Intro: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of Dr. Podcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth (host): On this edition of the SHSMD podcast, we talk with Jeff Stewart, another session presenter at SHSMD Connections, 2023, with the most creative title of them all. Are you ready for this? Here it is. Can We Just Put the Old One Back? Yeah, that's what it is. Can We Just Put the Old One Back? Sustaining a Consumer Focused Content Strategy.

What in the world will Jeff be talking about? Hm. We're going to find that out and more as we talk about putting together consumer focused content. So let's focus on you and get to it. Right now.

 This is the SHSMD podcast, rapid insights for healthcare strategy professionals in planning, business development, marketing, communications, and public relations. I'm your host Bill Klaproth.

In this episode, we talk with Jeff Stewart. Jeff leads, all marketing and brand initiatives in the United States for Christus Health, as Vice-President of Strategic Marketing and Jeff is presenting during this year's 2023 SHSMD Connections conference in Chicago, make sure that you register, just go to SHSMD.org. That's S-H-S-M-D.org/education/annualconference.

Jeff will be presenting his conference on September 11th. Jeff, thanks for being here.

Jeff Stewart: Thanks, Bill. Excited to talk to you today.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah. Well we are all looking forward to SHSMD Connections 2023 in Chicago. And your session, can we just put the old one back? Sustaining a consumer focused content strategy. So Jeff, it sounds like unlocking new patient acquisition for your required re-architecting the Christus Health website to meet the needs of the consumer and overcome years of, I love this phrase, internally focused content. So let's start here. Tell us about this internally focused content. What was that and why was that not working?

Jeff Stewart: So, Christus Health is a collection of 12 or so health systems across New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. Specifically in the US side, we also have international operations, but those health systems, by virtue of growing through acquisition, their content functioned essentially as microsites.

And moreover, the way that the content was architected, the way that our, any particular administrator, or executive, or physician inside of those ministries viewed it; they really viewed their content as their own content and not in service of the larger brand, not in service of efficient consumer access or facilitating navigation.

And so it really created this condition where everything that was present on the website was built from the perspective of the internal stakeholder. It was organized the way the physician wanted it, the services were listed in the way that the local CEO requested it and you could have, and all of what's interesting is many of our geographies are actually contiguous.

So the zip codes abut on the outer lying geographies. And so if you have somebody who lives in one of those, let's say zip codes that lives in between the boundaries or near the boundary of two health systems, they can actually find themselves navigating one health system website, while in fact the one that may better meet their needs or better meet their life where they run errands or where they go to school or work is actually, the health system on the other side of the geography may actually be the better fit.

And so the whole website was designed around our internal boundaries. The way our internal divisions, we call them ministries, but that really means market area or health system. And so that internal ministry division defined the consumer experience.

Bill Klaproth (host): So it was kind of a patchwork of little microsites and different messages and services and, did it not have the same look and feel across all these different platforms or microsites as you call them?

Jeff Stewart: Well, so that's why the microsites isn't exactly the best term for it because we use that term even as we described the problem that we're solving, because it functioned as such. But to your point, the visual experience was the same. The navigations were united in many ways.

And so if you landed on the homepage of Christus Health.org, which we did generally direct most of our marketing traffic into, you land on Christus Health.org and then you begin navigating down the ministry pathway, right? So, I'm interested in, let's say, Trinity Mother Francis, and then I'm interested, which is a health system in Tyler, Texas.

I'm interested then in the Mother Francis Tyler Hospital, then I'm interested in the services that that hospital has, and then I'm interested in orthopedics at that service. That, that defines the information architecture as it existed prior to our redesign, which created a condition where if we have in excess of 40 hospitals across the United States, that, and all of them have orthopedics, for some service lines, we had more than 50 pages, all describing essentially the same set of services. And so specifically, you know, Google then is unable to navigate that appropriately. Google is unable to process those 50 pages as unique or different per location even though they have an address that says, this one's in Tyler, Texas, this one's in Longview, Texas. This one's in Jacksonville, Texas, Marshall, Texas, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Even though we have the address on those orthopedic pages, Google could not really help our consumers get to orthopedic care at Christus. There was no place where we could define what orthopedic care at Christus was like. Instead, we had 45 almost duplicate versions of orthopedic care at Christus, and that meant, when you looked at, so if I go in and I started here two years ago, right as this process was kicking off. When I go into the webmaster tools, I look at the Google search console and then I say, we are a leader in, let's take Heart care specifically. We have the largest heart group in East Texas.

We have a hundred bed heart hospital, nationally recognized. We are a very large player in heart care in Texas overall. And I go into my search console and I look and I see that I have zero impressions for unbranded cardiology in the last six months, meaning Google has said I cannot find anything relevant about cardiology on this website.

Now, if you do a branded search, you will find us. But in an unbranded sense, cardiology didn't exist. Orthopedics didn't exist. Cancer and oncology didn't exist in an unbranded sense inside Google. And so that was the consequences of an internally focused content strategy where we allowed our ministries and our physician priorities to define the consumer experience and build artificial boundaries between relevant pieces of content.

Bill Klaproth (host): How did you streamline all of these patient pathways? How did you take all this and make it easy to understand for the patient?

Jeff Stewart: Well, it's actually really simple, right? Because we just have to say what is relevant to the consumer. What is the consumer interested in? What are their common questions? Again, when you, especially you take that unbranded lens to it, cause our mission at Christus is to extend the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

And that word extend right in the front of that mission statement does is the work of marketing. We extend. And so how do we get beyond our walls? How do we get beyond our boundaries to bring our healing ministry to more and more people? And we do that by finding those in need. Who has knee pain?

What are the questions they're asking? Who is concerned about their heart health? What are the questions they are asking? Who recently moved to the area and is in need of primary care, of mammograms, of diagnostic, of preventive? How do we identify the search words, the terms, the questions they're asking of Google to bring them to our content first?

And so when we look at it from that lens, we say, well, we need to identify the conditions, the services, and the procedures at Christus, create a service page that encapsulates cardiology at Christus, Cancer Care at Christus, Orthopedics care at Christus, Sports Medicine, stroke care, and so on. Define it, offer all of the services and demonstrate all the services we offer in one place, and then attach that to the physicians in the locations who offer it and build in a zip code finding tool to help you filter to the place or the physician that offers those services in that area.

So really just is flipping that to that consumer, the basis of the consumer question.

Bill Klaproth (host): So instead of the individual entity doing that, headquarters took over basically and said, we're to put together one main service page and then we'll attach it to you, if you offer these services. That way, you have more control over it. Instead of the individual entities, which there's many, and they're all doing it a different way, or not even having those key phrases or search terms listed.

Jeff Stewart: We're not even connecting those dots for the patient. I mean, from our perspective, Christus Health is the 10th largest health system in the, in America by one measure. We are one of the largest not for-profit, faith-based health systems. And, we should be demonstrating the scale and the scope and the size of the services and the expertise of the physicians that we bring into our ministries.

We are essential in our communities. We provide a huge range of care, especially as telehealth and virtual care continues to break down those geographical barriers, why are we saying, well, we have a limited cancer program in this area, a slightly more robust cancer program in this area, no cancer program in this area, when in reality, all of those are within perhaps a one hour drive of each other.

And so we should extend, showcase that Christus is a leader in this service line, in this, in cancer care and saying, here are all the physicians, here are all the services. Here's all our expertise. And yes, there is some geographical variation as to where it is, but that's where the location of the service and the facility to, or the of the physician in the facility to that overall service line, allows us to help you see that Christus is a leader collectively as a system.

Bill Klaproth (host): So apparently, you received some pushback from the physicians and the administrators. You're going to cover this in your session. Can you talk about some of the pushback you received from doing it this way or, or changing up from the way it had been done?

Jeff Stewart: You know, Bill, I really wanted to put topic in this way because I sat through many conference sessions, be it SHSMD and others where people they rightly talk about the wonderful progress they've made on a particular website. And maybe sometimes you hear like, well, we had a physician here, or maybe a leader here who wasn't terribly thrilled.

But it's so often it's a success story and that's great and I wish them well. But you know, I think many of us in healthcare marketing really understand the truth about what it's like to work with some of the other stakeholders inside our organizations. And, Christus is a fantastic organization, filled with wonderful people, but we really received some very challenging feedback when we launched.

And there's a lot of reasons for it. But I thought it was a great angle to really come at it because it was not a kumbaya moment. It was everything that our executive team wanted. I'll be clear. I've received our team, has received a lot of praise from the system leadership side.

But for every piece of praise from system leadership, there is an equal and opposite amount of feedback from the leadership or the local leadership from our physician group. And that is a really challenging condition. And it really was. And I don't mean the first day or the first week that my phone rang from several of our local leaders asking us, can we put it back? I mean, three months, four months, five months later, I was still being pulled into meetings and having people insist that we just put the old website back.

Bill Klaproth (host): Right. Can we just put the old one back? Hence the title of the session.

Jeff Stewart: Yeah, it's a real quote that comes up. And we are now one year past as of mid-June in 2023, and I know for a fact there are still people who harbor that feeling that the old one was better.

Bill Klaproth (host): How do you defend this, Jeff? Can we just put the old one back, what do you say to them?

Jeff Stewart: It is the right thing to do. So when we come at it and we bring the perspective of our consumer, when we can document and demonstrate the frustration for our consumers, whether it's using tools like Hot Jar that allow us to, to show where there are frustrations for our users. Or whether we're using qualitative tools where we can actually have a moderated feedback session with a random user and talk to them about how they're using it or whether we're able to show, as I said before, we were in a place where the unbranded cardiology, unbranded oncology, unbranded gastric bypass was at literally zero impressions.

Bill Klaproth (host): Yeah, not showing up.

Jeff Stewart: Right.

Bill Klaproth (host): I've heard, somewhere. If you don't show up when people search for you, that's not good. I've heard that.

Jeff Stewart: It's hard. Yeah. It, it's hard to get people to your website, so when we can bring and that perspective to it. Because ultimately as we all know, that the idea of the HPPO right, the highest paid person's opinion, and oftentimes that's the physician, and maybe it's not about pay, but the physician in our health systems carries a very strong voice.

That is, that every healthcare marketer out there knows exactly what I mean. They carry a very strong and powerful voice that has very few checks against it. The one thing that in my view at least, can trump or at least balance that provider's opinion, is the consumer. And so when you can very clearly demonstrate that a consumer seeking care cannot get it from us because of the way the site is architected and implemented, then we have probably the only voice that can stand against a strong physician's voice. And so that's why I think it's really important for this session that we really talk about how we do that. What are the both quantitative and qualitative ways that we document and bring that voice to the table. And when we use the lens of our consumer, I don't, I mean, data wins. But data with a story really, I think brings the results that we're looking for, right? So I don't use, you know, something that we've done in some other areas is we really find a patient story. A patient who is able to tell us about how they use our site to find care, or they use one of our other digital tools to actually access us.

Like we have an on-demand care product and we have stories of how people have used that on-demand care product. It's a virtual urgent care. It's a very simple self signup. It's a very low price, and so it's an easy way to get to a Christus clinician. And so we can, I can show you, we've had 10,000 visits.

I can show you that, 30 to 35% of them have never had a visit at Christus, and 50% of them don't have a PCP. That's all important data and it really documents the success of say that on-demand care program, that consumer focused strategy. But when I then give you the story of the mom who accesses care for her sick six year old at a moment in which she can't leave the house cause another kid is home and there's nobody to watch them or whatever that story is. When I layer that story on top of it, it really drives home the importance from the consumer's perspective because the one thing that we all have here at Christus in common, is again, our mission to extend that healing ministry of Jesus Christ.

And when we can show how we are doing that by meeting the needs of their consum of our consumers where they are, then we can really stand up for this website that unites us as a brand and makes it easy for our consumers to get answers to the questions they're asking about their medical and their healthcare and how they access our system.

Bill Klaproth (host): Data with a story wins. I like that. Data is great, but data with a story is really key. So when people that were giving you pushback on this, Jeff, an administrator or a physician calling up going, Hey, can we put the old one back? When you go through the data and the story, do you change their minds right away? Are they like, okay, I get it now. Thanks for explaining that to me.

Jeff Stewart: I wouldn't say right away, but it helps check their perspective.

Bill Klaproth (host): Okay.

Jeff Stewart: And it depends, right? I mean, every physician's a little bit different, so it helps them. And, one of my overall management things is anytime we're experiencing a conflict, how do we get to a shared goal?

Because from a shared goal, then we can understand where each of us needs to reconsider the other's perspective all in service of getting to the same end point. And so that's what this consumer focus allows us to do because we both are in working in service of the goal of our mission. And so when we remind ourselves that we both want more consumers, we both want more new consumers, more new patient visits, we look at it from that angle and we can demonstrate how we are working towards that goal; rather than insisting, let's just put the old one back. You are wrong. We're not doing this anymore. We instead can work from the perspective of, okay, I see the value in the perspective you're bringing. I still have a few concerns about how my patients are accessing this or that, or how I add this piece of patient education or this challenge with a specific access around calling me on at nights or whatever it is; we are at least working towards a common goal now. And that's a powerful as well as, you begin to win some advocates, right? So in fact, just earlier today, I was meeting with our physician leadership team and it's such a serendipitous that we are, we're speaking today and there are absolutely a number of the specialists who are leading some of our specialties through our physician leadership group who are not pleased.

They still are very concerned. This is even after I just showed them another monthly growth of, in this case, we grew 12.5% in organic traffic from April to May. And I can also, I'm happy to share with you that organic traffic eclipsed direct traffic as the number one way to bring people into Christus health.org.

Still not? Yes, exactly. And still not enough for many of them. But one of the primary care physicians, the leader of our primary care physician group, who was very skeptical initially, who has had his challenges with how we're doing this, stopped the group when it came time for him to present on something completely different, stopped the group and said, I want to recognize the efforts of Jeff and Jeff's team. I want to recognize the efforts that the digital marketing group has put in to getting us to this point. Yes, we have ways to go. Yes, there are ways to improve it, but we have a willing partner who's making a lot of strides and putting a ton of work into it. And that's really the difference, right?

We still have people who are not on board. We still have, I mean, I, have another email to answer yet today with another group who has some challenges. We have weekly meetings with at least two of our ministries who have had more significant challenges, cause they're a little bit different than some of the other ministries.

And we still provide weekly status reports. We in fact had one of the CEOs of one of our hospitals come and sit for, spent her entire day, an eight hour day, directly with our digital marketing team going one by one on page of the website. I want this, I want that. And it was very challenging because it was, again, this internal focus.

It was not focused necessarily, although it got there, but not necessarily focused necessarily on how to best serve the consumers. A lot of it was, well, our physicians need to see this and our physicians need to see that, but, we did finish all that work in March. Looking back three months now under us, and we already see huge wins inside that service line.

We see massive changes and that's all because we actually stopped and worked and got together. And this is somebody who absolutely wanted us to just shut it off and go back to the old way.

Bill Klaproth (host): Can we go back to the old one? Come on, Jeff. We want to go back to the old one, please. Jeff, please. Well, Jeff, I want to recognize you too. I think this is, going to be a great session. So I think we've covered most of the learning objectives that will happen in your session.

Participants will be able to articulate digital strategies in the face of difficult stakeholder feedback. You've explained how you deal with that. Participants will be able to communicate the benefits of maintaining a consumer focus. Your results so far have been amazing, and it's doing exactly what you want it to do.

Third participants will be able to organize work in teams to embed digital expertise. Let me ask you about that. What does that mean?

Jeff Stewart: Sure. So we've been in the process of also centralizing our, marketing operations. Increasing the amount of resources focused on digital and then putting our digital group in directly with our, either as our regional teams or our service line teams, so that they're, co-located, one in our offices, and then two, they're participating directly. So, just the way that we had been set up previously, it was closer to almost your sort of internal agency creative services side of, Hey, we need this done. And, the digital team was sort of isolated from the operations team by a layer of marketing management.

And instead we've tried to flatten that so that the digital teams are exposed and visible and transparent with leadership teams. Two weeks ago we sent, I think it was three or four of our digital team out to our Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Institute based in Longview, Texas.

They sat side by side with the leaders of that service line and said, okay, help us understand. What do you offer here? Okay, you've got a hand clinic, you've got a foot clinic, you do these kinds of, fitness center there that has some aquatic therapy and so how do we best document that to the website?

We understand what you want from the internal side. You need X, Y, and Z. This is your priority. This is how people access you. We from our side, view the consumer journey to look like this. We want consumers to see this. We are talking about things this way, here's how we would reorganize those two things to meet that same goal.

Bill Klaproth (host): It's almost like a listening tour. You're sending people into the different markets saying, let me understand your services. Let me learn more about you. Let me listen to what you need, and then give us a chance to tell you what we want to do and how we think this should be organized, so it is consumer focused and not internally focused, and it meets the brand standards of Christus Health.

Jeff Stewart: Correct. Yeah. Well said Bill.

Bill Klaproth (host): This is going to be a great session. I would love to keep talking to you about this, but I don't want to give it all away, Jeff. We want people coming to your session.

So as we wrap up, thank you so much for your time. Anything else you want to add about your mission at Christus Health and this great work that you've done, going from an internal focused content and website to more of a consumer focused content and website?

Jeff Stewart: It's so important that we talk about the digital front door. That's such a common phrase in healthcare. But we often don't really in, in my view, think about it from the consumer side. What is the easiest way for the consumers to access? What is the language they're using? What is their expectation?

What is their experience? And moreover, what is it on other websites? We spend so much time looking outside of healthcare. You know, as we've looked at our appointment scheduling, we look at how appointments are scheduled outside of the healthcare context. How do we bring that expertise in? So I guess what I would say is, at Christus, we are so focused on how do we build the best digital experience based off of the consumer's perspective from outside of healthcare?

And how do we match to that experience? And that's what we're really excited about. We've got a lot of work to do as does all of healthcare. We're excited by the team we've got and moreover, at a place like SHSMD and venue like Connections, we are also really excited to tell our story, but really hear from others too and to build these strong connections so we as an industry can move forward and erase the stigma that healthcare is a digital laggard.

Bill Klaproth (host): Very well said Jeff. Thank you for saying that. I think that's absolutely correct, and thank you for your thoughts on putting the consumer first. What is the easiest ways they can use our system or book an appointment or the easiest pathways they can take? What is the language they use? Making sure that the consumer is always out front.

Great lesson for all of us and we look forward to your session on September 11th at SHSMD Connections, 2023 in Chicago. Jeff, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it.

Jeff Stewart: Hey, Bill, it was a pleasure speaking with you.

Bill Klaproth (host): And once again, that's Jeff Stewart and you can see him and all of the great sessions and presenters and networking and fun and SHSMD Connections, 2023. All you have to do is register by going to SHSMD.org. That's S-H-S-M-D.org/education/annualconference. And if you found this podcast helpful, and once again, how could you not, please share it on all of your social channels? And please hit the subscribe or follow button to get every episode you do not want to miss an episode. This has been a production of Dr. Podcasting. I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya.