Behavioral Science and Digital Conversion Tools: How Virginia Hospital Center Used “Nudge Theory” to Drive Service Line Growth

A new Strategic Health Care Marketing webinar for health care marketers and strategists

Presented on May 25, 2022

Sponsored by Wellsource

This event is free to attend thanks to our event sponsor.

About Your Presenters:

Transcript

0:00
Welcome to today's webinar, Behavioral Science and Digital Conversion ToolsHow Virginia Hospital Center used nudge theory to drive service line growth.
0:09
I'm Jane Weber Brubaker, Executive Editor of Plain-English Healthcare.
0:13
We are the publishers of Strategic Health Care Marketing and eHealthcare Strategy and Trends and producers of the eHealthcare Leadership Awards.
0:21
What prompts a person to take the next step in their health journey?
0:24
Today we'll hear how small nudges along the way make it easier for patients to take the next best action.
0:30
And we'll share a case study about how Virginia Hospital Center used marketing tactics based on Nudge theory to grow its Barry ... program.
0:38
And now I'd like to briefly introduce our speakers for today's presentation.
0:43
Cathy Turner is director of health promotion and senior health at Virginia Hospital Center, where she has worked for over 30 years.
0:50
Cathy is responsible for co-ordinating the corporate, community, senior, and employee wellness programs for the hospital.
0:57
She works closely with the public affairs and marketing teams to assist with promoting hospital service lines and physician groups to community and corporate clients.
1:06
Alyssa Carter is the director of marketing at Wellsource.She has deep roots in the healthcare and technology sectors and loves working with clients to help them think strategically about their marketing goals and design effective in measurable programs.
1:20
Today's presentation will be approximately 45 minutes, followed by 10 to 15 minute Q&A.
1:25
We'll hold your questions until the end, but feel free to submit them at any time during the presentation.
1:30
Immediately following today's webinar, we'll send out a PDF of the presentation slides and in a couple of days you'll receive a link to the recording.
1:38
Now we'd like to turn it over to her first presenter Alyssa Carter. Alyssa,please go ahead.
1:43
Thanks so much, Jane, and thanks, everybody, for being here.
1:47
So I know a lot of us are excited to dive into Nudge theory, and I wanna thank Kathy, so much one of our favorite clients to work with for doing this webinar. With us. It's gonna be fun. So, we're gonna save questions to the end. So if you have them, feel free to put them in the chat, and we'll get to as many as we can at the end. And then we'll follow up, in case we don't have time to get to it. So, we have a lot of content to cover, so I'm gonna go quickly, so, through your questions in the chat, as you have them.
2:19
So, before we dive into specifically, nudge theory, kind of what it is, and Cathy talking about your story, in terms of using it.
2:28
I thought I would just spend a minute kind of setting up the challenge that I think, Kathy, you guys were in when we first started talking back in, I think, Fall of 2020 or so. But I think the challenge that a lot of healthcare marketers are in today as well, so, we're kind of in this situation now where we are?
2:48
We're having shifting patient expectations, right?
2:50
People have more online and self serve, um, solutions, and then, at the same time, we have marketers who are having more and more challenges to find effective ways to reach. this increasingly data, digital, savvy healthcare, consumer, right? And so, people are looking for more self-service answers. And then, I think, as we all know, it's been a little bit of a rough time for health systems the past couple of years, you know, between.
3:19
managing the pandemic really has stretched bandwidths.
3:23
And so, I want to transition into talking a little bit about how we can use Nudge theory to help kind of meet patients where they're at throughout this journey and also meet our goals as marketers.
3:36
And, so, I'm gonna go over the kind of, like core concepts of Nudge theory here in a minute, but before I do, Kathy, could you maybe just kind of introduce a little bit about Virginia Hospital Center, and kind of what challenges that you guys were having when we first started talking back in late 2020, And then I can go into the specifics and?
3:59
Sure, Alyssa, so I think with, you know, with most marketing efforts, the biggest challenge is tracking, effectiveness, right? How do you know that whatever marketing that you are putting into place, Whether it's print marketing, digital, marketing, How do you know if it is successful?
4:21
And how do you track the return on investment?
4:27
And so, that was our biggest challenge.
4:32
We just didn't have the ability to close the loop and find out, Wow, is this marketing real? Is this whatever we're doing for marketing, this service line or this physician group? Is it actually leading to new patients?
4:48
Did people make an appointment? Did they schedule surgeries and so that that's where we struggled?
4:55
Gotcha. OK, so we're definitely going to talk more about that.
4:59
Before I do, I think, probably listeners have a variety of knowledge about Nudge theory, and I am certainly not an expert. When it comes to this. I do. But I, and so I would encourage those of you who really want to dive in deeper.
5:17
There's a great book called, Nudge Theory that was released in 2008, that is, And I'm going to just kind of pull out some of the core concepts here that we can then talk about more, and then talk about how you guys used it in your campaign. Kathy, So, really, at its core, Nudge Theory is a term in behavioral economics that really helps us as healthcare marketers to guide our patients toward making the best decisions.
5:42
So, as health and wellness professionals, we can kind of consider the design in which different ways, choices can be made for the individuals we're targeting.
5:54
So, when we do this, when we design, kind of an environment that helps nudge people toward the next best action in the book, this is kind of a fancy term called Choice Architecture.
6:09
So, what is choice architecture? I remember when I was reading this, like, OK, this is getting a little confusing for me, but once you break it down, I think it is actually pretty simple. So I mentioned the book nudge, which was, he kinda the author. Richard Thaler kind of coined this term back in 2008.
6:28
And what Choice Architecture is, is essentially the environment that you designed to help people make the best decisions.
6:34
Because one of the things we know in behavioral economics is that humans are not rational, right? So, we know that we should exercise, you know, eat healthier, make these better decisions about our health, maybe seek care when we're having pain, or, or, or issues. And so, as healthcare marketers, what we want to try to do is help move people along in their journey toward making the right decisions, right? And so, how do we do that? There's several ways. This is one example that I'm going to talk about a lot just in terms of digital design.
7:12
Here, you know, and you've probably seen this just in your lives where we're designing an environment where we want you to click that purple button, so we're making it very prominent.
7:23
We're making it easy for you to make that choice.
7:26
So, I will go ahead and give you, um, some examples. Personal example from my own, my own life about how I use Nudge theory.
7:36
So, so F I Told this to my husband last night, and he was not super happy with the story, but we're going to tell it anyway. So during that, I did all of the grocery shopping in house. A partner had an autoimmune disorder. We were all very scared, you know, washing everything down. And so I would do all the shopping, I put everything away.
7:58
I started noticing all the chips in the house would somehow be just gone after a week, and so I finally asked like, are you eating all of these chips? What's happening?
8:07
any kind of said, yeah, well, they're out. And so, I just, I see them out on the counter. I have a couple, you know, by the end of the week, the God.
8:15
So I, without even knowing what I was doing, I designed a choice architecture environment to help nudge my husband to start eating healthier. So instead, I took all the chips and hid them in a drawer in my office that he didn't know where they were and I started putting fruit and vegetables.
8:33
Out in plain sight and shockingly, it worked chimps were no longer eating fruits and vegetables were consumes. It was a win-win for everyone.
8:42
So this is an example of nudging.
8:45
You want to curate the choices that someone can make that influences their behavior but they're not mandates and they're not incentives, right?
8:55
It isn't actually giving them an option to make it easier for them to make a specific choice, right.
9:03
So, as we think about, how in healthcare marketing, do we design this, do we nudge people to make the next backlash? So, there's several tenants. Like I said. Definitely pick up the book if you are looking to really dive into this and learn more. But a few examples that we can talk through. So, one, we just talked about this, make it easy. People are going to take the path of least resistance, so make it really easy for them to identify the next action to take.
9:31
Um, again, Nudge theory is all about helping people make choices, so offer them a small selection of next steps, and really highlight the option for helping them move forward.
9:43
Then finally, ensure the effort matches the word. We're going to talk a little bit about, Kathy, how you guys use the health risk assessment to gather person's information.
9:53
So something really light, like asking for an e-mail address, as opposed to, you know, calling them right away, is helping them get more information without kind of being a little bit too invasive too early on in the process.
10:07
So, we're going to get really quickly, I think, into your case study here, Kathy, but I want to kind of walk through, kind of nudge in action, and how kinda we see it working at a holistic way in healthcare marketing, and then I want to dive into exactly how you guys use it, Kathy.
10:25
So, so, here's kind of what I see a lot healthcare marketers are doing, who kind of aren't using much theory. So, typical patient experience. You have somebody, they're searching online, usually they go to Google, They're searching for, you know, their symptoms, or help for some sort of problem that they're having, And then they usually, they might hit your website.
10:48
And then from there, oftentimes, the next choice that you're really giving them is to make a phone call.
10:56
And this is a pretty, like, big ask for someone who has just Googled, and is probably not ready to kind of dive in right away. And they can kind of feel like, proposing on the first date, which is not going well in this gif and probably wouldn't go well, in real life, either.
11:17
And so, what we want to do is design and architecture choice architecture that gives people choices along the way so they can make the next best steps toward this decision.
11:28
So, before we jump into the case study, Kathy, and I want to hear, you talk about the specifics of what you did.
11:35
But I want to just have everybody keep in mind that there are a lot of tools out there that you can use to implement Nudge theory.
11:45
But before you really go diving into the tools, really think about the patient journey. Think about what the motivations are of their patients and what barriers they might be having along the way. And the technology can just help you do that, and we're going to talk about that with Kathy here, But you don't necessarily need a ton of sophisticated technology. You just need to think through the patient journey and how they might be experiencing, you know, the digital navigation of your site.
12:16
So Patty, I'd love to transition into kind of your case study and specifically how you guys used use the HRA as a part of your toolset to use, kind of nudge theory to move people along the path. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop it over to kinda your next slide.
12:36
And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the campaign, the goal, et cetera. So maybe you can monetize that.
12:43
Sure. So just to give you a little history so that the goal of this rate of this was to increase and help promote our very Amtrak service line.
12:55
Previous campaigns were very visual, right?
12:58
They were reading digital digital marketing or print marketing push people to our website so as a push to our bariatric section of our Web site.
13:13
And then people would read about the program but then that was about it right?
13:20
The beauty of the HRA is it was more interactive. So they could take a little questionnaire. And, Yeah, and I think down the line, Alyssa can kind of show you, how would the questions look like? But they took a little questionnaire, was are you a candidate for Bariatric service.
13:45
So, that's kind of the, the key tagline is Are you a candidate for very accurate surgery.
13:52
And then they got their results, And if they did fall in the zone of, yes, they were, they had three call to actions, it would be question where they could e-mail one of our nurse practitioners, make an appointment or get more info, and if they put get more info, then again it took them to the Bariatric section of the OR website.
14:23
So, it was much more personalized, It enabled us also to collect data. So down the line, we were able to follow up with more resources.
14:37
So we did, we launched the campaign. I think in February we collected data and then in June we did a live meet the Bariatric team webinar and we were able to reach back out to the people who had completed the HRA and fell within a certain BMI level.
15:00
So it was a way to really then when we did the Meet the Bariatric webinar, attract people who were already engaged.
15:10
And we used a variety of different and I should say the beautiful thing about this from a marketing standpoint is we were really able to track and close the loop so we could track how many people completed an HRA. We had different promotional channels, we had SEM campaigns that took people to our website and then the HRA was on the website but we also did social Media post just about the HRA.
15:46
We included an article in our Hospital magazine, we did E blast along the line we spread kind of these marketing campaigns out.
15:58
We were able to trap, alright, this campaign led to this many people completed completing the HRA. So that, in and of itself was beneficial, right?
16:08
We were able to tell which one of our promotional channels.
16:12
We got the best results from but then we worked very closely with our bariatric team and we were able to track who were making were people making appointments of the people that completed the HRA.
16:29
Were they making appointments?
16:31
We were able to track downed online surgeries. So again we were really able to track the return on investment.
16:42
We were able to track so many different levels on the effectiveness of the program.
16:51
Awesome so and you mentioned to the HRA right? And so, that was kind of, it sounds like the anchor in your ...
16:59
program, in terms of kind of having an interactive tool to kind of, nudge them right throughout the process, so they weren't, you know, immediately going to the point where they're making a call.
17:13
And so, in this case, and this is just a little visual of, kind of, what, what it kind of looks like in the experience for the end user? And this is a great example of kind of a soft conversion point, Right?
17:28
So we're not asking someone to make an appointment right at the get go, we're just saying, you know, are you eligible for bariatric surgery?
17:35
You know, take this assessment and find out and there's a lot of great examples of Nudge theory just within that. So I'm going to talk about a few of them. So, one is priming.
17:47
So the theory in terms of, in, just in the design of the tree itself: getting people, thinking about their health, right, priming them, are you eligible and thinking about what options they might have at the end. We're making it really easy. You can see here in the video, you know, as soon as they click Yes, no, whatever that choice is, it automatically moves them to the next questions. We're making it easy for them to take the next step, And then we're curating options rate.
18:14
You mentioned some of the calls to actions that the people had at the end of the key city, And you can kind of see here, the three options that you had were asking nurse, make an appointment and more info. Can you talk a little bit more about kind of these different races and then how followed up with some of these people who like quite ready to make an appointment. Right, right?
18:39
So the first thing I have to say is that the campaign was successful because there was a true collaboration between our our marketing efforts but also the buy in from the Bariatric team.
18:58
So as Alyssa said, you can see here on the left-hand side of this, this just gives you an idea of some of the marketing that we put in place around The HRA right to the drive was to get people to complete the HRA.
19:17
Once they got their results but then they knew, OK yes you are, A, you are a candidate, then they have the option, they could click on the button that the nurse button would send to enable them to E now are Bariatric Navigator and ask a question. And if they had a question, she would follow up. Sometimes. you know, it was just a couple of back and forth, sometimes she would end up making an appointment for them. Then, there was the Make an Appointment button that actually went to our online scheduling, so people could make an appointment right there.
19:58
And then as I said before, the more Info button just took them two are the Bariatric section are webpage. So, you know, depending on where people were in their journey, right, everyone's a little bit different. And for those of you involved, you know, buried with Bariatric, it's not in an immediate need, right?
20:23
So, it's not something, typically that, you know, people do right away because it's It's life-threatening.
20:31
And so there's a lot of fun involved with the whole process. We found that sometimes it took people awhile we can see from the time where maybe they took the HRA until they actually made, the appointment was awhile but depending on where they kind of were in that stages of change, sometimes they just wanted more information. They were just looking at and say, Well, gosh, I'm wondering, Am I actually a candidate? And this provided them with a really interactive tool, right? Without having to talk to, Anybody, just a really interactive tool to say, OK, you know what, according to this, I may be a candidate. And then again, they could decide, Well, let me just get some more info, or maybe let me ask a question. Or now I've been thinking about this for a while, it sounds like maybe a candidate.
21:24
So let me make an appointment so very, very personalized.
21:33
We are actually going to be relaunching. So as Alyssa said, we we started this probably in February of 2021.
21:43
And we did heavy promotion from February two, nay and then we still have the HRA up on our website, the Bariatric Section of our Website.
21:59
We haven't been doing any heavy promotion of it, however, but people are still taking it right, when they come.
22:07
We're gonna relaunch a marketing campaign around it in 20 22, but we're adding to it because we now have a physician within our bariatric practice that does just medically supervised weight management.
22:26
So, ideal for those folks who may either not want to do surgery, or maybe they're not a candidate for bariatric surgery, but they, they still need to lose weight for health reasons.
22:42
So, now what we can actually do is we can personalize it even more.
22:49
If they fall, if they fall in this section where they are a candidate for surgery, they'll get these three call to actions that you see here that direct them to our Bariatric Surgery Program.
23:02
If they fall in that yellow section that you can kind of see on the phone here in the picture, then the Ask a Nurse, the Make appointment, the more info will go to call it the actions to our doctor who does the medically supervised weight management program.
23:23
So, again, different call to action, based on results, makes it even more personalized, which is so great, too, because that's, you know, we talked about that core tenet of Nudge theory, is being curating options and like giving people the next best choice of action. And so even if, if somebody is not necessarily saying, Yes, I'm eligible and, like, ready to make this dream.
23:47
Maybe there's some other action they can take that still leaves them on their journey of, right, you know, being healthier. Just in a way that's better for them or more suited to their needs at the time.
24:00
You mentioned to Cathy, that sometimes, you know, people would click nor info or asking nurse and it would be like a while before they actually then came and said, OK, you know, now I'm ready to talk to someone or whatever. And so, the great part about that, as we'll see in the next slide, is, by the time to make an appointment, you know, they've, they've been primed. They've been nurtured and they are ready for that proposal on their terms. You know, and you're not posing them for state and getting washed away into the sea. Like we saw earlier, quick questions to the nurse practitioner.
24:37
were like, simple questions like, Do you take XYZ Insurance?
24:44
Or, you know, they weren't, And I would say, I actually talked to our nurse practitioner just a couple of weeks ago.
24:53
And it wasn't like she was inundated with e-mails, But it was, it was nice to have that as an option for people.
25:03
Right, right.
25:04
So let's talk a little bit, because one of your big goals was obviously that you really wanted to you wanted to be able to track your results, So let's talk about some of these awesome Results that you guys, you guys saw, tell me about these.
25:21
Wow, how did they, you know, what were your expectations?
25:26
Yeah, maybe just talk more about oh, we didn't really have any station other than we wanted to be able to track something right And I have to give super kudos to our very abstract team because they did the hard work when it came to that tracking.
25:49
What we would do is we would give them a list on, know every time we did it.
25:57
You know initially when we were doing heavy promotion we would give them the list at the end of each month and then after we it would be the end of each quarter we give them a list of all the people who had completed the HRA names.
26:15
We didn't have, No, we don't ask for address and that's another thing I wanted to point out. You have the ability to ask for people's address, phone number. We felt that, If we ask for too much personal information, that would be a barrier to people completing that.
26:36
So, we simply ask for their, their e-mail, and I think we did zip code that was, that was it.
26:46
Um, so we were able to give that to our Bariatric team, and they painstakingly went and looked at those names that people went on, had completed, went into the Epic system N went in and looked through there appointments and stop, There was a match.
27:09
And then track those people that came in from from, for consults to see if they had surgeries.
27:17
We actually took it one step further because again, as I mentioned before with bariatric surgery sometimes it takes people a while to really Think about it. Even though we did this heavy campaign early on in 20 21 we kept the HRA app on our website.
27:44
We just literally, I just gave actually, Alyssa, these updated results two days ago because we just had our bariatric team go back again.
27:57
And they looked at all the data from 20 21.
28:02
Again of all the people who completed the HRA and we only, we only pulled the people that, that fell in, that, yes, you are candidate, right? So we didn't give them the names of the people who fell in the yellow or green.
28:20
Categorize are just the people that thou and, yes, you are a candidate Gave them all those names and they doubled and cross checked because some of those folks had surgeries this year, right?
28:36
So even though they completed the HRA in 20 21, they didn't have their surgery Intel 2022 and we were also on I Didn't Include this.
28:46
We were also able to she was also able to find a couple names that she knew, I don't know how she could I'm in the marketing side. So, you, folks that are, clinical, may know this, but she actually could track a couple people who she knew ended up having surgery. But, not at our hospital.
29:05
We had a couple names, folks, that ended up making appointments with our weight management.
29:15
Doctor, we didn't include these in the numbers, but, it was, it was just a win-win because, we were able to show, from the marketing end, we were able to show that, what we were doing made a difference.
29:31
And, it did lead to actual surgeries.
29:37
And, then, again, from, obviously, are very accurate, folks were very happy, and they were able to track their surgeries from first quarter of 2021 through 2 fourth quarter of 2021. And they definitely know that curve one the right way in terms of number of surgeries.
29:59
Overall it was really wow, we have actually expanded it.
30:04
We did a General wellness HRA that promoted our Primary Care Physicians and we're about to initiate A and cardiovascular HRA that will promote our cardiovascular line. And Alissa will talk about this a little bit later, and we'll talk about how you have to structure things and set yourself up for, for success.
30:35
Right.
30:36
Well, and that's such a great segue, because I think, you, know, you guys obviously saw great results in this campaign, and I think you know, now that we've kind of talked through kind of, what does Nudge theory an example of how you guys use the tree as a tool to move people through this journey. I think listeners might be thinking, OK, well how, how do I do this right? Every service line is a little bit different.
31:00
Every hospital system is a little bit different, but I think there were some things that you guys did really, really well, Cathy, which kind of frameworks for success, that helped this be successful with you. That I think you can now apply to, you know, the other H, the other campaigns you launch. And I think people at home can think about, too, when they're going to maybe think about utilizing this within their campaigns as well.
31:28
So I think the first thing, and I think you guys did this really well, Cathy, is that first thing you have to do is make sure you have clear goals, so things like how you measure success, how visible or these success metrics. Do. You want to talk a little bit about how that process and goal setting and how you guys did that their attics and how you're thinking about it for your other service lines.
31:48
Yeah, I think, you know, I think, it's really important upfront, you have an idea of what you are going to track? So, we, we met with a very accurate team upfront and it was very easy because it's one practice, right. And we knew it was just one practice. We knew we had good collaboration, good buy in.
32:14
So, our goal to them was, we want to track What marketing efforts are the most successful, but we also wanted to be able to track.
32:27
If people are making appointments, if that is leading to surgery.
32:32
And so we worked upfront how we were going to how we were going to attract that, who was going to be responsible.
32:41
The general wellness was very different.
32:44
The purpose of that was to promote our primary care physicians while we have 14 practices.
32:53
So we knew upfront there's no way we're going to be able to track appointments or anything like that.
33:00
The goal for this HRA really was tracking again, looking at our different marketing campaigns Which one drove the most clicks to the HRA, right?
33:14
How many people were taking the HRA and then again, tracking how many people were going to. So we didn't even have an ask the nurse gone on this one which I think also too, what your call to action buttons are.
33:30
The Call to Action buttons were literally make an appointment more info.
33:37
And so in that case you're just tracking clicks, right?
33:41
How many people clicked on this button, how many people clicked on that button, how many people completed the HRA, mm, hmm. What's the cardiovascular?
33:51
It's going to be a little bit different where we've worked with the cardiovascular. Again, it's just one practice.
33:59
We have it where if people fall high risk, we have three options. We only have two options.
34:07
Again, they felt that they, they didn't want to get involved with, ask, and ask a question.
34:14
Because it's way too broad, and it might be overwhelming.
34:19
So, again, we made the decision upfront, we're just gonna do, make an appointment more info.
34:28
Yeah.
34:29
Yeah.
34:31
Yeah, so you guys are being really strategic about what are our goals, How will we design? You know, the calls to action and things. Just to make sure that we're gathering the right data. And it was because of you and working with you guys that we then released our. Net new Call to Action Reporting. Where you can actually see Specifically which calls to action people are clicking on, so you can get even deeper into the data and track exactly how people are behaving. Right, right.
34:59
And I think that was one of the things that we had mentioned to the folks at, well activate is, and while sources pay for this general wellness we're not going to be able to track appointments, but we want to be able to track and show the success.
35:15
And so it's really important for us just to success for us, is if we can say, Hey, look, these are HRA, dro, this many people to our Primary Care website.
35:30
Or this many people clicked on the Make an Appointment button, so that we're just looking at number of clicks, right? So, so operate operationalizing similar program. So step one have really clear goals. They might be different depending on your service line. I think the next thing, and you guys did this really well, as well, is cross collaborations. So really thinking about how your work. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about how you specifically worked with your service learning teams to set that up for success.
36:08
So the first thing we did when we met with our ... team is we set the HRA, the very accurate, each questionnaire, to our surgeons and make sure that they were on, you know, I think actually they had a meeting rescheduled, the meeting with you all, and they wanted to know, How did you guys come up with the questions? Where, you know, is this? Why has this been vetted? What's the science behind it?
36:35
And they found they took it and they felt comfortable with it. And so, that was important to us.
36:42
First of all right, is we have to have our very after docs feel comfortable with us, and then after that I was setting up meetings with the other folks on the Bariatric team about how we were going to track and what expectations were for, for everyone. So, that was really important. Emily done the same thing with our cardiac team, right?
37:09
Sent the cardiac HRA to our cardiologists, to some of our cardiologists, to look at, talk with folks from within that physician practice of what our expectations are for them.
37:24
Because it's, if you will, it's still focusing on the patient journey, right? You want to make sure that no one sees patients actually do end up talking to someone of your care team, that the care team is aware. what this, you know, each, Ray was. That's what you don't want to have happen is, right. And we also have expectations up.
37:42
We don't want to be clicking on, make an appointment If we're pushing this, H or I make an appointment. And then there's no appointment available for three months.
37:52
We also didn't want that either. So, we had to have that expectation within our teams as well.
38:00
Yeah, absolutely. And then the final thing I think you guys did really well, is you really nailed the handoff.
38:06
So for those, like you already talked about this, But for those people who weren't quite taking action, or weren't eligible for treatment, You know, you were able to hand those off to patient navigators, called them for Next steps, you're even now, you know, taking the next step by bringing in someone who can talk to those people who aren't eligible for surgery. But who might want to take a healthy weight program? So, I mean, you guys are just doing such a great job.
38:32
Again, setting those goals, right from the get go up, you know, working cross collaboratively with your different teams, and then doing the follow-up necessary to see that full funnel closure of the loop, Right. Yeah.
38:47
So we know what we did is because we had that that data, right, we were able to e-mail, do a follow-up e-mail to two people when we scheduled that webinar for Meet the Bariatric team to follow up, give people another opportunity to reach out to us, be able to ask questions.
39:11
So that is essentially, kind of, I think, the overview of our presentation. I do want to make sure we're leaving enough time for questions. Before we dive into questions, I do want to just let all the listeners know that.
39:27
So, as a part of this, we're offering a, essentially, a service line, marketing campaign review. For the first 10 organizations, you sign up, there's a link down the bottom if you guys are interested.
39:43
So, essentially, what this would look like would just be a consultation, looking at some of the service line campaigns, kind of doing an analysis of how are you guys operationalizing it, now, are there, you know, opportunities for there to be, you know, tenants of nudge theory kinda worked in, et cetera. So feel free to go to that web URL at the bottom to sign up, if you are interested in that. But I will go ahead and leave the rest of the time for questions for either a coffee or myself.
40:17
Thanks, guys. That was a great presentation. And I particularly like the little gif. Or somebody's actually taking the assessment, and it looked like fun. I mean, not everything in medicine is fun, but it looks like a little fun quiz. We get the results back.
40:31
So we do have quite a few questions, so let's just jump into the first one.
40:35
This is somebody who seems to have program in a little different than yours, and since our weight loss surgery program requires an educational Webinar, prior to allowing patients to sign up for the first appointment, it doesn't sound like you have that barrier for patients.
40:50
Do you find your patients are coming in under informed or inappropriately as a result?
40:57
That's a really good question. We, we don't have, so, that first appointment for the consult, we don't require it. And then obviously, after that, before they have the surgery I enough for Bariatric, It's quite, it's quite a process, right?
41:13
You have to meet with several different people on the Care team, go through some education, make sure that you, even if you are a candidate, medically, just from an IT standpoint, there, there's much more involved. So, what we were able to do with this is we were able to, we looked at that first appointment more of a CONSOL.
41:43
Right, and then, based on that first appointment, if, yes, that person was interested, then they had to go through all those those next steps.
41:55
OK, next question is: What kind of metrics do you report to leadership and how will you be measuring success for the next round of your Bariatric Campaign?
42:06
So, um, we, I'm actually doing a presentation to our leadership in, in June, we're doing, on the success of this HRI, this very abstract, so, some of the slides that you see in here are using to present to our leadership team next week, but the metrics for the, again, for the cardiovascular.
42:36
When we did this very accurate campaign, we were lucky because we had the buy in from our bariatric team, and they really went through data and looked at consults and surgeries.
42:48
At the time, we didn't have the ability to just track clicks on, you know, get more and Fellow. So that wasn't something we were able to track. That has since changed with the metrics from the folks from, well source. They now have the ability show with our cardiovascular.
43:10
We are going to again we are going to track, we've we've kind of put in a special car.
43:20
I'm I'm not a web person, but there's a special URL that they've done for our Make an appointment. So and then for them more info.
43:30
So again both on our end and on the well source and we'll be able to track how many people clicked, make an appointment how many people clicked more info.
43:42
Now for the cardiovascular HRI we've also done it based on results.
43:50
So it's just not being able to see it. But with a cardiovascular HRA it says, Yes, you are at risk and it gives them some reasons why they are at risk.
44:01
And then at the bottom, the call to actions will be, make an appointment with a cardiologist, get more information on our cardiac, cardiology services.
44:13
If they fall in the medium to low risk, it doesn't take them to our cardio that the call to action is different. The Call to Action buttons will be on to our Primary Care Physician. Because the results page say it's really important that you know your medium risk or low risk, but it's important to keep track of your blood, pressure your cholesterol, keep track of your not number.
44:41
So our call to action on those will be make an appointment.
44:47
You know, do you need to make an appointment with primary care more info?
44:52
The other thing that we are going to add this time around is an auto generated e-mail back to everyone who completes the HRA.
45:06
We did not do that with the bariatric because we felt that was self focused with the cardiovascular and the general wellness one that are much more general. We're going to do an auto generated the e-mail back that says, thank you for completing the, you know, two days later. Thank you for completing the blah blah blah HRA and then you know, for additional information, you know, here.
45:32
So, again, it's going to be then just tracking numbers, OK?
45:40
So it sounds like it's kind of an adaptable program that you can kind of adjust along the way as you're learning, correct? Yeah, OK. Um, here's a question. What data do you collect from a jury, participants?
45:53
And you just answered this part of the question, which is you send any follow up communications for people who qualify in this case But don't schedule an appointment just to keep these contexts warmed up.
46:03
You kind of answered part of that already, but whenever. Yeah.
46:06
Um, so it's nice because to be honest, well, source has all that is collecting all the data, so they are the host of that data and then they send us a spreadsheet.
46:22
Our as I said, our choice was to not for to make name, address, Phone number required, some people fill that in some people, Devon. So for the Bariatric HRA, the data that we would have, I mean, you have literally, for each person, their name, you know, the answers to each of their questions. You know what their BMI is, and then we have their their e-mail.
46:56
So we were really so for example, when we did the follow up for our Meet the Bariatric team, we just followed up with an E now to the people that were within a certain BMI, Right? We weren't gonna send people and meet the bariatric team to the people that were the lower that weren't candidates for for surgery.
47:20
OK, and just to add to that, too, I mean, it's, it's pretty flexible in terms of what information do you want to capture. And then, so, we work for Kathy to figure out what's important to you, but There is a lot of infamy. I mean, we, to your point, Kathy, like every answer to every question, the time spent right from when they click start to, when they finish, you know, how long did that take, drop off, Sometimes, people will get halfway through and then drop off and not finished. So we can also talk to those drop offs as well.
47:52
And, you know, two point now, even tracking which buttons they're clicking on at the end.
47:58
So there's a lot of information that we can collaborate, and we just, you just work with the client to determine what do you want to see. Because, you know, we don't want to be giving you guys. That's not important to you. So yeah, quite. A bit of information is collected.
48:14
They did give us information. Because it's different of how many people click on each already started. And then how many people completed. So when we're when we're reporting data, we were reporting back to our team.
48:31
We were recording, Oh, this is how many people, you know, clicked on the HRA Bun, remember, we were more concerned with this is how many people actually completed the whole HRA which was a pretty high intent audience too. I think earlier we showed that started with something like 88% of the people who started it, completed it.
48:54
Then, you guys had 289 completions 269 of those completions were actually considered an eligible for server surgery. So 269 at it.
49:05
So, I think that's just speaking to the use case of this particular service line, is, it is a very high intent audience that isn't, you know, typically in need of some kind of care and recognition you guys were able to provide.
49:20
Yeah, I have a feeling that probably our completion rate and not intention is going to be a little bit different for the other than the one that the general wellness one, which is much more, know, those who are generic.
49:35
Was a perfect segue to the next question, which is somebody who like to know the goals and calls to action for the general. Well, as ..., Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, you know, the general wellness was really just a drive to promote our primary care physicians.
49:53
So, in that case, it was more just a general awareness and a driving to our primary care website.
50:06
Right, Show very, very strategically, very, very different than the Bariatric, which was the, really, the goal was to lead. And we wanted to be able to track appointments, surgeries, general wellness, it was just.
50:27
People getting name Recognition of our, all our different prime, because we've added so many new primary care practices in the past two years. So, it really was just general awareness of our primary care practices.
50:41
OK, so a whole different strategy.
50:44
Next question is, How are you able to identify and track patients in Epic, using only e-mail and zip code?
50:53
So, that's how they, I'm not exactly sure what our team did, but they actually went and they had, well, they also had a date of birth.
51:07
So, they had age. That was another one, right?
51:10
So, they had dad name, they had date of birth, and they had, and they had zip code.
51:22
And so what they were able to do is to track, all right? if those people looking up those, those names to see if they have made appointments.
51:36
So it wasn't you know, there was a little on their end time, Tompkins humor, but remember this is spread out over a period of time so you're not giving them.
51:48
We weren't giving them, you know, 70 names at a time.
51:53
We were, you know, giving them a group of names at the end of each month, and then they would, they would love, But didn't, it requires a little bit of a time commitment from your actual team, but thank you for asking that, Jane.
52:08
We did also have, I think, because I think part of the HR, a question for the very Atrix was date of birth, right, OK.
52:15
Yeah, and just to add to, it is, we do have clients who, who asked for a little bit more information. Instead of just e-mailing that, they ask for things like mailing address, which then allows them to sink a little bit more seamlessly. So it's kind of a trade off. It's like, well, if I ask for more information, I might not get as many, had a higher barrier, but it might be a little easier for me to put that. So, you kind of half way, you know, which direction you want to go.
52:47
We'll say probably, um, 50% of the people included their address, even though it wasn't a requirement. So, those, those line items were still there if I didn't in place. So it was still there for them, to complete, if they wanted to. It.
53:05
Just, it wasn't a requirement, so they could skip through that part if they wanted to.
53:14
Here's another, about the actual process. Was online appointment scheduling available for the make an Appointment button?
53:21
We didn't use direct user call, nope, it was online, Abney, Here's another analytics question, are you, are you not able to use Google Analytics to track through to appointment conversion?
53:39
Um.
53:42
You are able, I mean, I think that was, to your point, Kathy, was, you were able to actually track from, so, the different promotional channels that you were using, which were then driving the, which, which channels and traffic we're driving. So, it is something you can do if you choose to set it up that way, Everybody's different, and how they do that. But, yeah, as long as you're tying all that information together, you should be able to.
54:13
Known to be related to the whip tactics worked best for the various tricks campaign, which channels E mail print.
54:21
Other.
54:22
I would say, so, we're, we're lucky and you might want to wonder. We have, so, I'm actually, I'm not in the marketing department. I'm in the marketing Division. I'm actually the Director of Health Promotion and Senior Health and we do a lot of community and corporate programming. And so we had e-mailed data. We have e-mail databases that were people who had participated in our community programs or programs and wanted to be on our e-mail list.
54:54
And so, we did some direct e-mail campaigns to those less.
55:02
We also, I'm trying to think, I think, are I'm not even sure for this campaign, if our marketing team purchased an e-mail list, I don't think they did, until we really did find that those e-mail campaigns worked the best.
55:22
Well we did multiple. And I think that's really important right?
55:25
We we did. I think you really have to do multiple things. So we did a big article in our hospital magazine on our very accurate program and then included information on the very accurate HRA. At the same time we had our very abstract surgeon.
55:45
We were doing SEM campaign for our Bariatric program that we're drawing people to our website and then they could click from that the HRA was on the website.
55:58
We did social social media So we were hitting it in various ways but I think our direct our e-mail blast probably in terms of clicks to the HRI lead to the most clicks to the HRA.
56:15
OK here's an epic related question. Somebody's moving to Epic asks, Are your patients filling something out on the website?
56:25
You're able to compare it to epic or is the entire appointment request taking place off domain?
56:31
Now?
56:32
So when they, um, so we have, on our, our website has a online scheduling tool, right, so that the hospital's website has each our physician practices, their own physician. So remember we're talking. These are all owned practices.
56:53
So we have a scheduling tool on our website and so when the Make an Appointment Button Is going to the scheduling tool that is on our external website that right, anyone can anyone can go to anyone that goes to the BHC hous dot org website.
57:18
Can go to and make an appointment, so the link on the HR rave results page Just link them to That portion of the website OK, here's a problem that answered the question think this is a question to do, the third party tool to create the jury and in most wars you are the third party tool, correct?
57:41
Yeah, we are the third party tool. So so we have an in-house team, health and Research director who designs all the questions. You know make sure they're, you know, scientifically validated evidenced based et cetera and then we also have an internal team that builds the HRA, the tool, the ..., the UI, all that kind of stuff. So, we, we are that, we are the tool, or the tool? To all the data. right, so then they, they housed all?
58:14
the data, we did not, we did not house the data, OK. So, and we think we have time for one more question. Do you have a dedicated nurses staff member who answers people's questions, or is it something that's handled by a team? And how quickly do you respond?
58:33
So, for the, very actually, kid was one, it was one person.
58:39
The number of, To be honest, the number of e-mails she got, she wasn't over overwhelming.
58:47
So, it was just her, and she usually responded within 2, 1 to 2 business days. That was our expectation upfront, right?
58:59
Again, important to set up those expectations upfront of the response. Just like we didn't want to say, and make an appointment and find out that there's a four month wait to make it to get into an appointment. So, she did it. But I've talked to her and she said it wasn't.
59:18
It wasn't a tremendous amount of, wasn't a tremendous amount of e-mails, and it was, like, oh, my gosh, what have I got myself into?
59:28
Hmm, hmm.
59:29
It is also why we didn't have the ask.
59:34
A question for the other two HRAS, because the questions that could come from a just a general wellness or a cardiac one are too widespread. And we did not want to open up that can of worms. We purposefully did not include that call to action button.
59:56
So, it sounds like it's very much in the learning experience to sort of see what happens and then adjusting from there yet. So, that's, um, that's all the time we have for questions.
1:00:05
So we'd like to thank Cathy and Alyssa for your presentation, and thanks to Wellsourcefor sponsoring the webinar today. So keep an eye out for a PDF of the presentation slides immediately following the webinar.
1:00:16
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1:00:20
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1:00:26
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1:00:32
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1:00:40
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