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

Bill Klaproth (Host): This is a special podcast produced on site at SHSMD Connections 2024 Annual Conference in Denver as we talk with keynote speakers and session leaders direct from the show floor.

I'm your host, Bill Klaproth, and with me is John Kadlic. He is the CEO of ParallelPath, and we also have Katy Dalton Rigsby. She is the System Vice President Marketing and Communications at OhioHealth, as we talk about their session, Mastering Patient Engagement, a research backed approach to meeting patients where they are. John and Katy, welcome.  

John Kadlic: Welcome you too, Bill!

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Thanks for us.

John Kadlic: You have to do these all the time, but we really appreciate you having us.

Host: John, you might be the first person that actually welcomed me.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Welcome you back.

John Kadlic: Well we gotta welcome the host too.

Host: Welcome me to my own podcast.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: We're all about hospitality in Ohio.

Host: I love it.

John Kadlic: We're kind people.  

Host: You're a unique individual John. And i like that. You are You are too, Katy. You're right in too all too right. This is gonna be fun, I can tell already. So, for you listening right now, I just want to let you know, John is very cool. He brought his own little gimbal, and he's filming himself on his iPhone right now. You are like a hip dude.

John Kadlic: You're probably the only person that would say

Katy Dalton Rigsby: If this were ham and egg he's the ham.  

Host: Right, we're here with Katy ham and eggs show today.

John Kadlic: Katy makes great eggs.

Host: Okay, wow, all right, well, next time you have to bring some Katy., on she's like, okay, let's, get out the questions. Okay, Bill, yeah, it's real funny. Okay, so John, what are some of the key insights you uncovered in your consumer health and wellness research study about how patients want to engage with their healthcare brands today?

John Kadlic: Well, appreciate you asking, Bill. We did a consumer health and wellness study of almost 1,900 consumers across the spectrum of health and wellness, including a large cohort from hospitals and health systems. A lot of insights from there, but I'd say there's a few that probably stood out to us. One is that wellness is not a nichey thing anymore.

It's definitely reached more mass kind of potential. People are much more conscientious about their physical, mental, and emotional health than ever before. Second thing I'd say is that when you're looking at segmentation and demographics as sort of the traditional way to go to market as a brand, we would say that motivations are actually a more higher level part of the hierarchy that trumps traditional demographics and segmentation which we can get into later as well.

We did identify one audience that was very mission focused, and so some brands feel this sense to be Patagonia, but we believe that not everyone has to be Patagonia. There's still a way to be purpose driven without going to that extent. And then the last one I'd say is we sort of talk about this drop the mic concept to let other people speak on behalf of your brand and that you don't have to do 100 percent of the work.

Host: Yeah, that's really interesting. It sounds like you uncovered some really valuable So thank you for sharing that with us.

John Kadlic: You bet.

Host: So, Katy, how is OhioHealth taking this great information that John has surfaced and put it to use for you?

Katy Dalton Rigsby: We did participate in the study. So we gave John's team access to our OhioHealth customer panel. Some folks in our market were directly surveyed around this and so as a result, then we got access to all the data from the study including the four customer segments that John identified. At OhioHealth, we really do spend a lot of time focusing on the voice of the customer. We're pretty fortunate we have a customer insights team that does a lot of quantitative and qualitative research. Those are the folks that partnered with John's team but we also have a pretty robust user experience team. So they take the insights and then they try to come up with experiences or solutions that might resonate or connect with the actual customer. We kind of refine them. I'll give you one example. In John's study one of the segments that they identified is the solutions focused customer. And so like many health systems we have a Find A Doc functionality in our website or in our mobile app. And one of the things that our team has done is really work to iterate to find ways to make everything that you need to find for a physician and schedule appointment all in a single view. And something like that really resonates with a solutions focused customer because they want you to be efficient with their time. They want you to meet them where they are to solve problems for them and be quick and be accurate. And we've seen great results from that. So for example building on some of those insights and refining our Find A Doc tool, we've actually seen our satisfaction rating go up for the tool. We've got a 4.8 out of 5 in terms of stars. We've also seen our conversion rate go up for scheduling appointments.

Host: So, when you're talking about mastering patient engagement, it sounds like those are the keys or that's certainly a big part of it.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Yeah, for sure. But it's also a lot of taking the insight, doing a lot of testing, learning, seeing what's working what's not.

Host: Okay, so, John, let me ask you this. You mentioned before, motivation seemed to be the biggest driver. To me, that was kind of an oh wow moment. Were there other oh wow moments or specific behaviors or motivations that you found to be surprising when you did this research?

John Kadlic: I guess there was a few, but one that maybe stood out is around personalization. And personalization has been around for a long time. But in our study, there were four segments that emerged, and two of them really prefer and enjoy personalization, while two don't really care that much about it.

So you can't paint this broad brush assumption that everyone cares about personalization when they might not. So, those that are Gen Z, for instance, and the younger generation that were born in a technology native environment, clearly care more about personalization when you get to age generational kind of things. But then, one of these groups that is very solution focused cares deeply about personalization. They want you to make their life easier. They want you to take the things that you know about me and make something of it. And others think it might be creepy and it might be crossing the line, especially in healthcare, where you're talking about people's personal data at a deeper level than you know a consumer good or product otherwise would. So, that was one thing that stood out to us. It wasn't a general rule that everyone loves personalization for instance.

Host: Was there a generality that younger people wanted more and older people are like get off my lawn? Stay away from me. What is this?

John Kadlic: A little bit, but I do think it's also how you were born and raised. Gen Z and Millennials with the phone in their hand from day one, boomers and silent generation, not as technology savvy. You didn't have as many options to personalize in that time frame. So their expectations were framed differently from the get go, and so it doesn't really surprise me in that regard that the younger generation is driving the agenda.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Yeah.

Host: For sure. Have you found that at OhioHealth?

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Absolutely. I can give a specific example. So we took a look at our customers at OhioHealth and we found that our most digitally engaged customers are Millennials. So they're most active on our electronic medical record. They're reading our newsletters that we're sending out electronically. They're scheduling appointments online. So that kind of builds on the insight that John and his team found.

Host: Is that because Millennials are a little bit older and they're more cognizant of their health issues? Where Gen Z is like, eh, I'll get there someday?

Katy Dalton Rigsby: So that's an interesting insight too. So, I definitely think to build on what John said, some of us grew up being more comfortable with digital, right. So we're seeing that with Millennials and Gen Z. What we're finding with Gen Z is we're trying to meet them where they are. So one of the insights in the study that John's team did was that Gen Z views health care as self-care which makes sense right?

They're not, hopefully they're young, they're of good health, they're not coming to us for traditional health care services. So we have tried to meet them where they are by finding other ways to engage them. For example we have an electronic newsletter we send out. We send out about a million to about a million people a month and we've looked at that data. It skews a lot younger. And so we put in a lot of really light and engaging content. So for example, in our session I gave the example, people are sober curious, right? That's a trend that we're seeing. So we put in mocktail recipes and things like that. We want them to start engaging with us now and becoming kind of sticky with us so then when they do need us for some traditional health care, that we're top of mind.

Host: Well, this plays right into that. Trying to start that relationship with them early, so as they age, they're familiar with you, and they trust you. They have that relationship foundation has already been structured. Yeah, that's really interesting. So, John, let me ask you this, and you can both chime in on this.

So, as consumer expectations for personalized health care experiences grow, how do you see the findings from this study influencing future health care marketing strategies, both for Ohio Health and the broader industry? John, let me start with you, and then, Katy, I'd like to hear your thoughts on that too.

John Kadlic: Yeah, maybe a couple things and it's probably an extension of what we were just talking about that Gen Z is really driving the future expectations and I would even argue Gen Z women more specifically, are setting expectations. So they do care holistically about their health and they want brands to know that. So they're not stigmatized by mental health things.

It's just part of their daily care. They care about fitness and nutrition and the full scope of wellness, and they have these heightened expectations around being digital natives. So I think they're pulling brands sort of into the future, and I would listen really intently to that audience in specific, as a way to sort of have a North Star as to where you would be heading next. And then regardless of what you do, and Katy mentioned this a minute ago too, we are still huge advocates of test and learn. This space is moving very fast, things are ever changing. So, it wasn't too long people were talking about, Dr. Google. We're now talking about Dr. TikTok and Dr. ChatGPT. And you need to show up in different ways in different places than you did, frankly, just a year ago. So, if you're not trying things, you're going to be left behind.

Host: That's funny you say that. So every year there seems to be a theme or one thing that sticks out when we do these podcasts. When we're here and I'm around all of you great marketers, this year Gen Z and digital experiences and things like TikTok and Instagram reels have popped up more and more and And it's it's funny that you both are talking about it.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Yeah it was funny, and I know we're not showing video on this podcast but during our session we showed a couple of clips from our social team. We like to refer to our social as OhioHealth on the weekends. It's very fun. It's very light. And we did leverage a couple of the TikTok trends and I shared with the audience, I had not actually seen any of these trends because I'm not the target audience. They were a little bit more edgy, but we did it, and they drove great engagement.

Host: Mm-Hmm So, where do you see for OhioHealth the future of this going based on these research findings, things that we're learning now? Things that John has discovered?

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Yeah it'll be interesting to see where we go. My hypothesis is it'll be much different for Gen Xers like me and John or for our parents the baby boomers. You know I think we grew up having a dedicated primary care provider who quarterbacked our care. I think nowadays people want it when they want it, right. A little bit more transactional, but we want to make it meaningful for them and so you know, John talked about meeting people where they are with content. We've talked about TikTok but when we think about personalization we also want to be helpful in that personalization. So one of the things that we've done is we send out appointment reminders but we've based it on our research to know when people want to get the reminders and then base our future reminders based on the logic and what they've showed us is their preference, right?

We want to be helpful. As John said, we don't want to be creepy. We don't want to be annoying. We want to show up and be a helpful, trusted partner.

Host: Yeah. And as you said, meet them where they are.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: A hundred percent.

Host: On the way they like to communicate the media that they use, meet them there.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Correct.

Host: Which makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Thank you. I got a bingo from John. This is good. I've, this is, this is, good. I'm doing good today. He welcomed me, and now I'm getting a bingo.

John Kadlic: You should have a lot of self confidence after this, Bill. I'm trying to build you up.

Host: You guys have been great for my mental health.

John Kadlic: ha ha ha

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Just like Gen Z.

Host: Just like Gen Z, and as Katy said, health care is self-care. you Thank you both for that. This has really been a lot of fun. I've loved talking with both of you. Before we wrap up, I'd love to get some final thoughts from each of you. Katy, let me start with you. Anything else you want to add?

Katy Dalton Rigsby: I just think that people can take one thing is we've got to continue to do a lot of listening with our customers and do a lot of testing. Put solutions out there, put experiences out there, and see what works and doesn't work. But don't be afraid to fail as part of that learning process.

Host: Yeah, the podcast before you, they said some of the same things and they phrased it, it's not win or lose, it's win or learn.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Yes, love I that.

John Kadlic: Good phrasing.

Host: Pretty cool

John Kadlic: That's good phrasing

Host: Please do. That's Carolina Anthony who said that, we have to give her credit.

John Kadlic: Thank you, Carolina Anthony.

Host: you. Yeah, thank you, Carolina Anthony. John, wrap it up for us. You're the anchor here. Final thoughts from you.

John Kadlic: I think you just need to take the time to understand the audience through their lens. We called the session what we called it, meet them where they are on purpose. So, brands tend to take a brand out perspective. Some are better than others, but in this case, we've learned that consumer motivations trump all else.

And so, you got to see the world through their perspective and therefore know what to try and test for your specific situation.

Host: Yeah, great, great advice. Very said. I've enjoyed talking with both of you. Thank you.

Katy Dalton Rigsby: Thank you.

John Kadlic: Good to see you. Thanks Bill.

Host: Yeah, you bet. And once again, that is John Kadlic and Katy Dalton Rigsby, and we hope you enjoyed SHSMD Connections 2024. And if you missed it, if you're unable to be here, if you're listening at home or at work right now, you can access the presentation recordings at shsmd.com. In fact, you can go and check out the session that John and Katy did.

And we ask you to please make sure you subscribe so you get every episode of the SHSMD podcast and share it on your social media channels. And you can check out all of our topics and healthcare solutions at shsmd.org/podcasts. Thanks for listening.