Drive the Consumer Experience with Data, ft. Heather Geisler, CMO, Henry Ford Health System

Heather Geisler (00:00):
When you think about the opportunity in healthcare to learn, there are… We have so many advantages in healthcare. We have more data on our patients than most industries do on their customers, we have an opportunity to interact with them in meaningful ways, we have incredible analytics, obviously. We have a huge opportunity to be soliciting and eliciting feedback along the entire journey. I think even within that highly regulated space we have a lot of opportunities, frankly, that other industries don’t have.

Chris Hemphill (00:37):
Hello Healthcare. I have to say, I am excited about this conversation because Heather Geisler, we’ve just been talking about the intersection between the consumer journey, branding, the patient experience and she actually in her role at Henry Ford Health System sits on the intersection of all of those things. Heather I’m really happy to introduce is Henry Ford Health’s chief marketing and consumer experience officer and executive vice president. You’re going to hear a lot more about her background, which… She has been a VP of marketing at MSNBC and in a marketing leadership at Hyatt as well, so she’s fresh to healthcare, about two years in, and she’s brought all kinds of interesting perspectives.
There’s been a lot of questions that I in healthcare and others in healthcare have had about how we should be approaching the consumer journey, about who owns the experience that’s going to retain our patients versus the communications and things like that that are focused on outreach. How do we make sure that all the outreach that we’re doing is then met with an experience that keeps people loyal to our health system? There’s a lot that we’re going to go deeper into. Within two years, she’s launched a rebranding initiative and introduced all kinds of amazing thinking around the consumer journey. I hope you enjoy hearing the history behind that and take away from it some things that you can do. I know that there’s a lot of passion from speaking with people over the years. There’s been a lot of passion around driving these industry leading consumer experiences. We’re going to get deeper into how healthcare can hopefully leapfrog the rest of the other industries in terms of the experience we’re delivering. Can we do it?
 
Heather Geisler (02:34):
I think we can. I think we can. I think part of one of the things that’s a huge opportunity… And thank you so much, Chris, it’s really great being here with you today.
 
Chris Hemphill (02:40):
Thank you.
 
Heather Geisler (02:40):
I think one of the amazing opportunities for healthcare is to really oftentimes look outside of healthcare, like you said, and take inspiration because consumer expectations, consumer wants, what surprises and delights a consumer, those expectations in particular in the digital space are not being set by other healthcare companies. I think for a long time people have said, “Well, what are other healthcare organizations doing and how do we match up?” But the reality is when you think about how consumers are interacting, in particular in digital, through digital mediums, you don’t have a separate computer to book your doctor’s appointment than you do to buy your plane ticket or to shop on Amazon. When you think about the level of personalization and the insight that you want and the seamlessness of that journey, it’s not like you have a different expectation as a consumer or as a patient of what you’re going to get from your healthcare company than you do from everybody else. If everybody else can do it, why can’t healthcare do it too? I do think that there’s a whole new standard that’s being set by the rise of consumerism that we would be smart to be aware of, we would be smart to learn from and we’d be smart to steal from as we think about how we can enhance the experience for our patients and their families.
 
Chris Hemphill (03:55):
Well, the fact that you’re here is proof that healthcare is eager to steal these concepts and things like that that are working for other industries, but one thing that I want to cover early on is in order to steal that talent, steal that effort and ability, you really have to… Healthcare really has to show that they’re serious about driving those types of experiences, which leads me to the next question, is knowing the shortcomings and deficiencies and our challenges and knowing that in other organizations you’re embedded in cultures that are used to doing kind of the right things around consumerism, what convinced you to switch to make the switch?
 
Heather Geisler (04:41):
Well, it’s really interesting. I mean, I think one of the opportunities was how this role that I’m taking was structured, understanding and owning marketing, communications and experience, and I would say an expanded view of experience because experience has always been a critical part of healthcare but often we talked about care experience, so how are we thinking about the interactions that happened within our care settings? We have an opportunity to think much more broadly about consumer experience, which really starts from the point that a consumer is thinking about or seeking care all the way through the care experience to post care. How are we thinking about compliance? How are we thinking about building emotional connections based on wellness with our patients even when we’re not caring for them when they’re sick>.
I loved the idea that this role was really integrated and focused on those opportunities, but I think when you think about the opportunity in healthcare to learn there are… We have so many advantages in healthcare. We have more data on our patients than most industries do on their customers, we have an opportunity to interact with them in meaningful ways, we have incredible analytics, obviously. We have a huge opportunity to be soliciting and eliciting feedback along the entire journey. Obviously we have… There are confines as it relates to privacy and regulatory issues but I think even within that highly regulated space we have a lot of opportunities, frankly, that other industries don’t have. I think we need to figure out… The challenge, I think, is in some cases we have to reconfigure or realign how we engage versus organizations that may have been able to build a consumer centric experience from scratch.
 
Chris Hemphill (06:23):
You bring up a really good point by bringing up the depth and breadth of data that we have on the people that we serve, and it leads me to a question because at the beginning of the conversation we said the leapfrog is possible. Just curious about with this access to data, with what you’re able to do, what are some of the capabilities that… I guess what are some of the uses of data that you’re looking to enable within healthcare to drive that experience?
 
Heather Geisler (06:53):
Yeah. I think there’s an opportunity for healthcare to be more intuitive. I think one of the challenges is that a lot of times we’re reactive. A patient says that they need something so we build it, a physician needs something so we build it. How can we be more anticipatory about what patients need? You can do that in a way that is very respectful of patient privacy. You have to understand trends, you have to use insights and so I think that’s another thing, is at Henry Ford we didn’t really have a very robust consumer insights function and so how are you really constantly getting that feedback directly from consumers about the experiences that you’re creating and then using them to optimize? But it does require a level of agility that I think is difficult in healthcare, maybe more difficult than in other industries, and I think you pointed that out. A lot of times, when you think about tech forward industries or even consumer industries hospitality, the goal is to move quickly, to set it up and then optimize. I think in healthcare, we tend to want to make sure everything is perfect before we launch or move forward with new innovations. I think there’s an opportunity potentially to be more nimble. That is something that a healthcare organization should lean into and embrace, kind of that more agile approach to both developing experiences and then optimizing them.
 
Chris Hemphill (08:10):
Another major component that we talked about beforehand was the recent rebrand. I’m wondering if the rebrand might be a good case study to talk about taking an agile and nimble approach. Would you say that would be good?
 
Heather Geisler (08:25):
Yeah. I mean, from the time we started to when we launched the brand, it was about a year. We looked at kind of overhauling a 105 year old, 107 year old brand in a year. I had been in the organization I think six months before we started. I think it definitely can speak to agility, but you always… One of the things that we always wanted to make sure is that we weren’t doing it in a vacuum, right?
 
Chris Hemphill (08:50):
Mm-hmm.
 
Heather Geisler (08:51):
We have so many really important stakeholders across our organization with incredible insights and so throughout the process we looked at always wanting to make sure we were doing a couple of things. One was educating, being really clear inside and outside our organization about what the opportunity is for our brand. We actually started with a conversation about what is a brand because I think many people think about brand and they think about a logo or a tagline or an advertising campaign. We used, again, examples outside of healthcare, things like Nike or MasterCard Priceless or Apple, to talk about what the power of a brand is in driving loyalty and engagement. Those are things that when you tell that story, people in healthcare are like, “Oh, and we could do that? We should think about it that way.” We started with this idea of education, how are we building foundation? We started in strategy and brand strategy, so we weren’t changing a logo just to update a logo.
It’s because it connected back to a deeper brand promise that spoke to the expectation we had for our teams inside and outside our organization. There’s an education, there’s an informing about what you’re doing that was really important, and then engaging, really making sure that we were engaging along the process, that people felt a part of it, that they understood the why behind we were doing it, that everything felt purposeful, and I think most importantly that they saw themselves and their experience reflected in the brand. That is the intersectionality between brand and experience, and we’ve said from the very beginning when we started with a brand promise that that really is about what we strive to do on our best day, how we show up for our patients, how we show up for our team members and everything we do subsequently has to feel true to that promise.
 
Chris Hemphill (10:32):
There’s kind of an arc that I want to go down here because you’re talking about the experience and having people show up at their best and also talking about the brand, but before you jump into the arc I have to ask what is a brand?
 
Heather Geisler (10:46):
I think a brand… When I think about a brand, a brand is not a logo or a tagline. It’s how you connect in a meaningful, emotional way and to an organization, to a product, to a cause to a value. It’s about a building that deeper sustained connection that feels highly personal, that is motivating, that… I talk about outside of healthcare, we use language like, “It drives irrational loyalty,” which means that somebody’s willing to go out of their way. When I was at Hyatt, we would talk about you’d be willing to drive farther to stay at a Hyatt Hotel. Even though there was a Sheridan or a Marriott right down the street. That’s brand loyalty because it says something about you that there’s rewards and benefits associated with it.
We don’t really necessarily think about it in healthcare. Certainly when you think about things like tertiary and quaternary care you go out of your way for the best care, but how do you build those loyalties and relationship that turns your patients and team members into evangelist, that are almost indescribable in words? It’s about a feeling. I think that’s hard because we always talk about outcomes. Outcomes are very tangible. Creating feelings is a goal and that level of sustained engagement is not necessarily something you talk about, but it is the power of brand that complements and helps drive and reinforce the outcomes that you deliver in your clinical care settings.
 
Chris Hemphill (12:06):
That’s a great point because if we think about outcomes like that’s a goal but it’s still a portion of a larger journey, we’re not done once we receive care. That really guides me to the next question, which is when I said earlier that we struggle with things like understanding consumer journeys and things like that, could you talk about how the rebrand relates to consumer journey or, I guess, even some of the more recent thinking that you’ve been introduced around how do we approach a consumer journey?
 
Heather Geisler (12:39):
Yeah. Again, I think if a brand is about a promise and creating an expectation then your experience has to deliver on that at every point. If you say that… Our brand promise at Henry Ford is to be your relentless advocate in making the impossible possible. If we don’t do that, you may still have a great outcome but if your experience, you don’t feel that, that if we didn’t make you believe that that promise is true in how we delivered care to you, then that great… Then we’re not capitalizing on that experience in the way that we could. I do think the other thing about brand is often people think about it externally facing.
They think about it in terms of the patients and the families and the communities we serve, which is really important, but your brand has to be true inside an organization, and especially at a time when healthcare and the labor market is so competitive where we all want to attract the best talent, we want them to stay. We want them to say, “I want to be a part of Henry Ford,” when they’re looking at what health system they could align themselves with or where they want to seek a job. They want to say, “I want to be a part of Henry Ford.” The reason why they say that is usually related to culture and culture’s related to brand. I think that that’s a really important part of this, especially coming out of COVID, is how do we really make sure that those brand promises ring true within our organization and connect back to that culture that we hope to develop and grow amongst our team members?
 
Chris Hemphill (14:03):
Something that you said in there really resonated because when I look at a lot of vision statements and mission statements, I see a lot of the same thing, deliver the best care, but in a world where everybody’s saying that… But most consumers in a lot of cases wouldn’t say that they’ve had the ideal experience. It becomes a question of like, “Well, how do we actually deliver that best care and how do we make people feel seen and heard by their healthcare providers?” When you said “being a relentless advocate for our constituents, for our patients,” is that part of the brand promise?
 
Heather Geisler (14:42):
Yeah. I mean, so our brand promise has two parts. It’s your relentless advocate in making the impossible possible. A relentless advocacy speaks to the approach that we take to the experience about never giving up, about heroism at scale, about really making sure that everything we do… It’s about the kind of grit and perseverance that’s, I think, a really important part of our history at Henry Ford. But then there’s also this idea of making the impossible possible, which is about a little bit of that magic that’s in healthcare, about that unexpected surprise and delight. The reality is unfortunately we can’t save everybody, we don’t save everybody, we don’t have cures to everything, but if in those moments and in those experiences we’re driving reconsideration about what a relationship with a healthcare provider or a healthcare system or a healthcare organization could and should be, then we’ve won. I think that is something that we felt was really, really powerful, that it was motivating for our teams and it is about establishing a new standard as to how we think about an experience.
 
Chris Hemphill (15:52):
Could you… With the relentless advocacy, making the impossible possible, curious about… This is another thing that I’m just really excited about, the intersection between marketing and the experience. What are some of the experience changes that you’ve been able to champion or introduce with these new efforts?
 
Heather Geisler (16:12):
Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things. I think one, I hired a woman named Deb Zierten who’s my VP of consumer… Well, first of all, we changed her title. It used to be care experience, now it’s consumer insights and experience, really showing that we were bringing insights and analytics to the forefront of how we think about experience so bringing in the right talent, she has a background at Disney for whom obviously experience is critically important, and thinking about the right tools to help guide and empower people to own their experience. There’s a huge opportunity for us to think about that. I do think we’re thinking more thoroughly about the healthcare journey and everything we’ve started…
We kind of put a pause on some of the experience work and first mapped our entire journey, both our existing journey and what we see as our optimal journey. Then we looked at, “How are we collecting data and insights along that journey? What do we know along the process that can help us inform and optimize it?” We saw that there were gaps or there were places where we had data and different sources that weren’t talking to each other or we weren’t seeing the complete picture of what that experience could look like or could be. We kind of mapped that, and then the third thing was thinking about, “How do we get the data and insights at those key places that we need to be able to impact change?”
But to be able to think about things like service recovery in the moment, so if somebody’s having a bad experience we don’t wait until they get home three weeks later and we send them a survey to find out they had a bad experience. How can we fix it in the moment and empower our care teams and support our care teams in doing so? But then also how are we thinking about the connectivity between the scheduling experience and the arrival experience, the digital experience and the in clinic experience and building those relationships and cultivating teamwork and between our operational teams and our digital teams and our clinical teams and our care experience teams? We’ve built a lot of cross-functional working groups who are all aligned around the same mission of optimizing that care journey and using that care journey to design interventions who are working together to build collaborative solutions.
 
Chris Hemphill (18:16):
Excellent. Well, I mean, that’s exciting on a whole bunch of levels too, but I guess the first question that comes to mind… Well, there’s two questions that are going to be key here that I’m hoping to hear about, which would be these cross-functional teams and things like that. The first question on how were you all able to work together? We’re talking about massive change, changing the way that we’re doing things. What was the glue that got everybody to be able to unite and start delivering on some of these things?
 
Heather Geisler (18:52):
Well, I mean, I think there’s a couple of things. There’s obviously the opportunity to advance the brand, that feels a little soft to some people in healthcare, to strengthen the power of our brand, to build that stickiness. That’s a little long tail. The reality is really understanding consumer experience is good business. It is really important in making sure that if somebody wants to… Is looking for an appointment, that we get them in as quickly as possible, about making sure that we’re not losing people along the journey, and that’s what happens. There are lots of off ramps in that consumer journey where if something goes wrong we lose them, and in highly competitive healthcare environments there’s going to be somebody else there who’s going to pick them up. As an integrated healthcare system, we have lots of opportunities to connect with people so how are we thinking more seamlessly about it? I think when you can talk about experience through the lens of, “Yes, it is important in terms of building your brand. Yes, it’s important in driving growth, but it’s also good business and helps us continue to do the things that we want to do from a mission, purpose and value standpoint.” It very quickly gets people on board.
 
Chris Hemphill (20:00):
Excellent. We have these people on board and it’s been almost a two year process. I’m wondering about now looking into how we’re measuring success, how we’re thinking about what, I guess, our KPIs are, are there some metrics that have emerged that you think are important [inaudible 00:20:23]?
 
Heather Geisler (20:23):
Yeah. I mean, think we always look at… You at things like HGCAHPS and CG-CAHPS and the scores that we’ve typically used to define experience. There are certainly opportunities to optimize that, but we’re actually looking at kind of an overall experience score, and how are we… If we say that these are the things that we pledge to do, how are we standing up against them? We’ve done a lot of work in building our own what we call EPS model to really say, “Are we delivering on the performance expectations of our patients? Are we continuing to see driving growth? Are we making sure that we’re addressing access issues in ways that we can seamlessly through digital tools and thinking about things like direct scheduling?”
 
Chris Hemphill (21:05):
[inaudible 00:21:05] what does EPS stand for?
 
Heather Geisler (21:07):
EPS is what we call our experience performance score. Okay. NPS is a number that a lot of people use. We’ve developed what we call an EPS which we feel is a kind more end-to-end metric that really looks at a weighted score, weighing input and data from across the entire patient journey because I think part of the challenge when we just looked at, for example, care experience scores is people who weren’t directly connected to the care experience was like, “Well, how can I impact the patient experience?” When you think more thoroughly along the entire journey, hopefully everybody can see a role that they play in their function to helping to support that journey. That’s a lot of work that we’ve done on the measurement and metric front to evaluate how we’re doing and to motivate teams with really clear interventions and things that they can do to help support and enhance patient experience.
 
Chris Hemphill (21:55):
Are there any examples of leaders looking at that EPS score? What are some [inaudible 00:22:00]?
 
Heather Geisler (22:00):
Yeah, it’s been incredibly well received across the organization. I think in particular part of the challenge we had was a little bit of a data lag. When you just look at surveys and especially post-care surveys, you’re three, four, five, six weeks out from when the care actually happened so a lot of it was speculation. People were looking back and were saying, “Well, what happened during that period? Was that the time when we had visitor restrictions? Was that the time when the OR was closed?” Trying to figure out why we were seeing a dip or a raise in score. This is so much more actionable. It really does allow us in the moment to be getting data that it helps us really work with our teams on interventions along the way, and so leaders… I mean, knowledge is power. Data is power. When you have access to those kind of insights in closer to real time, it does allow us to be much more nimble and flexible in not only ascertaining where there are challenges, but also being able to monitor where interventions are making a difference.
 
Chris Hemphill (22:58):
Excellent. Well, I’ve got to say I’m really impressed to hear how y’all are using metrics and figuring out a way to tell a story around them because, again, we began with the conversation talking about the fact that there’s so much data within healthcare but at the same time it can be extremely difficult to access and make sense of if your epic implementation has 58,000 tables. Where do we put our focus? This EPS score really sounds like a way to bring all that in unified.
 
Heather Geisler (23:27):
Well, and the other thing that we realize is sometimes… I mean, it’s the same thing again, taking lessons from outside of healthcare. When you go into the bathroom at the airport and you’re leaving the bathroom, there’s a little thing there that says, “Is this bathroom clean?” It has a smiley face or a yellow face or a red face. You’re just asking. I don’t know how many people actually do that, but you get credit sometimes for asking. I think part of what we’ve realized, too, is yes, there’s critical data we need to be able to make change at the operational level, but sometimes there’s also a patient benefit to more frequently saying, “Are you doing okay? Did we do a good job?”
It shows that you understand that that’s important to them and it shows a sustained commitment to making change and to taking those insights. Now, you then need to take that and actually do something with it, but things like simple polls and getting feedback along the journey can really help us do that. We’re looking at how are we thinking about polling and feedback in our digital and our web experience? How are we thinking about using it in room in inpatient settings? Just simple surveys on a television screen to ask people how their experience is doing, and certainly post-stay is really important. So tons of opportunity and, as you said, a lot of these tools already exist. This functionality is not necessarily new but it is thinking about how you’re connecting the dots both for patients and for your care teams.
 
Chris Hemphill (24:55):
Yeah, and especially when you couch it like that. Taking every possible opportunity to listen to a patient that… I mean, of course the technology exists, but there has to be a cultural element as well.
 
Heather Geisler (25:10):
There is. I think part of this is it’s very hard to overhaul and boil… You don’t want to boil the ocean. I think even as we think about this journey, we’re piloting different interventions at different points of the journey that we’re going to get more data that’s going to allow us to optimize and scale, but when you can show how you can impact change at one part of the journey it gets you permission to do more and do more and do more. It builds to your point in organizational alignment around why this is important, why it’s empowering and how people can be and should be using this data moving forward in their own work. People need to see this as a benefit to what they do and it allows us to tell that story.
 
Chris Hemphill (25:52):
Well, hey, I got to say, I’m very glad that you made the leap into healthcare because it gives me the opportunity to ask now that you’re in the midst of a two year effort, overhauling the experience and consumer journey, again, there’s so many other people that would be excited to be able to drive that kind of change but they might not have the organizational support to do it so do you have any thoughts for folks out there that want to establish metrics like that but might not be getting the best support from their own teams?
 
Heather Geisler (26:28):
Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things. One of the things… When I was at MSNBC, I had an opportunity to do a program through Columbia University that really was about how helping news leaders drive business outcomes. One of the things that I learned in that forum was about change management, how do you create cultural change in an organization? There were kind of three things that were really important and they’re called DVP. One is dissatisfaction. People don’t want to change things unless they know that it’s broken. If everything’s fine, what is the impetuous for making a change? You have to be able to really clearly help people understand what is possible, either what is broken… Often the things that are broken people see but they don’t have the solutions, but how do you really make sure that people are understanding the potential of what this investment could look like? The second is about process. There has to be a clear plan of, “How are we going to get this information? How are we going to be applying it? Who do we need as stakeholders to help do it?” I think process a lot of times is where this gets a little clunky in healthcare, right?
 
Chris Hemphill (27:33):
Mm-hmm.
 
Heather Geisler (27:33):
We’re big organizations, we have lots of different parts of the organizations that may or may not be working together, sometimes you find that somebody else in the organization is solving the same problem that you’re doing. How do you really outline a clear process from where you are today to where you want to be? Then the third… The V piece of it is vision, so what is the opportunity? If we do this successfully, what will we be able to say? How will this be differentiating for us? What will it mean in terms of the experience for our patients and our team members? I would say that somebody who’s looking to make change in organizations could think about it that way. What is the conversation you have to do to educate people about what’s broken and how this is maybe a remedy for it? How do you start to think about process and who are the stakeholders you need to have at the table to outline that and pull that together? What is that vision? How does it align with the strategic goals or the business goals for your organization? When you can do that, at least you have the foundation for advancing the conversation.
 
Chris Hemphill (28:30):
Cool. Yeah. I like having a heuristic like that. What was it, dissatisfaction, process and vision?
 
Heather Geisler (28:37):
Yeah.
 
Chris Hemphill (28:39):
Yeah, having a heuristic like that at least gets people to… If you’re just overwhelmed by the fact that you’re not being heard and not being listened to, it gives a way to say, “Well, hey, how can I confirm that people even understand the perspective [inaudible 00:28:55]?”
 
Heather Geisler (28:54):
Well, and it may help you identify what the barriers really are.
 
Chris Hemphill (28:57):
Yeah.
 
Heather Geisler (28:57):
Is the barrier the fact that people think that everything’s fine and you need to be able to use data or insights to help illustrate the opportunity or the challenges you’re facing? Is it that it feels like such a big problem? Because I’ll be honest, I think especially because in a lot of times in healthcare things have been done the same way for a while and so change can feel scary. How are we thinking about that process and how are we bringing in those outside perspectives that can help us think about it? Some of it is like, “Why does it really matter?” I mean, I think everybody says that they want to be patient-centric or consumer-centric but what does that mean for us? What does that mean for you at Henry Ford Health or what does that mean for you within your organization? I think being really clear about that opportunity and making sure it is aligned with the strategic and business objectives… Because it may not be at this point, and so figuring out when is the right time to have this conversation, who are the key stakeholders you have to have at the table, is really, really important.
 
Chris Hemphill (29:54):
Well, thank you. Well, thank you for outlining that so clearly and being really transparent about what’s been working for Henry Ford Health. For the folks out there watching, listening that want to hear more from you and, I guess, follow you on social, what’s the best place for people [inaudible 00:30:13]?
 
Heather Geisler (30:13):
I’m on LinkedIn. It’s Heather Geisler. I think I’m HGeisler, G-E-I-S-L-E-R, on LinkedIn. That’s probably the best place. I’m happy to connect. I love building my network and I love the opportunity to network with other people in healthcare. I am new still so, I mean, two years in I feel like I am constantly learning from people who have a greater depth of experience and insights in healthcare than I do, but I’m certainly happy and eager and excited to share the perspectives I have from outside healthcare with my colleagues and other team members.
 
Chris Hemphill (30:45):
All right. Well, big thank you. Yeah, everybody go out and give a follow, but we want to listen to these outside of healthcare perspectives. Get them while they’re hot off the press. Again, thank you for hanging out with us for a while.
 
Heather Geisler (31:00):
Yeah. Great.
 
Chris Hemphill (31:02):
Yeah. Everybody listening, thank you for hanging out with us too. I guess until we see you next time, hello.
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