Hospital Websites Aren’t Dead, They’re Evolving: Practical Wins & ROI from the Past Year

Good afternoon everyone. I want to welcome you to today's webinar. It's titled Hospital Websites Aren't Dead, They're Evolving Practical Wins and ROI from the Past Year. I'm Jared Johnson.

I'm the host of the Healthcare Wrap Podcast. I'm also a member of the eHealthcare Strategy and Trends Editorial Advisory Board. So I'll be your moderator for today's presentation. Very excited about our guests today.

I just have a couple of housekeeping things and then I'll introduce them.

Very quickly. Our discussion today will be about forty five minutes is what we're targeting followed by ten to fifteen minutes of Q and A. So to submit your questions, can type them into the control panel and hit send. You can indicate if you have a question for a particular panelist, you can indicate that on your question and we'll tend to hold those to the end, but feel free to submit them as the presentation happens at any time.

And then we'll have that time a little bit later in the program. Today's session is being recorded and you'll receive a link to access the recording as soon as it's been processed and it is available for viewing. So with that, let's go ahead and dive into our topic today. There's a lot of interest here for sure.

And I'm just glad to have our guests here today to talk about this. But really when you think about it, what led us to this part of the presentation is that this really has been a hot take in digital health marketing for like the last year, the whole thought of, Hey, websites are dead. And meanwhile you have top hospitals and health systems that are continuing to deliver tangible results. They are making continuous website improvements, staying ahead of the curve.

So we'll have this active conversation today about where the website still is, because the fact is there, the website is still where patients make decisions. It's still where access journeys begin and where marketing performance becomes measurable. So today we're talking with a panel of hospital and health system leaders who are actively modernizing that health experience, that website experience. So you're gonna hear about what's actually working right now.

And with that, let me introduce our guests. First off, have a Brad Muncs, CEO of Symetris, and we can go ahead and roll in. Let's see. Yeah, we have Brad, we have Seth Kaplan.

He's the director of marketing, digital and CX for honor health and Tara Nooteboom, a director of consumer digital strategy for UCI Health. We had a brief little, a little bit more to show you a little bit about each panelist. So we can roll into those slides really quickly just to give you a little bit more of a familiarity with them.

Brad has had over twenty years working with marketing and digital teams, including hospitals and health systems. He's focuses on how healthcare websites operate under governance, compliance and budget pressure. And he helps marketing and digital leaders prioritize ship and prove value without constant rebuilds. So we're looking forward to having him on the panel and hearing from him today.

Looking forward to that.

Let's see next, I believe we have, do we have Seth next?

Let's see, yes, we have Seth next.

Seth also has twenty years in marketing and healthcare for healthcare non for profit companies. Ten years at HonorHealth. My, wow, the years have gone by, Seth.

Congrats, ten years working there. He oversees website, digital measurement and growth strategy and lives in Scottsdale in my neck of the woods here in the Phoenix area with his wife two kids and the four month old Aussie puppy named Rocky. So hopefully Rocky makes its way into the conversation somehow. So welcome South.

And then let's see then we have Tara.

Tara shared just a little bit about UCI health, to start off with maybe this is a good place for us to start. Tara do you want to do you want to cover this for us real quick and then we'll dive into our questions.

Broke the mold here focusing a bit more on the health system than MyBio but we're a growing health system, huge ambulatory growth in the last few years, as well as in the past three years, moving from one hospital to six hospitals. So trying to make sure that our digital experiences deliver on our expanding network and excited to talk more about that today.

Thank you so much.

All right, well with that, tell you what, let's roll into this. We have a few questions here but I wanna start off by maybe helping our audience sort out the signal from the noise. I would say that's one of the biggest challenges in this space today. So if we could hear from each of you about what's actually changing for health system websites.

So it's based on what you're working on and or what you're seeing and talking with colleagues about in twenty twenty six. What's actually changing? What isn't changing? Brad, maybe you can start with like a ten thousand foot view of of what you're seeing across the industry, and then I'd love to hear from Seth and Tara.

Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks, Jared, and I'm glad to be part of this panel. The so what I've seen or and, you know, there's a lot of noise going on right now about, as you mentioned at the beginning, like, is the website losing relevance?

Is it still part of the equation for marketing teams? And it I think that's based a lot about the fact that traffic is down because of the AI summaries and stuff like that. And I think that that assumption that websites are eventually gonna die is the wrong conclusion right now. What's changing is really the quality that I'm seeing of that traffic that's coming to the website.

So it's less about top of funnel where the AI summaries and search tools and all that and the WebMDs of the world are are answering those questions at the top. And so people, when they're getting to the hospital and health system websites, they're really looking to make a decision. They wanna have you know, make a transaction, get to an eventual action, and it's not so much about browsing and exploring stuff. And across the market, what I'm like, the stats are that about fifty percent or so of visits on on websites are returning patients.

So they're looking to, you know, log into my my chart or pay my bills or whatever it is. And then we have about twenty percent are prospective patients. And usually, those are the ones that marketing is going to be measured on, on like, Hey, have you made more acquisitions and conversions?

And right now, what we're trying to focus on is really how do we change the role of the website to be more about getting people to make that action and less about informing them at a high level about health, about symptoms, etcetera.

And I think what's happened is that over the past five to ten years, hospital marketing teams I mean, marketing teams in general have been trained by Google to push all that content for the SEO because we want to get all those organic visits and stuff like that. And there's a paradigm shift happening right now where we want to be more about how do we get to schedule care, how do we book that appointment, compare different physicians and stuff like that. So I think that's really what's going on now. But what hasn't changed is really, I think, the part of trust.

Health care is based on trust. The websites have to show that trust. And people are spending less time on the website because they want to get to that action quickly. So you have to show that trust faster in a more clear, concise way and getting to without friction.

That's what makes that trust connect with a brand coherence, etcetera. So for me, I think my twenty twenty six takeaway is it's not so much about more content. It's about reducing that friction and making that actionable.

Yeah, I think that what Brad was saying really resonates with me and what we're seeing in our health system. We are hyper aware of the fact that people are coming to websites less. I think that's not something that's happening just in healthcare, but it's all over with the AI summaries. So if you can go to ChatGPT or even Google and you get a summary that answers your question, there's really no need for you to go to visit the site unless you're needing to make a transaction.

We've seen our traffic go down quite a bit year over year.

It's something that we've expected, but still something that we're noticing.

We've shifted our strategy a bit in a couple of ways. One is that we are really trying to do everything that we can to get as much valuable information into the search engine results. So things like building out robust third party listings, being able to influence where we can, if someone's able to make a transition, schedule an appointment in the listings without coming to our website, that's something that we want to work on and allow people to do. We're also putting some more effort into our content strategy.

So developing the AI friendly content that's answering those questions that people have so we can get into those AI summaries and building out the functionality in the site to facilitate that. What really hasn't changed is once people hit our site, were really focused on the same thing. So focused on the top tasks that people have. So paying bills, getting to MyChart, scheduling an appointment and building those seamless journeys that we're delivering ROI.

We've been kind of continually relooking at those journeys, seeing where there's friction, how we can increase the skills to drive action and conversion and just focusing on that core functionality of the site. So the find a doctor, find a location, getting people to those kind of transactions that they're looking to do.

Great contributions from Brad and Seth. I think I would add that for all this rumor that hospital websites are dead, I think the website is more a part of my conversations now than it has been before when I think about how important structured data is for the site, which means that whenever we're talking about search listings to Seth's point, we're talking about the website. Whenever we're talking about provider data management, we're talking about the website. Whenever we're talking about digital scheduling pathways in the EMR, we're talking about the website.

And so while the focus might be more on structured data and more on function than it has in the past and the traffic is fluctuating. I think the website is as important a tool as it has ever been.

Yeah, maybe I just kind of jump on to one thing that we haven't necessarily mentioned but I'm sure is relevant to you both and to my clients as well, how now we're shifting towards having to differentiate ourselves a bit more as systems as opposed to just saying that we offer this type of service or care or service line. It's more about how do we do it differently so that, again, it's more about that bottom of funnel comparison. Like, do I prefer this system versus that system? How they do their approach? Then it's like this provider versus that provider. How can I compare the individuals? There's a lot of like, almost like Amazon type contrast and compare and buying journey and considering the patient as more of a customer in in that flow.

Yeah, I think that's totally accurate. I think that we've been getting more focused on providing information about really granular subspecialties that physicians have and being able to surface that in our Find a Doctor tool and allowing people to filter and get down to the, I have this very specific condition and I want a doctor that focuses on that very specific condition and things like that. And then getting the ratings and reviews and things like that. So it is more of like that Amazon type of experience that people are used to from a retail site.

Thanks, everyone. I would love to hear, maybe as our next topic, hear especially from Seth and Tara, what are the most impactful website improvements your team has shipped in the past year where you have an opportunity to share the specifics of things that you're working on as well as any measurable results that you were able to drive from that. Tara, maybe we can start with you on this one.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think most important thing to mention, we launched a new redesign ucihealth dot org website in April. Some of the key value contributions from that work included not just a look and feel update, but a new more flexible architecture that relies less on parent child relationships to reflect kind of that complex connection or services and particularly integrated programs or shared services between expertise.

The integration of our clinical trials database into search, which has been really valuable and is a key differentiator for us in our market that research and advanced treatment is now something that can be exposed in many different parts of the site. So that's been an exciting advancement and the launch of a specific provider data management platform so that we can more efficiently and in a consumer friendly way, store and distribute our provider data versus managing that data individually in our CMS. So those have all been really plus speaking of measurable also the addition of a more longevity oriented analytics platform that is secure around PHI policies. So that's been huge to begin measuring some of the impact that we had at a long break in.

So those have all been exciting changes. I think the tagline I always mentioned for the work that we did on the site was build trust and make it easy. And I think some of the patterns there, the website as a source of credibility for folks who do make it to that next step, a source of accurate information that is consumer journey and a tool and platform for transaction has already come up in the conversation. So in that sense, I think was a really important approach for how we were looking at the website.

Yeah, so a lot of the similar things that we've been doing at OnurHealth.

So I mentioned before, we've been getting really hyper focused on the Find a Doc search results. So it's really getting granular into the specific subspecialties that a physician focuses on and working with our physician network to make sure that they're tagged appropriately so that they show up in so like an orthopedic surgeon that focuses on knees is showing up in the search results appropriately for I'm looking for a knee surgeon, continuing work on that and build it out. We also launched a new blog functionality on the site.

Previously we had kind of like an article repository, but it wasn't like a true blog.

So now we're able to tag, it has more sophisticated tagging and we can get more granular to organize and structure our content.

Our hope is that will start to influence the AI summaries and things like that by answering more of people's questions via our content.

The other thing is not as sexy or visible to everybody, but we did implement a PHI compliant tracking tool so that we're able to measure that impact that we're having.

Was something that our legal team was saying that we had to turn off all of our tracking. It was something that we needed implement to be able to continue to prove the value that the website is bringing.

Minh, I'm glad that you are confirming the trend that I'm seeing also that I think the vast majority of systems now have that tracking ability. But there was that moment about two years ago when the HSS came out, and there's so many people that suddenly were flying blind. And there's solutions now that can be implemented, and they're evolving as we speak. So that's great. But I think that was a huge challenge for marketers in general to prove the value of what they're doing, because how can you prove it's actually working if you just have this huge generalist or almost no data at all? I'm glad that you're both of you are ahead of past that kind of hurdle.

I'm I'm glad that both of you mentioned search because that was also part of my examples of things that actually we've implemented over the past couple of months and have had positive impact. And what we've seen is we've had more like natural language search where people can type in whatever and the LLM behind is going be able to connect what you're saying to the actual doctors or service lines or whatever, not having the exact specific word and auto typing and stuff like that. Improvements are more intelligent. On-site search for from our perspective has done a lot of improvements on on the stuff that we've seen.

And just to kinda get back to the top of the what we've seen as measurable results and improvements that we've we've we I've kind of put them in two buckets because there's one that the one that we're all talking about, which is, hey, the patient experience has improved and we're we've put these things on the website and it makes it easier to to book or the provider search or whatever. But the other thing that I've seen a lot is, and, you know, talking about the non sexiness, is is internal operational efficiency, like better using AI in our workflows, better governance on the internal teams of what we're focusing on.

How do we filter requests from other departments and stuff like that. Because both of you have had organizations that have grown over the past couple of years, and probably your marketing teams and budgets haven't grown proportionally. And so you're trying to have to deliver more with less.

Every incremental thing that you can do that makes your job faster or to focus on some things and eliminate some others. I've seen a lot of teams make those types of choices and it's been positive, I think overall on the operational efficiency.

Yeah, and to that, I would just say, Brad, I think the identification of as few sources of truth when it comes to your data integrity is really impactful for your operational efficiency and really clear definitions of what information is coming from where so that when you do need to waterfall changes, you know exactly where to go upstream. And those might sound simple, but has been really impactful for our team to get those defined and streamlined.

Yeah, think we all know it's not that simple. So it's a great reminder for sure. I'd love to hear from you all specifically about patient journey work and how you translate a patient journey strategy into work that can realistically ship. I feel like this is an area that is often aspirational or just evolves so quickly that maybe we don't ship actual work as often as we want.

That might not be the case anymore, but that's definitely been the case in the past. So when you're talking about patient journey strategy and you're considering all the constraints around that technical constraints, regulatory constraints, operational constraints for sure. How do you translate that patient journey work, and that strategy into, meaningful updates I guess? Seth, why don't we start with you on this one?

Yeah, look, this has been a big challenge and one, I guess that we're continuing to evolve.

I think that one thing, I guess that we're coming to terms with more a little bit recently is that our website serves a lot of different people and a lot of different audiences.

And those patient journeys for different specialties don't look the same. So like someone that's coming to the site that's looking for urgent care is really different than someone that's coming to the site seeking orthopedic surgery.

And we're trying to figure out how to accommodate all of those nuanced differences within the same site structure so it doesn't become too difficult for the team to manage all of these different journeys and pathways.

I think in the past, we've tended to try and say everything needs to be standardized. We need to send everybody on the same path and that needs to work for everything. And what we're finding is that doesn't really work well because scheduling is different for primary care than it is for ortho and urgent care people are not scheduling on a site, we're just trying to get them directions. One standard path doesn't really work for everybody.

I think that what we're thinking through now is like how do we keep the same structure and kind of everything under that same honorhealth dot com mothership, but be able to be flexible with the journeys in different sections of the site. So we're starting to think through that now. I don't know that we've really shipped anything quite yet, that is the current challenge that we're working through.

I think that the regulatory environment has always been a challenge for us. We have a pluralistic medical staff.

We rely on independent providers to staff the service line programs that we have, but due to START, we're not always able to promote providers in the way that using the kind of providers in the way that they feel like they should be promoted on our website.

So we've been working through some of those challenges. Sometimes we create legal agreements with them where they're paying for the promotion that we're giving them. Sometimes we're setting criteria for how a provider ends up being a part of a particular program, but definitely a unique challenge for healthcare marketers that we're always trying to work through.

I think on the operational side, also some challenges there. We have a lot of staff and physicians that seem to think that if they put up a webpage that means that they have a program, but in reality they haven't really thought through the patient pathways and what is someone going to do when they land on this webpage in order to schedule an appointment with you. So we're having to have some of those conversations, difficult conversations in some cases with leaders and physicians that in order for us to be able to promote your program, need the true operational readiness for it.

Yeah, man.

And I hear you for the operational challenges. It kind of makes me think of a story. I didn't see it specifically in one of my clients, but I've heard about it at a conference. It was that they were measuring the booking rates at different clinics that they had in their network.

And there was one that consistently had lower booking rates than other ones. And they realized that that doctor didn't want to have online booking or really restricted the amount and stuff like that. And that automatically connected to lower bookings. There had to be a whole conversation with leadership of like, he didn't want to, but he's never done it before.

It's like, obviously, you have to navigate all these individual cases of all these different stakeholders.

But anyway, but getting back to the overall patient journey, first of all, want to because you were mentioning constraints at the beginning, Jared.

Of all, I try not to see that as constraints because for me, the fact that there are all these regulations and things that are put into place is to protect patient data. It's to protect the system. And so I just kind of see them as requirements when we're thinking of building the different features or tools within the websites that we're setting up. I try not to see it as constraints because it feels more negative. Just so it's part of the different specifications that we have to consider as we're building it. And it doesn't mean it's easy to work around.

And one of the things that I try to focus a lot on is how do we connect the strategy with the execution? Because building those patient journeys and thinking about them and getting to a level of sophistication, as you were mentioning, Seth, where it's like you could have multiple different patient journeys and different contexts and different types of patients.

But often, what I've seen is that those kind of sit in a slide deck or on a shelf or whatever, and they're not consulted as the website evolves throughout the years. They're kind of more of like, oh, we did it. Now we can just kind of go to the next step. So it's really important to make sure they're part of the ongoing shipping of what we're delivering on the website.

We try to build this into a one or two year roadmap, see what elements can we focus on. Usually, we're going to try to do in those journeys to try to refine that focus is to where are there drop offs or breakpoints? Obviously, we're going to need data here, like say, is this booking lower than that service line or something? And that can maybe bring us to certain things or, Oh, and the service pages don't convert as much as the homepage for the booking.

Why is that the case? And then we can focus our energies on the next iteration of an improvement on the website based on that data. But obviously, we have to have the data to be able to do that stuff. And another thing that I've seen, especially in healthcare, is wanting to get everything perfect.

I think it's part of the nature of the roles of clinicians, etcetera, to like, Oh, it has to be right. It has to be this exact page. It can't be this. We can't incrementally improve on this. It has to be perfect day one. But that stalls stuff a lot.

That's the conversation to have internally managing around who's accountable to get this online or not. Is it a roadblock to have to have an approval by someone, can they just give their input?

Those are things that can accelerate time to market, and then you can test out, is this working, not working, and then iterate on that. Because the patient journey wants to be, the patients want this to be improved. If it can be improved by thirty percent, great. We don't need to wait another five months to improve it by thirty five percent, right? Improve by thirty percent today.

Brad, I liked what you said about having to have the data and sometimes I feel like the hardest part of having patient informed journeys on your site is getting the information from patients. And for us, I think we really try to think about it in two ways. You have your kind of user experience optimizations where you're thinking about, you're talking about booking conversion and where you want to put those CTAs and what the experience looks like, how you're organizing your page and whatever information you're able to observe from behavior on the site and make those optimizations that way. But

I think there's also a broader category of patient journey input that comes for us. I feel like the past two years we've gotten a lot closer with our leadership in operations and it turns out patients are like frequently giving them a piece of their mind about their journeys and their experiences and what they need. And a lot of that has to do with the website. So a comment like, I cannot find the phone number for the department that I'm trying to reach, is information that can translate to us.

Again, a simple change, we added one page with all the phone numbers, and something that we can bring into the digital experience we're offering that is not as complex informed by repeated patient feedback that we're hearing at the operational level and drawing from, that piece of input as well. So, and of course always operating in those constraints that both of you mentioned with the organization in terms of availability and infrastructure and tracking, but trying to find many of those different sources for the voice of the patient and the decisions and priorities that we're making for the digital experience.

Yeah, I would say we've also worked really hard in the past few years to build those relationships with the operational leaders. And it has been really fruitful for us where in the past there may have been frustration where why isn't marketing changing X, Y, Z on the website? And really it was just that we didn't know about it or no one had brought it to us, having those proactive meetings with them and talking to them about it has been really helpful and animosity when they're bringing up, hey, you need to change this phone number or this thing isn't accurate. So we need that information too.

Yeah, certainly none of our physicians or directors in the operation seem to think the hospital website is dead.

But I just want to kind of jump into what you were saying, Tara, because I think sometimes teams imagine that the things that require the most effort are the most valuable on the internal teams as well as the agency side of teams. But that example of, Hey, we just added a page with the phone numbers for the departments, or just be it on the specific service line pages, have those numbers there. That's really not that big a lift, but there's a huge impact for the patient experience. And so I think that it's really important to see it from the perspective of the actual patient and not about like, oh, this is probably very valuable because it's going to take two weeks to build kind of thing.

Yeah, that's a really good point. That's a really good point.

Another part of that, if I can ask it this way because that made me think about like how you're prioritizing certain things. So how are you prioritizing the website and managing all the things you just mentioned managing governance also When you do have all these stakeholders, Tara and Seth both just alluded to this of the number of stakeholders that have an influence and or an opinion on the website.

So when they're all especially just have these different opinions and then they're all competing for attention on it, Seth gave a great example of that already.

What is more of your response there? How do you prioritize that and communicate that to them when there are so many different stakeholders competing for attention?

Maybe we'll start with you Tara.

Yeah, I think as with any prioritization exercise that you're gonna have layers. And so for us, again, coming back to that build trust and make it easy principle, the first part build trust to the number one thing that that relies upon is accuracy.

So when we're talking about things on the website that are not correct, whether that's a kind of basic information about services, structured data, again, coming back to that and making sure that we have the right information about our physicians and our locations and what we're offering and making sure that the relationships between our physicians and our locations and our services are accurate, which is actually like quite a complex network of information.

From my perspective, the investments in advancing that accuracy come first and our table stakes to anything that we're talking about, about driving transactions upstream or offering information upstream or investing in the site. The second priority is going to be in that make it easy category. So are we making the pathway for the patient more accessible?

And once we get through those two areas, the focus on what are the organization's priorities around service line investment? Where are we connecting most with the business? And those are kind of inform that next layer. But to be quite honest, the focus on accuracy and transaction takes up quite a bit of our budget.

Yeah, I would totally agree with that, that we put a heavy focus on accuracy and it is far more complex to all the relationships between physicians and locations and keeping the medical staff data accurate far more time than I realized before I got into this role, definitely more time than a lot of people realize. So that does end up eating a lot of our time.

We also try and take like beyond that, we try and take ROI first approach. So we're really trying to work with our stakeholders. So when they bring something to us to have them think through what's the expected contribution margin and help us to prioritize the work in a way that is gonna produce the most ROI for the organization.

That doesn't always work. There's politics that get involved, like well respected doctor has a pet project that he gets our executive team on board with and that ends up being a priority.

I think that those things inevitably will always come up.

More and more we've been trying to establish our marketing team as a strategic partner rather than order tickers. So we're trying to bring forward the web projects that we feel are going to have the most impact to the organization as well and really bringing the data forward and earning the respect of the organization so that in the future, our hope is that they'll start to realize, oh, the marketing team, web team, they know what they're doing, they know that what types of changes are going to be most impactful. So they have it handled. It's where we hope we're going to get, but it is a journey for sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree that the accuracy is something super important, when there's more than one listing for a physician in different pages and how is that connecting? Is Google showing the same thing? So that's definitely a huge concern.

And a lot of what we're talking here is really governance. It's not so much technology or implementation of something. It's really how you talk with different departments and different leaders.

Throughout twenty twenty five, all of the conversations, challenges, even in conferences that I've been like, governance has been such a central theme over the past year, I think it's gonna continue to be one over the next couple of years as well.

From my perspective, what has worked to cut through that challenge is really the clarity.

I think first is clarity about the ownership.

Know, Seth, you're talking about positioned as partners and strategic partners for the other individuals around the organization.

Think that's a really good move because you have to be owners of, own the website. This is how we're working with the communication, the marketing of how we're doing our stuff. So that's kind of first step is setting that out. You know, some certain cases, it needs to be more structured.

There's like a RACI, like, you know, responsible, accountable, consulted, informed, or whatever, just to be clear on what happens there. And some tricks that I've seen clients and systems do is, Oh, if you want to make a change on the website, you have to fill out this kind of change request form or whatever. Explain what your change is, describe why it's important and blah, blah, blah. And that breaks a percentage of people's requests.

Oh, I'm not going to go through the effort of clarifying my request. So finally, maybe it's not that important after all. That offloads the marketing team.

And the other thing that I've seen is using data as a tiebreaker, like when someone has, Oh, I need absolutely to change this page on the website. And then, Yeah, but this page has zero point zero one percent of our visits, right? And this other page has nine percent. We need to focus on here.

It's not because it's my opinion against yours. It's more that, well, we have to focus our energy, attention, and time on where the conversions and the patients are on the website. And we'll add that to maybe a backlog and we'll get to it. But we don't need to prioritize because you're screaming loudest or you have the most seniority or most respected member of the team or whatever in another clinician or something.

And that's a good way to convince them of how you're prioritizing what you're working on.

The great way to think about it. Maybe that kind of leads into this next topic because naturally the question is then what's the ROI on that? So I'm wondering how you each tie website ROI, like website improvements to other outcomes, especially when we all know the budget pressure that comes from executive leadership. It's one thing to be able to see it yourselves in your department on your teams, and it's another thing to be able to communicate it that in a way that resonates with executive leaders. So how do you tie website improvements to ROI and outcomes?

Brad, let me start with you.

Yeah. This is I think it's the big question. Right? Because everybody tries there's a lot of pressure, you know, as we mentioned earlier in the conversation about, you know, is this valuable?

You know, there's even CFOs saying, well, you know, why do I need a marketing team? Like, people are still going to need care and we're in their community, so they're going to come anyway. Why do we pay you kind of thing? That's maybe too extreme.

So thought about this a bit.

And the the way that there's there's three different angles that I usually approach this type of conversation. So one is obviously the classic revenue and if you're sophisticated enough contribution margin, connection. So, hey, if you're able to hey. We someone clicked on this ad and this campaign.

They came onto the website. They booked. They kept that appointment. They had it. It was scheduled.

They got the care.

And then you can connect that with maybe a future, like with the CRM. Oh, they also had this additional upsell to a specialist. And then you can approximate a lifetime value. That's like the holy grail. Not that many systems are able to kind of get to that level. But having an idea of those bookings, how many were had, I think are kind of a minimum conversion rates and dollars generated. I think that's the number one.

Then there's an opportunity cost of, well, if people can't self schedule, there's maybe dollars shifted towards the call center. So in certain cases, can say, hey, we want to reduce call center volume by five percent. If we do this, can we check the impact? So those are other ways to kind of say, Hey, we're removing costs elsewhere by doing this.

And then the last one, which is less obvious, I'd say, is there's an accumulated technical debt and comparison to competitors.

If there's this stagnation of let's not do anything on the website to save costs, then what happens is you're accumulating technical debt. There is a potential redesign that's going to come sooner than later because you're not keeping that website up to date. You're losing patience to competitors who have implemented better features. And so comparing in your community, in your market, what are other systems doing and am I comparing positively or not to those are also different ways to kind of prove the value of what you're doing on the website and how that's gonna generate, you know, either the revenue or the brand awareness, etcetera, in your market.

But it's always very difficult, I'd say, especially when there's an absence of data. Like, now data is starting to trickle back in. But when there's an absence of data, it's it's very difficult to to have those conversations of saying, you know, this is valuable or not. And I think at the end of the day, just to kinda conclude, there's a portion of marketing investment, which is not a direct line to ROI.

And even if we are measuring like, oh, this someone clicked on this ad and booked an appointment, there's a whole slew of actions that patient has done prior to that. And it's not like a one to one mapping. There's all kinds of other parts of that journey that happened. That's maybe just the last mile.

It's very difficult to have it. The way a CFO might think of the numbers, it's very difficult to translate like a one for one equation.

Thanks, Brad. I think that's a very sophisticated view on ROI and I agree.

I think many of us would love to be in the place where we're tracking users through to conversion and showing how that traffic site is driving. I think relevant to this conversation, that pathway is becoming more elusive as we think about the site informing transactions that happened before the site. So the site's an important player in that journey, not touched.

But I think from my perspective, when it comes to justifying us around budget time or having those conversations around ROI and kind of conversely to some of the things we were just saying, like for me or for us, the answer has been saying yes more, a really big component of our website redesign was building a component library so that building pages is really low development and low investment effort. And it has really given us the ability, you have a program, you have a phone number for that program, great. You can have a webpage, You are HR and you want to show our new organizational values that you've invested a lot of time and research in like here have a webpage.

And in many of those cases, those are use cases that would have gone to a third party agency to develop as a pet project for another department. In which case you're talking about easily ten thirty, depending on the use case, forty, fifty thousand that would have been going to an agency. And we can see that those are now free. I mean, there's still investment from our team, but we're able to offer much more low dollar solutions to the organization and solve problems that are coming up.

And same thing in our relationship with marketing, right? Where, programs and initiatives come to marketing looking for support. And, you know, we might not be able to invest X dollar paid marketing campaign for those programs or service lines, especially as budgets become constrained. But we are able to support them with more digital infrastructure at relatively low investment. And so that is a way to services when a financial investment isn't available. And that kind of problem solving conversation is really important to us when it comes to asking for digital investment.

Just wanted to be quick before you jump in Seth, but there's two things that Tara said that really kind of resonate with me and that we haven't necessarily addressed that much is you're talking about the HR aspect. And I've done a lot of collaboration in the marketing and HR departments as well because we're talking about patient access all the time. But staffing is a huge issue. And being able to collaborate with HR to make a good HR brand page to attract new people to the team is super important operationally for the organization. And so that's a couple of kudos that marketing gets by improving on that part of the website.

So that's one of the big things there. That connects directly to the other thing you were talking about, Tara, which is about access. And when we're talking about the ROI, what we have to make sure is that we're aligning where we're investing and if is access available. Right? Because if you're creating a campaign for, like, breast cancer month or whatever, and there's no availability for appointments for the next two months, then that's kinda like throwing money down the drain a bit because people are going say, well, I'm not going to a couple of them are obviously going to book eventually. Right? But if you don't have access or availability for that immediately and you're creating a campaign for it, you should be redirecting that budget towards something that's going to bring a direct return in the immediate way you're looking for it.

Yeah, think Brad and Tara had good responses here. I think that from our perspective, we're really just trying to do what we can to look at the conversions first. So anytime that we can, someone filled out a form or scheduled an appointment that we can tie it to some activity that happened on the website. We're trying to show that. We've been working more with our analytics team to start to ingest some of the web and marketing data into our data warehouse so we can get more sophisticated with some of those downstream appointments and the lifetime value that we're bringing to the organization.

That's been a focus for us lately.

The other thing is the reality is that not every dollar that we spend on the website is going to be directly trackable or directly traceable to an ROI number. And so our CMO especially has been trying to work with our executive team to help them to understand that this investment that we're making in the website is important, even if you're not seeing the direct correlation to we spent the money here and got money x amount out of it.

A lot of our budget for the website goes into things like security updates and things like that that are necessary to keep it running but don't, or aren't, you know, dollars spent on trying to gain and ROI.

Yeah, I knew that'd be a loaded topic. So that's a lot to talk about there. I'll tell you what timing wise, we do have quite a few questions that have come in and maybe we can just start rolling through those if that's all right. There's a couple I could group together, but let me start with the first one that came in. It was, how do you get noticed by AI summaries if you're just focusing on transactional content?

Yeah. I can maybe kind of jump into that one quickly. So right now, we need to be visible to search engine and there's adaptations you can do to the code to make it AI friendly, but it's not a big jump from SEO friendly. So if your website's already SEO friendly, it's visible by search engines, which is basically what AI LLMs are doing. They're searching your website and parsing it.

It's less, I think, less about the volume of that information, right? And more about, and we were talking about it earlier in the conversation, it's how differentiated that is because people are gonna search for the LLMs.

Oh, is there any people who can provide dermatology services in my area or whatever? If you have a page that talks about dermatology, that's great. Then talking about how specific that dermatology service at your organization is compared to others, then the AIs are going to be able to map that information into their responses and saying, could you compare these different hospitals? Because that's what people are going to do. They're going to say, can you compare system one and system B, and which one should I go to? And you have to have answers that differentiate you there so that they can decide to go to your website after as opposed to not going or going to the competitors.

I'm not that worried about not being visible in search engines because when people are looking for just symptoms, you don't necessarily need to be there at, oh, my skin is itchy. Do I have eczema or whatever? That's not where you need to be present. It's the next step when they're saying, Okay, well, who can treat dermatology in my area? So it has to be very local and it has to be very differentiated.

And that's an acceleration, Brad, of a pattern that we have been seeing around where you're investing content to say, do I need to be in those medical advice questions or do I need to be in decision making content?

Now even more so in the decision making content where again, your information about what patients are saying about you in reviews, whether that's first or third party, the accuracy of your information about doctors and where they practice, the services and conditions that are specific to them. Those are transaction oriented pieces of information versus some of the more educational content that I think several years ago was more of a focus of SEO for hospital sites.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that there was a period of time where we were really focused on being like a WebMD and that we've really gone away from that trying to focus on what is differentiating about our brand and what's the value prop of choosing HonorHealth versus one of our competitors.

Jared, are you on mute?

No. Oh, yeah.

Thank you. Thank you.

You were you were animated there.

So excited. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. The next couple of questions I'll just group together because they're related to that.

And one of them, I think kind of just got addressed. It said most hospitals have mountains of content tied to their websites. So service pages, blogs, podcasts, etcetera. How are your hospitals leveraging that library in the age of AI?

And then maybe related. Another question was, are you implementing AI features?

If so, which ones?

How are you prepping your sites and data for the next generation AI layer? So they may or may not be related, but anyone wanna jump in on either of those?

I'll just start off and I think that this is both a journey focused and search focused answer, but in terms of the relationships between these mountains of content depending on what they are, these different kinds of types of content I mentioned, with our site architecture taking more of a tagging approach to saying there's a relationship between this podcast and this service or a relationship between this news article and this service that isn't this news article lives under this service in your architecture and creating those robust relationships between areas where you've already invested and the service lines to like add layers, add decision points, add color to those places. I think that has been the focus for us again, creating stored and flexible relationships between many pieces of content and many service pages as one way to create those pathways.

I wholeheartedly agree with what she said. We do a lot of that tagging, connecting pages. And that's also how AI understands your content, where it's more about what theme is this page we're talking about and less about what keywords are there. So that just enhances that if it's connected with all these different pages that are similar, it just makes that page more relevant.

I wanted maybe to address the second what was the second question there? Because I found it was interesting.

It was, are you implementing AI features? How are you prepping insights and data for the next generation AI layer?

What's really interesting that I've seen okay. My my my trend in talking with different health systems and and hospitals and stuff like that is that AI, I think it was sold about maybe three years ago as being, hey. You know what? We're gonna do personalization at scale. We are going to now have one on one messages for each individual who comes to the hospital, adapt it to their reality, and that everything's gonna change.

And what I'm actually seeing on the ground is teams using AI to optimize their internal operations, improve content creation, etcetera, review, editorial reviews and stuff like that, workflows, but not so much client facing. Because as we mentioned earlier, accuracy and trust are so important, and AI is kind of hallucinating sometimes. And I think that's a huge issue that that's why we don't want to be client facing. We have implemented some chatbots, but they're very, very limited in their scope where it's more about, hey, how can I find this type of doctor or location or whatever? But when it gets to health recommendations, then obviously we have to kind of stop and say, well, you should talk to a physician at that point. And so it's like AI with built in algorithms to make sure that it's not responding to certain types of questions with a very limited scope of information that they can refer to.

So I don't think AI is patient facing ready yet. I'd like to keep, as I was talking with Matt here with my colleague in another organization, like, you have to keep a human in the loop and you can't just have AI client facing, you know, and start giving them advice.

Yeah. I I would agree with that. I think that that we've primarily been using it for our own internal efficiencies. So the content creation and some audience profiling and analysis, that type of thing.

We've talked about potentially having a patient facing AI tool or chatbot. And it's just, we've never felt like it does go back to that accuracy. We don't want it hallucinating and telling patients things that are inaccurate. And so we've been hesitant to pull the trigger or haven't really found an AI tool that we felt comfortable making patient facing at this point.

Any questions?

I would say as folks are exploring things like experiences AI are only going to be as good as your structured workflows and data. So you might not have to tell it what to do in every single situation that you can think of, but the decision making framework and the information feeding into that framework should be pretty robust to avoid many of these unexpected and unexplainable journeys that we sometimes see.

Thank you. Thank you. We'll try get to a couple more questions here before the top of the hour here. I did want to mention real quick before we do that just for those who have to hop off right at the top of the hour that we do have an upcoming virtual summit, the future of hospital websites.

So just related to this, again, we're going to answer as many of these questions as we can in the next couple of minutes, but that is a full week of sessions. It's March ninth through thirteenth, and it's free to people for people to register at hospitals and health systems and other healthcare providers. So you can learn more about that or register at ehealthcarestrategy dot com. I just wanted to mention that before we get there.

Yeah, let's see the next question real quick. Maybe we have one for Tara, one for Seth.

Tara, you mentioned CRM longevity. Can you talk more about what we consider long in these days of lightning fast changing tech?

That's great. Yeah. To clarify, talking about basic analytics platforms with more longevity and flexibility around controlling the type of information you collect and don't collect. And so from my perspective, I will say longevity having a shorter and shorter lifetime thinking, we're thinking about roadmaps where we might've been thinking five years, I now feel more relevant speaking about a three year roadmap.

But as it relates to those principles of we know that PHI is becoming more important and not less important. We know that control over what we track and don't track is becoming more important and less important thinking about those perspectives as opposed to crossing our fingers and hoping for more flexibility with what we're able to collect on patients.

Thank you, thank you.

Let's see, Seth, I'll just for the sake of time here. We can come back to that one if we want. I know Tara needs to hop here right at the top of the hour.

We'll stick around for a few minutes. The rest of us can for a few minutes if we need.

Seth, this question for you is with the updated blog section, how are you approaching key CTAs to encourage conversion to appointments and treatments or other important CTAs?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I think that we're always trying to balance with the content team, information that are providing content that is interesting to people that they want to read and content that actually drives to the CTA and appointment. So we were doing a lot of recipe content for a while and that was really interesting to people that got a lot of clicks, then we realized that nobody really took any action. They were coming, looking at the recipe, maybe printing it off and then clicking away without taking any other action. So we're really trying to find the kind of human interest types of stories within our service lines where we can talk about an innovative treatment approach or doctor that's doing something new and interesting that generates excitement among our audience, but we're able to put a solid CTA where if you're interested in this type of treatment or seeing this doctor click here to schedule an appointment.

I am gonna drop, just wanted to say quickly, Jared, thank you so much. Ann, Brad and Seth, great conversation. By all means, Thanks.

Thanks Tara.

Thank you, thank you. All right, we'll try to cover a couple more. We may not be able to get to all of them here but we will find a way to be able to follow-up on as many of these as we can if it's not here in the webinar here. Let's just keep going on a couple.

The next one was a step by step journey of how your marketing tactics result in direct patient visits and ROI is the ultimate dream. In order to take a step in the right direction you need access to the right data. So the question is, how do you get buy in from your IT, data informatics, and EMR teams to make that dream a reality? Where do you start with that journey?

Yeah, it's a really, really good question. So we have, especially in the past few years, but have been developing a really strong relationship with our data analytics team.

It does help the marketing vice president and the analytics vice president report to the same senior leader.

And so I think that has kind of helped grease the skids in terms of our analytics leader learning more about marketing and realizing that we have really strong data needs.

I think that the biggest challenge for us is that we're resource constrained in marketing, they're resource constrained in analytics, and just finding the people who are just getting the resource to be able to pull the data and model it and analyze it. That's really where we're getting the rub now. I think we have the buy in from the leaders that it's important. It's just it takes longer than we want it to just because of the resource constraint.

I've seen that be more of like, I think because the person who's asking the question, like, I wanna connect all this data all at once kind of a thing. And I think it has to be built slow momentum. And I think first of all, is like if you have a CRM that is able to track some data, some first party data that you can build around individuals who are existing patients, for example, and then you can say, Hey, can I connect with maybe one field that can be pushed towards my CRM that I can connect one data point, then I can prove something about a campaign or whatever? And if that has a success, then it's okay, well, can we go to another data point? And then eventually that can get to, okay, well, I wanna be able to interact and access that data in the EMR or whatever. But I don't think it's like, oh, can you just up in the floodgates because marketing needs that information? I think it has to be kind of a business case that has to be built and proven over time.

Yeah, one thing that we've been talking about lately is kind of going the opposite direction. So we're talking about having our marketing data flow into the enterprise data warehouse. Interesting.

Web data, CRM data.

And I think that that way we're able to kind of rely on the resources from our analytics team to help model that for us. But that's been, I think that we had in the past where we need all of the data and our CRM and we kind of recently came to a point, well, why don't we go the other way? Don't we put the marketing data and the data warehouse?

Fantastic. Tell everyone we're five minutes over here and we still have a good litany of questions to address. What we will possibly do here is I'll propose that we will have a recap article of this webinar up on ehealthcarestrategy dot com in the future anyway. We could use that as a way to address some of these and get the thoughts from the panelists as a follow-up there.

I think that might be the best way because there's some great questions in here and we're just simply out of time here. But I do want to thank our panelists. I want to thank everyone for all the great questions and I want to thank our panelists, Tara, Brad, and Seth for joining us here. So again, don't forget the upcoming virtual summits, the future of hospital websites, March ninth through thirteenth.

You can check that out at ehealthcarestrategy dot com as well. Thanks everyone for attending. Hope you have a great day and I look forward to seeing you at our next webinar.

Thank you. Thanks.