, the more they're going to engage with your health system, which means ultimately they're going to have better outcomes because they're less likely to drop off.

They're less likely to not come to that next appointment, which is so critical that continuum of care is so important. But none of that is possible if you don't have the right data and the right data being powered to your marketing automation platforms, to your call center, all of those different touch points that a patient may have with your hospital system, needs the data to back it up. So, you know exactly who that patient is.

One of the big messages from that is that you have to know them. Show them that you know them, right. Have to give them that message in a way that they want to receive it. And then, say I'm not figuring out who you are. I already know who you are. Right? I know that you need this next level of care. So, that's one of the big things for that. And then the other presentation was really, how do you speak to and communicate with your CIO to get them to invest in what the marketing team needs to do what they're doing best. Right? And again, it boils down to data, right? The marketing team needs more information and more data to be able to make those better communications.

Gary, who led that presentation also really talked about the idea of retention versus going out and finding new patients, right? The cost of retaining is just so much lower than going out and finding a new patient, but yet most hospitals really focus on that finding of the new patient, right. Versus which kind of ties both of these presentations together is, having that data means you can have better communications with them, which means it's much easier to retain because they don't feel like they're an anonymous number to the hospitals. They're a patient that the hospita knows well.

Host: I can see where the could see where the two sessions were tied together. You're right, one you're trying to one, keep the people coming back when they should, right. Instead of finding the new patients, which is important. You're still going to do that, but making sure that you keep the patients that you have is vitally important. Let me ask you this. So, why do people not adhere to their treatment plans, especially when they need ongoing -

Jack: I think a lot of it has to do with just the complexity of healthcare, right? This is not a immediate knee jerk reaction. Right? You would like you'd have purchasing something e-commerce right. Everything is a much slower process. The people may do the research. They may not even do the research, but they're going to convince themselves, hey, next step is, I'm going to go figure out, you know, what I'm going to do next.

And then life happens, right? That people get busy. People start to think through other things. So, it's the health system's job to remind them. And one of the things Rachel, who did the presentation on the patient journeys, was talking about is your dentist or your where you get your haircut, they'll text and remind you when your appointment is.

And then you may go to a hospital system and they don't. Right. That's something that they don't have built out. Right? So you have all of these different industries that are accelerating at unbelievable rates of how do we make it easier for you to take the next action with us as a company and really simplify what that looks like and health systems are just, it's just hard right? There's different challenges. Right.

There's HIPAA. There's so many different pieces that they have to combat in the healthcare world that makes it harder, but it doesn't make it less needed. Right? You still have to have that really optimal care and that optimal conversation with the patient to make sure that they're coming back and getting that care.

So that make sure they're a patient for life and that's where lifetime value comes in and all of those great things that you can take advantage of as soon as you start communicating with them. I'm about to get on a flight, a Delta flight, right. And they're known for their customer service. Right? It's so much easier to schedule, book and fly on Delta. It's, it's really difficult to do the same thing with my doctor. Right. So, I may put it off because it's harder.

Host: Yeah, very, very true. So let's talk about patient journeys a little bit. How should somebody listening to this going, you know what, I need to do that? Can you just give us a quick. How someone puts together a patient journeys and how that ultimately helps in the process of getting these people back when they need to come back?

Jack: Sure. So CRM is critical, right? Understanding where that data is all coming in and having a centralized point where all that data can be ingested. You know what the care that patient has had, and then connecting that to your marketing automation platform and creating those unique journeys that are all data-driven right. This is not one static journey. These are journeys that are driven based on the actions that that person has taken. But a CRM is really a critical component of that. If having some single source, that's going to collect, aggregate all that data and then make smart, analytical decisions based on that data that it's collected.

Host: Okay. And then also you talked about the, the second presentation, that you had how to pitch engagement tech to your CIO, data was really important in that. And some of the patient journey also covers into that area too, right? So tell us about how to pirch your engagement tech to your CIO. We're just talking about patient journeys, patient engagement and those things. Why is it important that we need to pitch engagement tech to our CIO? Do patient journeys fall under that?

Jack: Yeah, patient journeys absolutely fall under that. Understanding your market, all of the data that you need to be collecting as marketers and really evolving your marketing team to the next level in the healthcare space; a lot of those decisions are being made by the CIO. What investments are we going to make in technology?

And so the marketing teams have to speak the language of what the CIOs are looking for, which is really numbers and data driven information. They need to know what is the ROI of this technology going to be, and how is it paying off for the health system that goes beyond just marketing. And so the marketers have to have those conversations and it has to be a fight that they're willing to have to go toe to toe and say, look, I need a tool that allows me to take all of that EMR data and make better decisions on how I'm communicating with my patients. It cannot be just a billboard or a TV spot anymore. Right? It has to be really smart conversations with patients and you can't do that without data.

So e-commerce, and every major retail brand has been doing this for years, or even been swiping loyalty cards for years and they make really smart decisions about what you see next and health systems are just behind. And again, it's not because it's, you know, they're not wanting to do it, it's just more complicated in the healthcare space, but they have to catch up.

And the CIO holds a lot of those keys that they need. So, having that conversation and saying I need a way to better engage my patients so that we can get them to take the next step, so we can get them to engage with our cardiology department, so I can get them to engage with the orthopedics department. So, they need the technology and they need to have those conversations with the CIO, let's invest and get the right tech.

Host: Right? Well, you said ROI. If you go in armed with that, usually their ears will perk up a little bit. So give us a strategy then for what you taught in the session, or actually, Gary Druckenmiller did the session. Give us a strategy then that we can use when we're formulating a plan before we're going to talk to the CIO.

Jack: One of the things he spoke about really specifically, was taking a market area data. So once you know, what's happening in the market and working with, you know, whatever technology vendor that you're looking at, working with them to kind of make sure you understand what your market looks like and show them, look by investing here, we are much more accurate than if we just kind of randomly target or we randomly place, whatever our next facility is or whether our next marketing activities, we know a lot more about the market because of this technology. So, imagine what we could do if we had this in our arsenal. Right? So that was one of the things that he talked about was with just a handful of small datasets, you can really show just a higher level understanding of what's happening in your market, very quickly. And so most of the technology partners out there can help you really show that story and showcase exactly how that technology would help you better understand your market. And that's one layer above understanding your patients, and then they can take that to the next level.

So once they start onboarding the EMR data, once they start onboarding all of those other pieces, they can take it even further than that. And really show exactly how we know these patients better because we have that tech.

Host: Yeah, so it sounds like data and data management is really, really important in this. And it sounds like Mercury Healthcare is uniquely positioned to help people with that data and data management, is that correct?

Jack: Yeah, absolutely. That's really one of the major problems that we help solve for our hospital systems is there's so much data flowing in from marketing activities, from the EMR, from their physician activities. Someone needs to help them really connect the dots on all of that and then make it actionable. And that that's the critical piece of this, right.

Just collecting all of the data and doing some analytics around them is great. It's important, but unless it becomes actionable, there's really not a lot you can do with it. Right? You have to be able to say, add it to a marketing journey, turn it into a digital campaign where I'm targeting people very specifically, based on the indicators I have of that person.

Host: Right. That sounds great. So, how do you work with your clients? Do you offer a full suite of tools? Do you, if somebody says, I just need this, only a dashboard. Tell us about that. How do you work with your clients?

Jack: It's a wide range of thing. So we have our CRM product, our physician engagement product, our engagement center product, which is a tool for call centers. So, we have lots of different products that are available to them. And then we also have an entire services department that can really help them maximize the value of those tools. So, that's one of the teams that I'm on and lead is the ability to just help them connect the dots, right? If they don't have a large team on their side that can connect all of this and maximize the value of their CRM or maximize their value, the value of the technology that they've invested, they can tap directly into us and we can really help them very quickly stand up and maximize the value of all the technology that they purchased.

But every client that we engage with has kind of a different level of engagement and we're, we're excited to help and engage with them in whatever they need.

Host: Right. Do you do audits as well? Go in and let me see what you're doing. Let me understand what you have in place now, and then give recommendations as well?

Jack: Sure. That's a big part of kind of the sales process and how we kind of go through this is really engaging with all of our partners and saying, what are you doing? How are you solving these types of problems today? Right? What is, what is your mechanism for saying, this is the next message that this patient is going to receive. And then we can show you solutions that can potentially enhance that, if you're not solving that problem well today, or we can add layers of data onto that if you are doing it well, but you just need that next injection of data to make sure you're taking the right action for your patients.

Host: Right. That sounds really good. Well, Jack, thank you so much for stopping by. Anything else you want to add?

Jack: No, this is great. Thank you so much for having me.

Host: Absolutely. So once again, Jack Vance, VP of Digital Strategy Marketing Technology at Mercury Healthcare. Jack, thanks for stopping by.

Jack: Thanks for having me.

Host: And sign up for the SHSMD Connections, virtual conference, October 19th through the 21st 2021, which will feature two days of new sessions plus recordings from the in-person event. Go to shsmd.org/education/annualconference to learn more and to get registered and please join us at next year's conference, SHSMD Connections 2022, September 11th through the 14th at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland outside of Washington, DC. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and to access our full podcast library for other topics of interest to you visit shsmd.org/podcasts. I'm Bill Klaproth. As always, thanks for listening.