Healthcare Growth Starts With Marketing + Operations Alignment

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Ashley Petrochenko: Welcome to the Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Ashley Petrochenko. I’m the VP of Brand Marketing here at Cardinal. I’m filling in today as host for Alex Membrillo. I’m really excited today to welcome Steven Harrell to the podcast. Steven, welcome.

Steven Harrell: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

Ashley: Thanks. You’re the Director of Marketing at StrideCare, correct?

Steven: Yes.

Ashley: Great. Tell the audience a little bit about your background, your role at StrideCare, and we’ll get some context for the conversation.

Steven: Sure. I started my career actually in organized medicine as part of the Dallas County Medical Society, a professional organization for doctors; the local level of the American Medical Association, Texas Medical Association. I didn’t know it at the time, but I feel like that was really great training for learning how to talk to doctors and about doctors and the language and the concerns that they might have. That was good.

I left there. I went into the agency world for a while. Bounced around at a couple of agencies, especially healthcare-focused ones, so working with a lot of independent practices, small practices, trying to get off the ground, trying to grow in a pretty wide variety of fields. We did IVF, we did back surgery, we did dermatology, addiction treatment, those sorts of things.

Then, in this role here at StrideCare, I’ve been really enjoying it. I’m the Director of Marketing, which is a lot of internal communications. This is a fun, growing practice with pretty big goals to become a national brand. Even as of today, we are the largest lower-extremity healthcare provider in the state of Texas. Lower extremity being veins, vascular, podiatry, wound care, bringing all of that together to help people walk and move better.

Ashley: Great. I love it. I love that background too, coming from the agency, from the dark side to the in-house. That’s awesome. I think that really helps shape some perspective. Your background communicating with doctors, I think we’re going to dig into that a lot in terms of content messaging today. We have a few themes we’ll dig into around marketing ops alignment, operational and clinical alignment, and how does that translate into better content.

Right now, it’s nearly the end of 2025. I know a lot of people are looking ahead to next year and thinking about what are the next trends, what are things that we’re watching, that we’re prioritizing. What do you think is going to be the next big thing in healthcare marketing next year?

Steven: I know that a lot of people are going to make the answer the latest AI tool or the latest way to create this or that. I think that we are really going, not necessarily the other direction, but it’s this shift toward this operational-driven growth. It’s this realization, patients aren’t really comparing brands for healthcare in the same way as products.

What is their mindset? They’re worried about symptoms. They’re unsure who to trust. There’s a lot of ads. There’s a lot of stuff when you Google it. Healthcare is confusing and anxious. When people are in pain, I think that the clarity of message and the clarity of the process of how you get the care that you need is going to be more important than anything else you might do.

The way that looks practically, for me, the next big in healthcare marketing is to become as close to the operations, the day-to-day management of the clinic, the people who are answering the phone to schedule patients. What do the forms look like? What does the front desk experience look like? That front door that I think Cardinal Marketing is always really good talking about, what does that front door experience look like? Tying that in. Seeing myself as part of the operations team is really going to be something crucial for healthcare marketers coming up.

Ashley: Are you and operations under the same umbrella? Is that something that you guys have moved towards?

Steven: Yes. That is really within the last few months, we have moved towards taking sales and marketing out from the silo that it was in, into the operations team. We’re in EOS, which is our leadership and meeting structure. Once a week, I’m in an hour-and-a-half-long meeting with the head of ops, the head of all of the different business units in the different regions, the head of the patient contact center team, nurse leads, ultrasound leads, the front desk leads.

All of us are talking the same language and looking at the same numbers, which is incredible. Especially in the agency life, as you guys know, I’m reporting on, “Hey, Google Ads is telling me that you had 150 conversions this week and 100 phone calls. Isn’t that awesome?” Then the client is saying, “I don’t know, I got like five extra patients. I’m not seeing it in the clinic.” The fact that I can be with operations and all be measured on the same numbers and looking at the same things, can make a super tight loop between my marketing tools and platforms and the feedback loop from the operations, what’s happening on the ground. That I think is just going to make everything operationally better.

Ashley: That’s awesome. Cardinal’s actually an EOS company, too. Having that alignment around the same rock, everyone is moving in the same direction, trying to achieve certain goals, and that data alignment. Maybe speak a little bit more about what are the goals that you and operations are really working towards? What data do you really keep front of mind, centered on? You’re really trying to make sure there’s no surprises or hurdles or anything like that.

Steven: Of course, yes. It is funny. When I was at agencies, I used to pitch business a lot and try to sell doctors on marketing tools and services, and all of those things. Everybody has dealt with this, I think, that’s been in healthcare marketing. The doctor will nod at you and be like, “Okay, well, how much revenue does that mean, and how many patients does that mean?”

The EOS system becomes perfect for that because in the same way that, let’s say that our surgery center team, our ASC team, is reporting on procedures, the front desk is reporting on new patient consults. I can provide earlier in the funnel of leads, patient contacts, appointments scheduled, held appointments, adding us into that first part of that funnel, but then being able to see it all within the same system so that we can identify where those gaps are.

I think the worst thing as a healthcare marketer is saying, “Oh my gosh, I think this is all working really well. I don’t know why more patients aren’t actually showing up in the clinic.” Being able to see every step of that funnel, in this cohesive way, is invaluable.

Ashley: Let’s talk a little bit about how are you actually measuring those metrics? What does the KPIs look like? Are you using call tracking? Do you have a CRM? How are you laddering up to get to that organizational-wide common language? What type of tools you’re using?

Steven: Absolutely. I’m so glad you asked that because that has been one of my real areas of focus this year. I joined this company in May last year, and there was a lot of growth. We have a private equity partner, and we are growing and expanding, and doing mergers and acquisitions. It’s been fun as we do acquisitions to be able to look at what a bunch of different people’s tech stacks and marketing has looked like.

For us, we have actually redirected some of our hard media ad budgets into these measurement tools, like you’re talking about, so that we can do this sort of thing. I’m really excited about our partnership with a company called Liine.

Ashley: Which Line?

Steven: It’s one of those fun companies with an extra vowel in it, so L-I-I-N-E. I’ve used CallTrackingMetrics before, CallRail. Those are all great. What we really love about Liine is the AI component that can understand not how many calls we’re getting or where those calls are coming from, but it can talk to us and give us real insights about the content of those calls in ways that we don’t really have. That is really a burden to put on the front desk of– I think often our reaction is to say, “Well, add a field in your EHR for where did you hear about us,” and have the person on the phone asking that. Then, [unintelligible 00:08:00] enough, and that was confusing.

Now, when they close out their case, they need to now fill out a new form that says, “What was the result of this call? Was it an appointment confirmation, a cancellation, a blah, blah, blah?” Sometimes people call the phone number because they left their person in the exam room yesterday. It’s the UPS guy who needs you to open the back door. There’s lots of reasons that people might make these phone calls that aren’t necessarily a conversion action that we want to measure based on.

Liine has a wonderful AI that can listen to the content of the conversations and then categorize it based on its own preset definitions. We can have real insight into, again, the content of these conversions. Is it mostly current patients calling in? Primary care, I would assume that would happen a lot. Dental, that would happen a lot. Are we spending money on ads that are driving new patient visits, or are we just giving brand awareness? A tool like Liine that has that extra layer of intelligence on top of call tracking has been essential to us. Just trying to get away from every call is a tally mark in the conversion, not how does that help?

Ashley: Yes, but in reality, conversion didn’t happen.

Steven: The doctors know that, too. They know that, is that a new patient they called? Was it a qualified new patient they called? Was it a patient that went on to get one of my procedures?

Ashley: Yes, being able to answer that. [crosstalk] Otherwise, it’s like, “Oh, we’re driving leads,” but leads are not all the same. I really love hearing that you’re pulling, “Yes, we’re an advertising agency,” but it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not building the right foundation.

We need the right conversion signal to pass back to the algorithm, to understand who is actually a qualified conversion, a qualified call, not someone who’s lost, looking for parking. That’s great. That’s if you implement it, call tracking. You have a CRM that you’re using. The CR2 is that something that you have integrated across all your practices?

Steven: If we had it here in the Texas business that we’ve built out, we’re using HubSpot. We are in a new world where HubSpot is now HIPAA compliant. That is a recent development that we are all still working through. HubSpot’s there for a reason. Why? It’s a great tool. We use it a lot for our referral team.

If we have physician liaisons that are out there in the market, knocking on the doors of referring providers, bringing donuts, coordinating patient referrals to our specialty care, that can happen through HubSpot, which has been great. HubSpot’s always been a great tool for those on-the-ground community marketer types to keep track of their business. Being able to also include the patient records of those patients that are being referred within the same ecosystem has been a real game-changer to be measuring those results and improving those results.

Ashley: Steven, you just mentioned your field team and your referrals. Let’s talk a little bit about how that has evolved in a digital landscape and what that looks like at StrideCare, balancing direct-to-consumer marketing with referrals.

Steven: Our business model is this integrated care model. Not only do we have podiatrists, we also have interventional radiologists and vascular surgeons. By bringing those two together, we think that we can provide better care for our patients. The way that works with our marketing is vascular surgery or doing ablations in the veins, and your legs and those sorts of things tend to be a specialist thing. You need a referral from a primary care provider, all of that.

Our vascular business is probably 70% to 80% of those patients are coming in through a referral. Now, the podiatry business is probably flip-flop. 80% of those would come in from direct-to-consumer or Googling or searching or out there in the market. The podiatry business is really our front door of how we do our D2C marketing to bring patients in there, which is better for patients too, because then they can get evaluated. A podiatrist can put hands on them, do some exams, determine whether or not they need vascular care, and then send them into the specialty that we provide.

It’s really interesting. Every other company I’ve worked at, we have considered two different ways of acquiring patients. The traditional, through the referrals, and through direct-to-consumer ways. The direct-to-consumer is really on that podiatry, that front-facing primary care side. Then the vascular business comes in through those referrals, which we support.

We’ve also added in this year a third category, which I’m super excited about, which is using our own data within our EHR to communicate messages to current patient populations that might have fallen off in the course of their care. The great thing about this coordinated care model is that there’s lots of ways for patients to get care. The occasional struggle is that maybe they might get lost somewhere along the way from the podiatry evaluation to an ultrasound, to surgical consult, to 12 different procedures that you might need for your legs, back to your wound care that takes care of your diabetes. We do all of these things, but somebody might get lost along the way.

We have a tool now that we’ve implemented, that we do patient reactivation and recall. We have an AI tool that plugs into our EHR with a one-way read that will search for patient demographics based on definitions that we’ve given it, either appointment data. Imagine, “Find me all patients who no-showed more than seven days ago, plus do not have future appointments scheduled.” This is a no-show that hasn’t rescheduled their appointment. Now we can put them into a demographic and send them text messages, automated phone calls, and emails in a nurturing sequence way to get them back on the schedule. We can also do it through ICD-10 diagnosis code or CPT procedure code.

We can stack all three of these things to make demographics with very particular messaging. We can say, “Okay, has seen a podiatrist, was referred to vascular, did not have ultrasound, has not come in for more than three months.” Now we can say, “Okay, put all these people into a group and give them incredibly specific messaging, but also automated messaging so that we’re not overwhelming our front desk staff or our patient contact center staff with all of those outbounds.” It can become a regular automated thing. Every day at midnight, it gets a new set of data, creates new cohorts, and starts messaging again at 8:00 AM.

Ashley: Just loops it back in, and it just constantly is running. That’s awesome. What tool are you using, if you don’t mind? I think people love to hear what tech everyone is using and what works.

Steven: Yes. They’ve been great. I have no formal partnership with them other than using them and loving it. It’s called Brevium. Are you using them?

Ashley: Oh, I love Brevium. They are fantastic. Yes, they work really well.

Steven: We’ve had really great success. We did a pilot campaign for just the vascular business for three or four months that worked so well that now we are in the process of rolling it out to our podiatrist. We did it for a podiatry group the whole month of October. It had great results. I just sent out the email. It was 160 patients scheduled appointments in the first month of the program, 3% to 5% conversion rate, which is great for something that’s happening automatically. Now we’re rolling it out to the rest of our podiatry groups as well.

Ashley: It sounds like you guys are really building the tech infrastructure to really be able to scale. Before you can head to the horses and throw money at ads, you have to have that right measurement foundation. You have to have the reactivation and nurturing. Otherwise, you’re back to the access and the digital front door piece.

If people are calling, it’s so easy to be like, “Well, it’s a busy line, no one picked up, couldn’t get through for whatever reason,” and then you just don’t call back. If life gets busy and you don’t make an appointment, but you’re able to actually reactivate them if they somehow have slipped through the cracks. It happens. I’ve definitely been prone to not schedule PT when I was supposed to because life’s ever busy.

Steven: Especially depending on your patient population. Our patient population is pretty old, just based on the nature of the disease state that we treat, so reminders help. It is what it is. I love that you said that because we’ve learned so much from engaging with a lot of Cardinal Marketing content and material that really does focus so much on those efficiencies. I’m still formulating how to phrase it, but this operational-driven marketing, where we are hand-in-hand and at the center of every campaign that I run, in my head, is the person making that phone call and the person answering that phone call.

What tools have I given the person answering in order to make this conversation lead to a booked appointment that somebody actually wants to follow through on? Have I given the person making the phone call? Have I answered some of their questions and assuaged their anxiety and fears, and maybe concerns that they might have?

The worst part is coming to a website and being like, “Great, I’m pretty sure that they might do what I need. I think maybe to get what I need, I call this number to make that clarity of message and give future patients who are making this purchase decision that confidence, that trust, assuage that anxiety.” I don’t know. Just getting that in the center has been really great. Yes.

Ashley: On the direct-to-consumer and the referral piece, how are you actually finding that clarity of messaging? Are you doing patient interviews? How do you understand deeply what does the patient journey look like, and how do you modify and adapt that for the brand, for the messaging, across all channels?

Steven: That’s a great question. This is where I’ve really loved the transition in my career from being part of the agency to being connected as an internal employee, and then even a step further into the operations side. I think that there’s a lot of great tools that we’ve all used for conversion rate optimization on a webpage, and seeing where people are clicking and how people are going. There are some things that Google Analytics just can’t tell you about what a patient was searching for when they were clicking through your pages and when they fell off, and you don’t know why or what were they looking for that they didn’t find.

What I have found to generate this, you’re going to laugh about, I’ve been married for 17 years, and for the last year, my wife also works at StrikeCare on the Contact Center team. Once a month, I will work from home, and I will sit next to her, and I will listen as she answers patient phone calls. I get to hear firsthand who’s confused, what do they want to know. Maybe Google Maps isn’t updated on a certain thing that is causing some stress. Maybe there’s a miscommunication or a phrase that I used that I thought made sense that nobody else understands, or something like that.

Even if you don’t happen to be married to somebody that is taking the calls for your practice. If you’re using call recordings, when I was at the agency, I took one day a month where that’s all I would do is listen to the phone call interactions that were happening for my clients, because that tells you more than any research. You can pay tens of thousands of dollars to an outside research firm to do a bunch of surveys, or you can listen to phone calls for four hours, and I guarantee that second one will get you more information and make your marketing and the message that you share that much more clear, powerful, and trustworthy because you’ll know. You’ll have that firsthand example.

Ashley: 100%. I love it. Getting close to operations, staying close to the patient. Those two things are going to build that foundation of just understanding where is the opportunity for growth, and then what are the hurdles that are preventing access, and what’s preventing them from making a call? Often, you go to a Google My Business, and it’s like, the hours aren’t updated, or maybe something’s off. There’s a lot of pieces that we all, as marketers, have to deal with. There are so many little touch points. Yes, I love that. I’ll recommend Kate and Finn.

Steven: I’m sure on your Google Business is just the drive-by camera at the outside of a medical complex that has a couple of dozen suites in it. Maybe you find out that patients are regularly calling and saying, “Hey, I’m in the parking lot, but I’m not sure where to go.” If that’s something that you hear a lot, now you can create a strategy that will help answer that, and again, smooth out that transition. Those are the sorts of things. I love AI tools. I love ChatGPT and Gemini and whatever, but AI can’t create that content for you because it would never know what that problem is.

It can maybe help you solve the problem, but it can’t help you identify that problem. That’s one thing that I really tell my team a lot is that content still is king, but clarity of message, the clarity of what we’re doing here and what our patients want to hear at the different parts of their funnel journey, AI will not know. We can know, and we can use AI to make that message more clear, but we have to generate that. That’s from listening to real people.

Ashley: Yes, AI is an enabler. It helps marketers understand, helps them think faster, but we have to have that strategic overlook of how to actually align with what the patients are telling you that they want. I love that. Let’s wrap up with one more thought. We’re looking ahead. What is one piece of advice for healthcare marketers that they’ve seen over here, but you really want to tell them?

Steven: That’s a great question. I think I’ve already referenced it, but really, what I love to tell people is that the core of your marketing strategy comes down to that interaction between two very real human beings. There is a hurting, worried, anxious, frankly sick patient on one end who needs medical care in a system that is confusing and expensive, and unknown to them. It’s a very vulnerable place that one person is in. On the other end of that is a person who is part of your team, your practice, who is at the front desk or the contact center answering that phone or answering that form submission, who needs the information in front of them to make this interaction a positive one for the patient.

Any marketing problem that you’re having in any dashboard that you’re like, “Man, our conversion rate is great from here to here, but then this step right here is broken.” If you can get at that core, which is that interaction between those two humans, you’re likely to uncover whatever it is that’s holding your conversion rates back. It’s probably not a tool that is at your laptop. It is probably inside the clinic. It is at their front desk.

Here’s something. The first time I went and visited a clinic, I had in my head, “This front desk person never answers the phone, and I don’t know why.” Then I went to the clinic, and I realized there has been a construction site in front of the wheelchair ramp for the last three weeks. This person at the front desk goes out into the parking lot and helps elderly sick people into their wheelchairs and pushes them all the way around the other side of the building and come through that ramp. Yes, some phone calls get missed sometimes, but it’s a problem we can solve without blaming or assigning any sort of ugliness to the person is helping patients, is helping sick people. That’s what we’re here for.

We can create some other operational or marketing thing to fix this problem, but they’re doing the right thing. I don’t know that unless I go and be physically present, I’ve rambled a bit, but my big piece of advice for healthcare marketers is that the solution to your problems is not going to be on your computer screen. It’s going to be inside those clinics or at the core of those relationships. That’s going to help you be better.

Ashley: We love that. Marketing is we’re in the business of empathy, understanding patients, understanding your coworkers, the front desk team, the shortages that a lot of the healthcare industry is facing. It’s tough. Being empathetic and understanding how do we move forward together and achieve that alignment. Be open-minded. Have that empathy. It’s how you actually set up a patient-forward organization that has that clarity message and that empathy piece. I love what you just said. That’s a really great way to just wrap up advice. Everyone, be empathetic in 2026. Marketing is hard.

Steven: Taking care of patients is hard. Those medical assistants that don’t make a lot of money get thrown up on and have messes and are carrying people. They’re touching those patients and really affecting their lives. They don’t need another checklist from you or whatever, or a field to fill out in the EHR. Get out there and help them.

Ashley: I love that. Thank you, Steve. This is such a great conversation. I really loved it. Thank you for being a great first guest for me on the podcast.

Steven: It’s so fun to have done it with you. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. This has been a blast.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.