Why “Always-On” Outreach is Essential for Patients, ft. Jeff Stewart, CHRISTUS Health

Jeff Stewart (00:00):
Each one of our 11 ministries actually ran their own paid search campaigns. We didn’t do that at a system level and there were several of them who would do heart paid search, cardiology paid search terms just in February, or breast cancer just in October. And that logic works for a billboard, I guess. But come on, paid search? We need to be driving paid search, email all the time.

Alan Tam (00:33):
Hello Healthcare. As we take a look at the healthcare landscape across the country, one of the most interesting and dynamic regions is actually in our second-largest state, the state of Texas. In the state of Texas, as if digital health, retail health isn’t enough, the region is also served by over 80 community hospitals and health systems, including giants like UTHealth, Houston Methodist, and so forth. So how does a smaller health system not only compete, but continue to grow and serve their patients? Joining me today is Jeff Stewart, System Director of Strategic Marketing from CHRISTUS Health. Welcome, Jeff, to Hello Healthcare.

Jeff Stewart (01:14):
Great, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Alan Tam (01:15):
Of course. Jeff, one of the things I typically ask folks I talk to is really what their title encompasses. It’s so different across various different health systems and what I’ve learned is that it doesn’t really encompass everything that they do. So why don’t we start with that, and what are some of your task initiatives that you’re driving at the moment?

Jeff Stewart (01:39):
Yeah, absolutely. So at CHRISTUS, with my title, System Director for Strategic Marketing, but as you mentioned, that goes a little bit broader and deeper than that. So I’m responsible for all of our marketing across the United States, so Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Arkansas to some extent, as well as our overall brand, which would actually extend internationally where we have operations in Mexico, Chile, and Columbia. So looking at the visual expression of our brand, how do we express ourselves? What do we look like in our communities? What attributes does that carry to our communities? What kinds of quality and reputation does it represent across all of our ministries? As well as the day-to-day marketing activities for our system.
(02:23):
CHRISTUS is made up of 11 health systems here in the United States. And so, I have a mix of teams for both of the system levels. We say for the corporate system, for digital, CRM, creative services, all the traditional marketing activities. And then at the local ministries, I have teams of marketing and communication specialists and directors who are responsible for a very traditional healthcare hospital marketing role. So all of those teams report up to me. But as you mentioned, everything’s different. So we also have communications, social media, public relations, that’s managed system at a different department, but is then together when we’re in our ministries.

Alan Tam (03:07):
Got it. So what are some of the key strategies and programs that your team is driving to keep the mission alive and to continue to drive revenue?

Jeff Stewart (03:17):
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s all about access into our clinics and hospitals. That’s what we focus on. And so, whether it’s onboarding new physicians, we’re constantly growing our employed physician base across all of our ministries. We have a little over 1,400 employed physicians now throughout Texas and Louisiana. There’s another couple 100 more in New Mexico also. So we have a large employment base for physicians. So growing those clinics, getting more and more patients into them, as well as, of course, supporting the growing services that we offer to our communities in the United States, whether it’s a new cancer institute, or a new heart institute, or new services, or other diabetes program, other things we’re adding to really make our communities aware of them, and then make it hopefully easy to access those, to set a new appointment, and to get in and become… We want to get somebody in to see CHRISTUS at the clinic level because we know that we can help drive loyalty for both them and their families into hospitals and other services.

Alan Tam (04:21):
So let’s dive a little bit deeper into the access piece. I think that’s very interesting. It’s been something that a lot of health systems have been focused on. What are some specific things that you guys have done in the last, say, 12, 24 months, to improve that access piece? Like online scheduling, I assume.

Jeff Stewart (04:37):
Yeah, I think two main things. So one is we redesigned our website, launched in June, and we added what think is a more friendly way to schedule online appointments. Two, I think, critical components in that. One was the next available appointment sorting feature. So if you go to our website, you search for a physician, you have the ability to say, “Well, sort by the next available appointment,” because that’s what a lot of people care about. And so being able to find somebody soon, my kid is sick and I want to go see a doctor, whether virtually or in person, but what provider has availability soon, today, tomorrow, within the next two hours?
(05:16):
And so we really like that, as well as just if you’re going to schedule something further out in the future, that we’ve rebuilt that part of the website to make it easier to get through. Some of the research we did really talks about how consumers, whether they perceive it or not, they subliminally recognize when they’re moving between systems. And so even if you’re moving from, say, your first party website to a hosted provider finder, to potentially another third party scheduler, you can supply the same CSS sheets, and you can give them all the brand colors, but there’s always just the most subtle differences in usability between them. So sometimes, in the case of Epic, a very stark usability difference as well.
(05:56):
But at each one of those gaps exists a place to erode trust of the consumer. So we really wanted to move as much of that into the first party experience as possible. So we’ve done that. There’s a lot of challenges in that, getting providers to open their schedule, getting providers to take new patient scheduling. And we’re really working through those as a system. But primary care, we have really got that open so that you can schedule.
(06:25):
And then, I think one of the things I’m most proud of is that in May we added on-demand care. And so, we have the ability to schedule, or to not… sorry, to find a provider immediately and see somebody in Texas or Louisiana, to see an urgent care clinician by your cell phone. That’s something that Epic offers and we did a lot actually, to customize that and streamline what Epic offers to make it very easy. So we pulled a lot of what is added by the EMR out to try to make it very streamlined.
(06:57):
But the other thing was we showed in market research we had a real ability… We thought our unique position here is that there’s a lot of disruptors low in the market, offering a very low price. Maybe it’s a subscription model or whatever, but you’re texting and all of that. They’re essentially technology providers that are in the healthcare space. And then there’s a lot of people already way up market, other large systems, be it Houston Methodist, et cetera, that have all the trappings of a large healthcare institution, and the prices of it. And so we really thought that our opportunity was to fall somewhere in the middle.
(07:37):
And so you can see a trusted CHRISTUS clinician. And as I said, we have 1,400 employed providers, we have 100 plus clinics, we have hospitals that have been in their communities… In San Antonio, we’ve been there since 1856. The name CHRISTUS is well-known, well-respected. So to be able to say, “I can see a CHRISTUS clinician today, not a doc in a box. I can see a CHRISTUS clinician that carries the weight of the CHRISTUS system.” And what we’re able to do through our managers care contracts is, number one, it’s free for associates, and then two, it’s only a $30 cash pay fee.

Jeff Stewart (08:13):
That is cheaper than a lot of deductibles, it’s cheaper. And it’s a great way to offer access for our mission, to extend the healing ministry of Jesus Christ, to bring that closer to our communities. And we’ve been really excited about that because we continue to see that I think the rate right now is right around 35% to 40% of people using it have never seen a CHRISTUS provider, at least in the last 36 months, which we call a new patient, they’ve never seen a CHRISTUS provider. And then another close to when you in total little over 50% have either… Sorry, so either the 35% to 40%, no CHRISTUS, and then another… To add 10% to 15% of that are maybe CHRISTUS patients but have no CHRISTUS PCP.
(09:02):
So again, maybe they’ve been in the hospital, maybe they’ve given birth, maybe they’ve had a gallbladder removed, whatever. They might have some loyalty to the CHRISTUS system but are not using our clinics, which is our primary care access. And so we’ve really seen that be an exciting place for us to grow. So we’re excited by those two things.

Alan Tam (09:19):
That’s awesome. Seems like you guys are set to compete against retail health. $30, I think that’s huge.

Alan Tam (09:27):
I think that’s the cost of going to Walmart to see a physician. So you guys are definitely on the right path there.

Alan Tam (09:35):
So it’s amazing that you guys have developed this. One of the questions I’d like to ask is how are you driving people to this amazing experience? Are you doing outreach in inviting people in? What’s the strategy and programs that you guys have in place to steer people towards this amazing experience?

Jeff Stewart (09:52):
For on-demand care, paid search is great. You got to capture them to that point of intent. So they are expressing urgent care near me and we saw that before launching the product. We continue to see that. That is the largest area of growth in our organic and paid search volume. There is tremendous demand for a search like that. So we’ve got to compete in that space, we’ve got to capture them there. And that’s where again, we think there’s an opportunity to use the CHRISTUS name and the CHRISTUS brand to help differentiate at that point. We do a lot of the other things too. Even the goal is not necessarily to drive clinic volume because we have… In the clinics or to drive the volume from the clinics because as you can imagine, obviously those are people who are already established for the provider so [inaudible 00:10:40].
(10:40):
So we do some promotion through there that we try to keep it limited because we do want to bring people in, but we’re not trying to hide the service. And actually, we’ve expanded those hours. And so the on-demand care is available from 7A to 11P. Well, most of our clinics aren’t open that long. So we’re using it to direct some volume there, as well as a lot of our ministry marketing teams have found ways to promote it in areas where we think that there’s opportunity. And so whether it’s promoting with a new employer group that’s come onto a plan recently. So say in the city of Shreveport, those city employees when they change their plan year in January, that’s something that we will be adding in is that ability to access that on-demand care into their plan.

Jeff Stewart (11:27):
At no cost to that particular plan. And so there’s ways like that we find to promote it. And of course email. We really like email, we have it set. So we refresh the message every… It’s like 30 to 40 days, maybe it’s just a change or it’s expanded hours or whatever and we just drip it out into our patient database at 10,000 15,000, 20,000 emails a day. So just keep the volume there.

Alan Tam (11:52):
Right. No, that’s spectacular and very comprehensive. Definitely much further ahead than many health systems that I’ve had the opportunity to speak with. What’s been most effective so far in terms of driving people to the usage of your online scheduling?

Jeff Stewart (12:11):
I definitely think paid search is always a good one, as well as email marketing. And it may be a little bit of bias in the channel because we can see it better than we can anything else. There’s a lot of people who just show up and use it and I can trust my Google Analytics, but a lot of it comes in as direct. So I don’t know why, right? But I can see email and I can see email traffic and I can see where it goes and I can see paid search traffic and I can see where it goes. And so in that sense, I can confirm that those two are working well for us.

Alan Tam (12:46):
Right. Okay. That’s definitely a huge undertaking what you’ve accomplished. What’s been some of the biggest challenges for you to get to where you are now?

Jeff Stewart (12:56):
It’s our own internal. A lot of our challenges are really internal. So as I mentioned earlier, we’re a collection of 11 health systems that are really taking the steps to learn how to work together as a system. And in many cases we’re strides ahead, and then in a few places we still have some growing pains to go through. And so what that means in a very real sense, we just finished up October, October’s obviously Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And so there’s a lot of activity to drive breast cancer screenings. Now, granted, you need to do them the other 11 months of the year. I’ve never totally understood why we only spend one month on this, but we’ll leave that aside for a moment.
(13:36):
There are basically 11 points of access to get a mammogram or more in the CHRISTUS health system. And some are call the navigator, some are fill out this form, some might even be scheduled through an EMR. And that worked five years ago even and definitely 10 years ago because at the end of the day your health system was its own self-contained unit. We look at the digital world we’re in now and the digital expectations of our consumers and we can’t support that model. There has to be one way to get a mammogram or one way to schedule a calcium screening or whatever that service is. There’s got to be one way but our internal complexity makes that impossible. And the default internally, because it’s easier, is to shift that burden of complexity into the consumer. And so the consumer has to then come to a webpage and say, “This is my zip code.” That’s at least the user-friendly way.
(14:41):
There are times where it’s like, “We’ll just have them pick their ministry.” Well, they don’t always know what their ministry is, even though [inaudible 00:14:47] they understand certainly. And even if you say pick their health system, we have areas where there’s overlap. In fact, throughout Texas and Louisiana, basically all of our service areas touch each other. And so if you live in a place like Lindale, Texas, you’re essentially equally served by CHRISTUS Trinity, mother Francis and CHRISTUS Good Shepherd. And you may want to get your mammogram on Tuesday in Longview, but if we don’t have appointments on Tuesday, you’re actually going to be in Tyler on Wednesday, so why not go to Tyler on Wednesday?
(15:15):
And so to force that burden of our internal complexity onto our consumer through a webpage, a complicated phone call tree, a form that has branching logic, all those things, I think is an entirely unfair thing to do to our consumer. It limits access. It doesn’t make us easy, it doesn’t make us convenient. It’s not the kind of care that I know we provide at the local level. And these are really just the growing pains of adjusting to a digital world where there can be one CHRISTUS, right? You cannot be 11 CHRISTUSES. There has to be one CHRISTUS. And so those are really some of our big challenges is getting that burden of complexity shifted back to ourselves and say, “Listen, do you want to make this complex?” Because it has to be complex because of a contract or a physician call or there’s all kinds of reasons why it’s like this, or certainly we have multiple EMRs. I don’t have a problem with that, but let’s not make that the problem of our consumer.

Jeff Stewart (16:10):
And that really is our largest challenge.

Alan Tam (16:12):
So what are some of the steps you’re taking to address that? Because like you said, it is a humongous challenge.

Jeff Stewart (16:19):
Yeah, it’s a huge problem and it’s a big challenge. There’s a couple of ways, and I think the biggest thing ultimately is keeping the voice of the consumer nearby and using that to help move this forward, exposing the problem and talking about it. We are on a journey that by the end of 2024, we will all be on a single EMR, we’ll all have transitioned to Epic, which will make things like scheduling in a mammogram significantly easier. It’s a very long time between where we sit today in 2022 and 2024. And so what can we do in the meantime? Are there IT solutions? Are there access center solutions? Are there call solutions? And really just bringing this up and advocating for it and using our consumer’s voice.
(17:08):
And so whether it’s showing data, if it’s from the website or we actually like the tool Hotjar, and there’s other tools that are very similar to it, where you can show somebody using your website and you can watch them scroll and click, you can watch them not understand what they’re supposed to do. Or we have another tool that does moderated or unmoderated user testing where you can watch somebody video use it and then talk as they describe their experience like, “Oh, I don’t know what I would put in this form box.” And demonstrate this to people because it does help provide the weight of the advocacy that you need to move it forward.
(17:44):
And then also, we have call analytics. And so when I get tail of a frustrating call that somebody had, because ultimately those things do eventually trickle up that there was a bad call or whatever, we can pull that recording. And when it’s the marketing call analytics solution, we have the end-to-end call. So your traditional contact center has their segment of the call and those frequently go well, they’re scored very well, this agent did a great job and then 90 or whatever, quality score. But then they transfer and then that person has a great call with them but didn’t solve their problems. So they transfer, and that happens and then that happens.
(18:23):
And so each little journey of the call went well from the agent’s perspective, but when you take it from the marketing perspective, you take it from the end-to-end consumer perspective and then you show that this person was transferred and transferred and transferred. Everybody in our system understands the challenge. Everybody in our system wants to solve the challenge. It’s just complicated.

Alan Tam (18:46):
Right. No, I think, again, that’s very comprehensive and I think you guys are doing it right in terms of taking a look at the problem and addressing it. I think very few systems right now in the US are at that level of sophistication that you guys are doing. So hats off to you on doing that. One thing that you brought up that is always interesting to me is October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Why are campaigns only running for breast cancer awareness in October versus it being an evergreen program?

Jeff Stewart (19:22):
Yeah, a 100… So putting on a slide the other day, I added a month is not a strategy. And then I Googled it because I’m like, somebody deserves attribution for this and it apparently doesn’t exist in the lexicon. And I say it all the time, I cannot understand why we’ve allowed months to become a strategy. To be clear, if you have a robust cardiology service campaign that runs evergreen or cancer mammograms, breast cancer, women’s services, whatever, if you have those and then you highlight, turn up, tweak, level up, whatever term you use to enhance what you do for the month of October, that’s great. But you’re right, women need mammograms every month or there are women who need mammograms every month of the year because it’s an annual schedule. And so if you got your first in May because your birthday’s in May, then you’re likely going to get it around May or June every year and October is going to be meaningless to you.
(20:18):
I do not understand this, and it’s been one of the things… In my interview process, it was brought up that this was one of our challenges and I was like, “Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t make any sense to me.” And it’s been something that we still continue to fight. But even when I came on, each one of our 11 ministries actually ran their own paid search campaigns. We didn’t do that at a system level. And there were several of them who would do heart paid search, cardiology paid search terms, just in February, or breast cancer just in October. And I’m like, “What are you doing in the other 11 months?” It’s like, “Well, that was all we had the budget for. The CEO just wanted to see it.” I’m like, that logic works for a billboard I guess, but come on, paid search? We need to be driving paid search, email all the time, right? And those drive to HRAs, and those HRAS goes to outbound calls and those outbound calls lead back to clinic visits, and that needs to be going all the time.

Alan Tam (21:17):
So what are you doing now in terms of helping to address that or is that still an issue that you guys are trying to figure out?

Jeff Stewart (21:22):
Standing it up. So starting digital first because as I said, that was one of the things we did a little over a year ago. We said, “Okay.” And we really try not to be a by force kind of system approach. We really want everybody to be on the team and moving forward together but this is one where we said, “This is just too important. Our spend is not right. Our strategy’s not right. We have to pull this all together.” And so all of our major service lines, cardiology, oncology, orthopedics, emergency care, primary care, you name it, all the major ones all move up to system. And so that we are doing paid search and paid social and some paid display where it makes sense across all of our major service lines.
(22:07):
And then layering in CRM campaigns that go with it because most of the… Depends on the campaign, but a lot of the service line campaigns drive do an HRA, right? Very common healthcare marketing strategy. We drive them into an HRA, they complete the HRA. And then depending on high risk, low risks, PCP, no PCP, gender, age, all of those things, emails go here, maybe a direct mail goes out, then we try to… And for a high risk, no PCP, an outbound call is going to be placed the next day from a call center to try to get them in. “Can we get you scheduled into the clinic?” Et cetera.
(22:42):
So that’s a lot of the stuff we’re doing to just try to always keep those alive but it’s difficult, right? Because you started by talking about some of the smaller community hospitals and some of the challenges we face is that a Houston Methodist has all service lines or whatever, they have all service lines, fully robust. There’s not a service or procedure really that they can’t do but we have some that don’t offer mammograms. Some of our hospitals that may not offer a mammogram, they don’t have the imaging or certainly a lot of heart procedures, orthopedic procedures. And then we have others who have it tremendously developed.
(23:19):
And so we have a 100 bed heart hospital in East Texas. It’s an amazing hospital that does fantastic work and it’s one of the only like it in all of East Texas for sure, and in that geographic model, probably one of the only ones in the country with that level of services and cardiologists that are supporting it. It’s an amazing piece. And so then how do you balance that message, what you need to service those in East Texas, as well as maybe in a place a little bit further away in say Corpus Christi where we don’t have that kind of robust heart program as an example or building it still?
(23:57):
And so how do you put together a heart campaign that’s going to work across all of those ministries, support being very local, also support bringing a system cardiology message? That’s really our challenge inside of all of our service line marketing is figuring out how to work that balance sophistication. And so it’s taking us a little bit of time still to stand those up and move through them, easiest to hardest in a lot of ways. And ultimately, about where we’re going next, it’ll be finding ways to better change our working process and structure today to support that and getting everybody bought in to there’s going to be a system service line campaign and not one that’s just vanilla and it’s just going to run your market and you’re not going to like it. The one that’s going to be come from system, carry the message that we want to carry about who we are, who we are as a brand, the kind of care that we want to offer to our communities and be locally relevant also so that we can support things like a heart hospital in East Texas.

Alan Tam (25:00):
Right. Yeah, that’s a challenge. So good luck with that, but I think you guys are definitely on the right path. As you go down this path, I think one of the things that’s really important probably for yourself and for your leadership team are core metrics and KPIs to keep things going, continue to invest, continue to improve. You talked a little bit about Hotjar and using that on your website. What are some of the other core metrics and KPIs that you’re using for your team as well as reporting to your leadership level in terms of, “Look, this is effective, this is working and we need to continue to grow this?”

Jeff Stewart (25:36):
Well, for our leadership, it is simply encounters or visits or clinic visits, whatever it is. And we get that from the CRM and that’s what they care about most. They need to drive patient volume, they need to drive revenue growth and we have a CRM that allows us to get access to that data and add in the marketing touchpoints that those consumers may have had along the way to help build the story in case. In the past, again, often we were presenting things like web sessions to executives. I was like, “No, we have to stop that.”

Jeff Stewart (26:12):
Yeah. Almost any metric that you present where you have to explain it to the executive is probably not one that we need to keep up with, and that’s been an interesting challenge because prior to my joining, there was a lot of communication to different executive teams, especially at the local level where we were showing them all of this. And we had them very well-trained to think to look for those things, but they didn’t totally really process what it meant for their business. They still never made that connection. So we opened up, we spent all of this time being transparent, showing all these numbers, but it didn’t lead to, “Oh, I should be giving you more money to be more successful.” It didn’t follow logically because it was all a bunch of numbers that didn’t connect to them in their bottom line. And so we have to reset that to focus on those clinic visits.
(27:01):
Now, there are different initiatives that they do understand and we do try to translate or put the filter on about what really matters and what you’re looking at. So for example, when we transitioned to a new website in June, that represented actually a significant re-architecture of how we had presented ourselves on the web and into a new one. And it was into a single one CHRISTUS vision of who we are. It’s exactly what the executive team wanted and it’s exactly the right move for the organization, but there were some understandable growing pains about ministries who still wanted to understand, “Where’s my local presence? How do I still keep who I am as a particular health system inside of this one CHRISTUS vision?”
(27:48):
So there were all the growing pains that I think anybody’s been through major website relaunches has been through. But our executive team, when we were talking about why we wanted to do this, we really focused in on unbranded organic search. Now, those are terms that mean nothing to them, but when you translate it to say this means that consumers who don’t know us aren’t finding us. They do understand Google because it’s how they use everything. That’s how everybody gets to anything. So we say, “When you are looking for heart doctor near me, primary care doctor near me, orthopedics near me, we are not there.” But when I say we’re not there, I don’t mean we’re on the second page. And I don’t mean we’re on the 10th page. I mean we are not showing.
(28:34):
And so that was an alarm bell for them. They understood that. And so as we followed up post-launch to talk about the improvements we’ve made in unbranded organic search and to deliver those numbers on… originally it was weekly which is high expectations for organic search, I recognize, but now closer to probably more of a quarterly update to bring them in. Or another one again, initiative wise, reputation and online reputation again is one that’s very important that we watch as well. And so how many Google reviews or some of the details that go into what’s in the map pack and what’s directed and undirected in brand? All of that. They don’t totally understand nor should they care or understand about that.
(29:22):
But they did understand that when I search for the doctor that I just hired or the practice that we just acquired, I don’t see them. Or worse, I see them and there’s a terrible review. And so we say, “Okay, let’s solve that problem.” So adding in something to the end of our patient satisfaction services, “Would you like to go ahead and leave a review on Google?” So we started that July 1st across all of our employed physician base. And that resulted in, I think it’s like a 300% growth.

Jeff Stewart (29:53):
Just in the last six months it’s been… As well as a resulting star increase correlation as well, which was what most people were worried about is we’re going to get a ton of reviews, but they’re going to be negative. Instead, we’ve gotten a ton of reviews and we’re creeping up on the average review both in lifetime and monthly. And that’s been awesome, right? So because that resulted from a specific business priority and we were able to say what we can contribute to that and then communicate about the success of that initiative. Now in six months, are they going to want to see that report? I don’t know. We have a dashboard and maybe they can look at it, maybe they can’t, but we’ll probably be onto another business initiative like on-demand care. How many visits did we have in Texas, Louisiana this month? How many of them had a PCP? How many of them have ever been to CHRISTUS before? Just reporting on that. And eventually that is a dashboard and it stays and people look at that, but our executive attention will turn to something else.

Alan Tam (30:46):
Right. Oh, that’s very, very classic and sounds like you guys have done a fantastic job there.

Alan Tam (30:53):
One of the key themes that I keep hearing about the last 12, 18 months is really a focus on lifetime value of patients and retention. I’d like to scratch up that a little bit with you in terms of what are some of the retention programs that you guys have in place or planning to do to continue to serve your existing patients and grow revenue and drive patient volume there?

Jeff Stewart (31:18):
That’s a great question. I think we have a lot of room to grow in that area for sure, and part of that comes in the disconnect between the MR. So a 100% of our ambulatory visits are carried out on Epic, and then all of our hospital visits are carried across multiple EMRs. And so there’s a disconnect there. Now, the good news is we do bring all of those into our CRM, and so we do have the ability to speak across those EMRs and speak to all of our patients. And so at the moment, our primary one is to continue to develop and it’s really to help leverage some of the work we’re doing elsewhere. We talked about unbranded organic search a moment ago. Well, how do you grow that? Well, first there’s some technical SEO, but beyond that, it’s content, right? Content. Content.
(31:58):
And so as we continue to write content, how do we get that into the email program? Just even monthly newsletters. When we have a new cardiologist joins us in Beaumont as an example, we want to announce that to the community and we use our patient database first. So we have a bunch of people that have PCP visits with no cardiology visits. Let’s show them we’ve got a new cardiologist and let’s give them a piece of content about why they should go see a cardiologist. Or I think we have one on the website that’s something about five things to ask your cardiologist in your first visit or to expect on your first cardiologist visit, et cetera. So send them that. Send them the new doctor and use that patient database to your advantage.
(32:44):
And we’re looking at some… Again, to focus on Epic. They’ve brought campaigns and obviously they’ve got some other CRM intentions in their future. And so I think we’re looking at other ways too to help keep people attached, and annual mammogram reminders, annual cardiology reminders, or five or 10 year colonoscopy reminders, what all those are, to try to build those into the system is how we want to keep growing.

Alan Tam (33:11):
Right. I think those are all amazing ideas and approaches. I think bringing this back to my intro earlier, you guys are definitely set up to compete within your region, and it sounds like you guys are set up for great success. I really enjoyed our conversation, Jeff, and if people want to continue the conversation or if they want to be able to reach out to you and pick your brain on, “Wow, you guys have done some amazing things, we want to do it too,” what’s the best way for them to get ahold of you?

Jeff Stewart (33:38):
Well, first I would love that. I greatly enjoy the conversation. I greatly enjoy talking about our shared experiences. I don’t labor under the idea that we’re doing anything necessarily all that much better than anybody else, or that our challenges are all that different than anybody else. And I really enjoy the opportunity to connect with colleagues at conferences like the one we’re at today, the HCIC, or SHSMD or however it is. And to just share and I’ve had great connections with people in the past who’ve called and said, “I just want to run a proposal I’ve got by you because I just want to know what you think.” And I love that. I love the ability to call one of my old colleagues and say, “We’re thinking about working with this software vendor or this agency,” or just, “What’s your feedback on my new website?” Or, “Do you like this ad? We can’t break our minds out of this ad.” I just greatly enjoy that. So easiest way, LinkedIn.

Jeff Stewart (34:29):
So I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. I think my picture looks a little bit like this. Maybe my hair’s a little bit different, but yeah, LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to find me.

Alan Tam (34:39):
Wonderful. Wonderful. So for those of you listening, Jeff has done an amazing job at CHRISTUS Health and he’s shared some amazing insights. So do give him a ping. I’m sure that he’s going to be able to help you out tremendously and get you started in whatever initiative that you’re working on the marketing side. So to our audience, thank you so much for listening today and until next time, hello.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
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