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

Bill Klaproth (Host): On this edition of the SHSMD podcast, we have another SHSMD Connections preview as we talk about bringing segments to life with personas in AI. Personas. A great way to dial in your marketing. Haven't done them yet? Well then you need to come to this session. Joining us is Stacey Mueller and John McKeever, who will be speaking on this topic during this year's SHSMD Connections annual conference in Denver, October 13th through the 15th.

The personas are waiting! Let's not make them wait longer. Let's get to them with Stacey and John, right now.

 This is the SHSMD podcast, Rapid Insights for healthcare strategy, professionals in planning, business development, marketing, communications, and public relations. We cover the gamut, people. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth. In this episode, we talk with Stacey Mueller, Executive Director, Experience Management at Froetdert Health and John McKeever, Chief Growth Officer at Endeavor Management. Stacey and John, welcome.

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Hey, Bill. It's good to talk with you. Thanks for having us.

John McKeever: Hi, Bill.

Host: Hey, John and Stacey, thank you so much for your time. It's great to talk with you. Looking forward to your session at SHSMD Connections 2024 in Denver, Colorado, October 13th through the 15th. So, your session, Bringing Segments to Life with Personas and AI. John, can you tell us, what can we expect in your session?

John McKeever: Sure, Bill. Well, first you can expect something exciting. Stacey and I are not boring presenters. We expect to have some fun and engage the audience in a conversation about how to take seemingly boring data in terms of segmentation and actually translating them into personas that marketing, patient experience, and other operational people can actually use.

Host: Well, we like fun presentations, and this sounds great. And Stacey, let's talk about segmenting data. Why is it important that hospitals segment their data by demographic criteria such as age, race, and gender? Why is that important?

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Yeah, so, it's really important because the demographic data, helps many health care organizations understand the makeup of their patient populations, communities, and their workforce, and really, you know, any stakeholder group that you want to look for. The demographic data informs strategic initiatives such as diversity, equity, and inclusion, and belonging, population health, workforce planning. You know, if you have a strategy to really match your workforce demographically with your community, a lot of organizations pay a lot of attention to that so that your patients and families who come in see people who look like that and have that sense of belonging when they come in.

So, the demographic information is really important and of course marketing as well. And most organizations I talk with, they're pretty mature with the demographic analysis of their key measures. I think most healthcare organizations have been doing that for quite some time.

Host: So this is kind of a know your audience kind of a thing.

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Yeah, it really is. The demographic analysis kind of provides that baseline understanding and it helps with certain regulatory requirements we all have to meet as well. So, it is step one in knowing your audience.

Host: Right. Okay, so let's talk about step two then, Stacey. So then we have, and you said most people have this baseline demographic information. Absolutely. So then why is it important to take that data to the next level, such as creating personas based on how individuals think, how they make decisions, how they behave? So we've got this information. Why is it important we then take it to the next level?

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Yeah, so one of the challenges with demographic information is that none of those demographic segments is a monolith. Each of those demographic segments include human beings who have wildly variable life experiences that shapes their perceptions, their thinking, their decision making, their behaviors, all of it.

And we find demographic data to be helpful for some purposes. But, if we really want to create experiences that are fine tuned enough or marketing messages that are fine tuned enough to really feel well designed and personal; we really need to have more information and the demographic information doesn't describe how people think and feel and what they say and do in regard to their healthcare experience.

So, to get that information, we need to a way to group people by how they think and feel and what they say and what they do about their health and wellness, by their preferences for contact and communication and all kinds of other factors that the demographics really can't shed any kind of light on. So the creation of the personas is a method to start to get on, get at the human behaviors, not just who the people are, but what the people think and do.

John McKeever: Yeah, I think one of the misperceptions and it has to do with the extremes on segmentation is that either all of our patients are homogenous in terms of their backgrounds, in terms of how they make decisions, et cetera, and therefore we treat them that way. You know, patients are patients.

Or the other extreme that I've heard more recently is, we have ends of one. In other words, everyone is individual and unique in their own way, and segmentation is impossible, and the truth is somewhere in between. And so, as Stacey pointed out, the first step is really understanding from a demographic perspective, who are they, and how can we characterize a segment.

One of the other things that's true is that we don't create segments, we identify them. They already exist. And so in the demographic analysis, what we're essentially doing is creating what we would call actionable segmentation. So this is the most basic way to segment. Are these older people or younger people?

Are they people who live close to us or live far away from us? And then psychographically, what we're looking at is how are these people across all those demographics similar in terms of their decision risk tolerance, how they view healthcare, how they take care of themselves from a health perspective, the relationship with their family physician, you know, their primary care physician, those types of things.

And then what we're able to examine on that basis is the clusters of individuals who actually seem to behave similarly and have similar attitudes and therefore actually creating those identifiable segments, as well as creating personas that people, individuals within the healthcare system can relate to.

And personas would include giving people names. People are people and they have names and we call them something. And they have certain characteristics and they have a, they're visually expressive and those are the types of things that we'll share, in terms of how we've taken that to another level with Froetdert and through this presentation.

Host: So I like how you said that, you know, we need to find out who are they? How do we identify them? And then put them in the special segments. And you said when you're creating personas, you even come down to giving them a name so you know that when, say, you have somebody by the name of Jennifer, this person represents a large portion of your audience.

And you can then, as Stacey said, you can create these fine tuned personal messages for that persona. Is that right, John?

John McKeever: That's correct. And not just from a messaging perspective; as we look at healthcare systems and the work that we've done with Stacey and her team at Froetdert, it's actually the intersection of brand operations and culture. So it's not just about what are we going to promise a particular segment in terms of coming to us as a healthcare provider. But then what specific processes and clinical pathways might they go through that is unique to that particular segment? And then culturally, what behaviors might we express that may be a little different depending on who arrives or presents at that particular time.

Host: So you're exacting a lot of criteria out of each of these personas then, it sounds like.

John McKeever: Well, there are, from a richness of insight perspective, but then again, to make it actionable, we have to get it simplified. And so that is part of the process. How do we take these insights? How do we use statistical methods to actually refine down to a critical few? And we use a series of research techniques like cluster and factor analysis to do that.

You know, what are those critical few things? And then actually elevate the conversation back out of data into personification, which is an exercise to go through and try to enrich, you know, if this were the person presenting, what other characteristics might they express that we don't see in the data?

Because everybody knows a Stacey Mueller. Everybody knows a Bill Klaproth. So, how do we actually personify, make them a real person that goes beyond numbers? And that's a creative exercise.

Host: Yeah, absolutely. And you just said, we don't need a lot of these. You don't want a hundred personas, right? You want to try to get it down to as few as possible that covers as many in your community? Is that right, John?

John McKeever: That's exactly right. And in fact, what we found as a heuristic would be that if you have more than seven, it's too many, because if you think about it, a call center agent needs to be able to process and ask very quick, what we would call typing questions to put people in a specific category. And of course, we can't have that, those set of questions to be more than just a couple.

And so, to put someone in the category, you know, you probably only have about five to seven buckets.

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Yeah, so too many, personas is just impossible to deal with. It's just too many to be effective. So our persona family came out to be six individuals. And there were some surprises there. And, you know, the research that John and his team did really brought out some things that I didn't expect.

So, for example we've got two of those six segments are really strongly defined by the presence of children in the home. So they're parents, or they're filling the role of parent. And one of those groups um, skews slightly female and there's attitudes and behaviors that go with that group.

The other group was a little more surprising for me because it skews very strongly male. And I didn't expect to find that. A lot of my career was in pediatrics and, you know, the kind of conventional wisdom I grew up with decades in health care, so this goes back, before we had sophisticated ways to really look at segmentation in this kind of way, you know, the mental model was moms as healthcare decision makers, but this research for us showed us that there's a very active group of tech savvy, health conscious, more likely to be dads in this group. So, what we find and then how we deploy them starts to get really interesting.

Host: I bet. I like how you called it a family. That's really good. So, John, for someone listening to this, how do they take their data to the next level? How do you start this process?

John McKeever: Well, starting the process really begins with getting a commitment to segmentation because it is a little different. Now, depending on where you are in the organization, marketers typically use this as a means of targeting and attracting different types of patients and even referring physicians, but they may not have elevated to the mature practice of true segmentation, which is actually a data driven process.

So the first piece is to organize around, okay, what is your segmentation research program going to look like? In the case of Froetdert, what we decided very early on is that we weren't going to do this once. You need to have a life and you need to do, be sustainable over a period of time. And so that actually prescribes certain things in terms of research methodology.

But fundamentally, proper segmentation is actually a quantitative and a qualitative approach. And so often, and these are sometimes interchangeable, you'll start with pulling patient records and then using a research panel for external consumers. At Froetdert, they actually have their own research panel of consumers, and so that's extremely helpful.

And designing a segmentation questionnaire, which is fundamentally different than say, brand trackers or other AAU or preference types of questionnaires. What we're really trying to dig into is, again, who are they and how do they think and feel and how do they interact with the healthcare systems.

So quantitative is usually a good baseline; analyzing it as I described before in terms of identifying those areas of similarity. And then enriching them optionally and actually convening a group and what we've done with clients is to conduct qualitative research among those in that cohort or that are those segment members.

And so asking them probing questions about how they make decisions, their perceptions of things, the types of care that they've received and why they liked it, what they didn't like, all those types of things can enrichthat segmentation using qualitative research because then we've actually gotten the voice of the customer into the segmentation. So it's not just a stat on a slide, it's actually a recording of someone having a And then of course, the next step to that would be now that we have these insights, how do we as, in Stacey's case, the consumer insights group, how do we further enrich them based on our experience, particularly with our organization and the type of work that her team does in patient experience management? And so, you know, from a customer experience perspective, what else could we inform or how else might we fill in some gaps with regards to these personas that we're creating?

Host: Mm hmm.

John McKeever: And so usually it's the blend of all of those things and then actually testing it. So one of the interesting things that we do is we'll actually ask the participants in these creative persona development workshops, to put themselves into one of the categories. And so what that does is a couple of things.

One, it creates a higher level of empathy with each of the personas. But then the second thing it does is actually help us test the typing tool, so was it effective to ask these types of questions of this team now, as a pilot, in order for them to self identify with a particular persona?

Host: Right. Yeah, there's certainly a lot that goes into this. And I know in your session, you're really going to dive into this. So you were mentioning Stacey and Froetdert. Stacey, can you tell us a little bit about your process and how you have used your personas in your marketing?

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Yeah, so we are still in the learning and growing phase. So the personas are a tool in the toolbox. They're not like a means to an end or a miracle solution by any stretch of the imagination. But what it's, what we've been able to do is to apply the screener to our human experience and consumer research programs.

So, some of our first learnings, for example, is that one of the personas is much more likely to engage in studies with us, which means that voice has probably been overrepresented in our findings so far. So, even that is a significant learning and understanding that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't done this work and created the personas.

So, now it's shaping our consumer research program such that, in addition, like, demographically, we've worked very hard to ensure a balanced demographic share of voice that represents our community. Now we're also working to include a representative psychographic share of voice to make sure that we're getting those balanced perspectives in our research and really it's helping us get to more finer tuned insights about our patient populations and what they expect from us, what they need from us, how they want to interact with us, and that is rolling downstream now into how do we design interactions that may even anticipate their needs. There's so many opportunities with how AI is taking off and how AI is being integrated in healthcare tools.

We're not there yet, but I can imagine a day where you know, your persona typing becomes part of your patient profile, maybe sits the CRM on top of your health record and that information somehow informs clinical teams about approach and what support or approach might work best for a particular patient to maybe understand their health care or their condition that's happening. So I think there's a lot that we can do with personas in terms of managing experience and we're really in the infancy of being able to do that. But it seems like a golden hour where we've got our personas typed. We've been applying them in our consumer research and understanding even more about our patients and, how they think and feel about their healthcare experiences.

And as the AI develops in the clinical space, I think there's probably opportunity to kind of really supercharge that personalization of the experience and not, you know, to John's earlier point, N of 1 is like, mind boggling to even try to attempt, but if we can use the segmentation to help people feel like they're getting a very fit for them experience, you know, maybe we don't have to do N of 1, but there's still ways that we can kind of mass customize and help people feel that it's a very natural and fitting experience for them and how they think and feel and approach their healthcare.

Host: Yeah, there's some really good stuff there. And like you said, trying to fine tune the messages for them. And very interesting when you said, think about integration into health records, how that might help a provider work with a patient. This is really fascinating. So, any results so far, Stacey, from your personas?

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Well, like I said, even just understanding more about our patient populations, those are the early results that we have so far. And what we've learned is absolutely inform things like our patient engagement center that is just launched in terms of all the different ways we need to turn on the communication streams because the phone call doesn't work for everybody.

So, really applying what we've learned through the psychographic typing to thinking about are we truly omni channel in our relationships with our customers? How do we make it super easy for them to interact with their healthcare and even how do we engage more holistically outside of the appointments and outside of the times that they are physically with us? So those are the things that we're starting to be able to do.

Intro: Well, those are good things that you're starting to be able to do, and I'm sure they will provide benefits down the road. Well, I know this session is going to be great. A lot of people are interested in this and you're going to really dive deeper into this and I'm sure you're going to create personas right there in front of us.

So I want to thank you both so for your time. So before we wrap up, I'd love some additional thoughts from each of you. John, let's start with you. Anything else you want to add about your session?

John McKeever: No um, we didn't touch too much on the AI thing, but just know that there will be a third presenter there with Stacey and I, so, be on the lookout for that person. And we're really excited. I think that attendees will learn a lot about the proper process, but more importantly, how to make these things very actionable. How to translate these insights into things that will affect the patient experience, marketing, and even physician relations.

Host: Yep. Very well said. And thank you for that John. Stacey, final thoughts.

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: I just said, you know, this is, the beginning. It's like we're happy to come and talk about what we've been able to do so far. But when I imagine what we're able to do down the road with the personas and with evolving AI, I think it's kind of a golden moment and I can't wait to be two years down the road and to be able to look back and see what we've accomplished with these I think is going to be pretty incredible.

Host: Yeah, absolutely. Well, the session is Bringing Segments to Life with Personas and AI. Stacey and John, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.

Stacey Mueller, MS, CCMP, CPXP: Thanks Bill.

John McKeever: Thanks, Bill.

Host: And once again, that's Stacey Mueller and John McKeever. Make sure you sign up for this year's 2024 SHSMD Connections Conference in Denver. You can get registered now at shsmd.org, that's shsmd.org/education/annualconference. And if you found this podcast helpful, and how could you not, please share it on your social channels, and please hit the subscribe or follow button to get every episode.

And to access our full podcast library or other topics of interest to you, we have many topics up there people, please go to this library. It's crazy good. Visit shsmd.org/podcasts. This has been a production of DoctorPodcasting. I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya!