Healthcare Marketing Built on Real Capacity

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: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Ashley Petrochenko. I’m the VP of Brand Marketing here at Cardinal. I’m joining today as host for Alex Van Rio. I have a fantastic guest today joining us on Ignite. Please welcome Joseph MacLean, the Director of B2C Marketing at Synergy Health Partners. Joseph, welcome to Ignite.

Joseph MacLean: Thanks a lot, Ashley. I’m thrilled to be on today’s episode. I’m a long-time listener.

Ashley: Awesome. I know Alex always says we have three listeners, so now we’ve found one of them. It’s great. Maybe before we dig into the conversation, you can tell people a little bit about your background and the work that you do at Synergy.

Joseph: At Synergy Health Partners, we’re an integrated care model, PE-backed ortho managed service organization, and I lead performance marketing, mostly on the B2C side, but I definitely make my way over to the referral marketing side and the physician liaison team. This is my first role within healthcare services. I started my career doing social media for New Balance, and that led me to get some e-commerce marketing jobs within the appliance industry, appliance part industry, and then eventually cameras.

I’ve learned a lot about data, and I’ve learned a lot about conversion rate optimization. How I think about things are time of the doctor is inventory to sell, and it doesn’t come one-to-one, but I have X amount to sell. How do I drive people that are interested in that to buy? That’s how I break down the marketing problem and performance marketing projects at Synergy.

Ashley: I love that viewpoint. I think there’s a lot that healthcare can learn from retail, so I’m excited to dig into that. I think that the healthcare [unintelligible 00:01:51] journey can be complicated. It doesn’t happen one moment. How can we, as marketers, help guide patients through to that final booking and make sure that there’s as little friction as possible? Maybe that’s something you can speak to. What have you observed bringing your retail experience to healthcare? Where are those friction points happening, and what can you do to improve them?

Joseph: When I first started, it’s baptism by fire because you can’t really solve a problem unless you understand what influences people to take action. What I learned when I was doing interviews for this job, I was devouring the Cardinal blog. There’s not really a demand issue in healthcare, I’d say, right now. Ortho specifically, the boomer generation is the target audience, and that’s one of the largest generations in America right now.

I’m in a good position right now because there’s not a scarcity for people who need orthopedic care, but there is a capacity issue, and I think really understanding where are those bottlenecks. You can’t really learn anything unless you ask questions. I quickly made friends with the scheduling manager, the VP of ops, PAs that had been promoted into business analyst positions, or just clinic managers, because you can’t learn, okay, who has the biggest opportunity in terms of new patient capacity? Who’s not filling up their schedule? Where are they, and what days of the week?

Those are things that required me to really dig into manually on a daily basis. It wasn’t necessarily like a silver bullet that I had to, “Oh, this person’s not here.” We had to work together, understand what’s not working, how do we fix it. It’s problem-solving, but it’s being willing to ask the question, getting up out of your seat, and going and just talking it through to learn how the organization works, who our target audience is, and how we can get more people in the door.

Ashley: To understand that inventory, the actual physician’s time, is there recommendations that you have? One just seems to get the conversation started. Just reach out, and then from there, how are you actually getting that data now? Have you been building on it? It’s not a silver bullet, but you have to start building those systems. Operationalize the data. Maybe you could speak to what’s working at Synergy.

Joseph: I think another serendipitous moment is that people are more used to doing things digitally now. Obviously, people want to connect with someone on the phone, but people don’t necessarily want someone to intrude their research process. If I have pain somewhere, I’m going to go and look try to find it out as fast as I can myself. That’s the instinct. Older generations, they have, “I need to find an expert right now to tell me what’s wrong with this.”

I think there’s this intersection where people are getting more used to looking things up. In terms of tracking, there’s first-party data that you can track in terms of your EMR or your practice manager. That stuff reveals whose schedule is open, how many slots. We use the word slot a lot. There’s new patient slots, there’s follow-up slots. On a weekly basis, if you’re someone who’s in charge of driving new patients to the practice, that’s my job, is to drive new patients to the practice. It’s a very intimidating, it’s a very high pressure, and it’s a very visible role.

If I don’t drive new patients, I’m looking at it every week with the C-suite team. They’re going to notice, and they’re going to ask me what’s going on. It’s one of those jobs where it’s, “Okay, I have to forget everything I know and figure out how I can move the needle on this.” You go to your practice manager, and you look at the templates of your provider. Thankfully, at my organization, we have around 20 to 25 providers that are across spine, general orthopedic, sports surgery, joint replacement. Hand podiatry and pain management. Some of those doctors fall into two of those. We have four spine surgeons. We have seven orthopedic surgeons and four pain doctors, four podiatrists, and one hand surgeon specifically. I can look at their schedules, and I know where they are during the week. Either they’re in the operating room at a hospital or an ambulatory surgery center, or they’re in the clinic. What I care about is the clinic and making sure that they have enough time in the clinic.

I’ll go to the practice manager on a daily basis, and I’ll look at doctor has 10 slots available on Monday in Livonia. That’s where one of our clinics are. Livonia is a very cheap place to fill. It’s our flagship office. It’s been around for 40 years. That’s going to be easy to fill. The same doctor has 40 openings on Friday in Sterling Heights, which is a more competitive market, harder. I got to really make sure that I’m putting enough spend on my ad campaigns, whether it’s social or paid search, to really drive this doctor’s presence on Friday in Livonia that he can fill it. That is how I do it.

With 25 doctors, doing that every day, it’s very time-consuming. We’re working on ways to make a real-time dashboard so that we’re able to do these things. Because I’m in charge of the budgets, and because we look at these things weekly, I’m looking at that hourly because I don’t want to leave my ads on when there’s no capacity, because then I’m wasting ad spend.

Ashley: It sounds like you’re really in the data very closely. You have full visibility into the provider’s schedule, and you’re making those adjustments. Is this something like if someone’s trying to get started here, maybe they don’t have visibility, how can other people take the first step towards having capacity-driven bidding model and budget control?

Joseph: Honestly, you have ChatGPT, which is a great thing for any resource that you have to learn, like a software test, which is great. Obviously, you don’t want to do anything with customer, patient data, or anything like that with HIPAA compliance. We have NextGen EMR as our practice manager, and that has templates for our doctors’ schedules.

I can go all the way back to last year and look at how people filled out their schedule, the seasonality. I literally go into the calendar view. It’s a grind. It’s a thing I think that people don’t really realize when they’re so wrapped up in their role like I was when I first started. It’s just discipline. In healthcare, I think the most frustrating thing is it’s very hard to clean every dataset and integrate it together.

Thankfully, I had a lot of experience with my background in e-commerce. I know how to clean data and integrate it together, but it’s still really manual. There’s no easy button that goes and does this. What I’m looking at is I’m looking at new patient slots. Someone who’s eligible for a new patient. I can count how many of those slots there are, and I can put it in a spreadsheet on a day of the week, color-code it by location for each doctor.

This doctor’s way too full, or he doesn’t have any opportunity. I can see, okay, we don’t have a lot of capacity for this service line at this location. I will see that after I do this for 25 doctors every day of the week. It’s taken me roughly 30 to 45 minutes. I’m pretty fast at it now. That gives me my day. I have a Teams chat that I can go to the scheduling manager and be like, “Hey, we are very light on ortho for the next four weeks. Can you open up some slots for me?”

What we’ve learned with cancellation rates, obviously, because I could have my whole [inaudible 00:08:20] filled, but our cancellation rates is anywhere between 12% to 20%, give or take what time of year it is. We’ll double-book at certain times of the day or give the doctor some PA help so that they chart all the new patients or the follow-ups and get through the follow-ups faster than the new patients.

Ashley: It sounds like just getting into the data. People just need to roll their sleeves up, get into it, and really just at the very beginning start understanding what are the trends that people have in terms of the number of appointments, cancellation rates. Just really understanding that, and you can start from there as a baseline.

Joseph: Definitely. PE, I think it is a different thing because if you’re at a hospital, doctors have a set schedule you can’t really ramp up. At PE, they want people to fill in the schedules. I don’t want to bore anyone with this, but yes, it’s basically just getting into the data and creating a spreadsheet so you can track things.

Ashley: It’s not boring. Getting in there as the data can be a little bit, but it is such an important part of not wasting your ad budget. You can’t be sending patients to a booking page where they can’t book for three months out, because what are they going to do at that point? They’re going to go to another doctor because they’re not going to wait around for three months to get an appointment.

Joseph: Especially if they’re in pain, too. I think that’s the thing. If someone’s not able to pick their kid up, if they’re not able to sleep at night, if they’re not able to do things like lift their hands up over their head, they want access ASAP. That’s really where we’re in the business of giving people access. Accessibility as soon as possible.

Ashley: You were mentioning something about your retail experience. It was an aha moment here, and how you started to think about capacity. Is that something you can dig into?

Joseph: Yes. At my time at KEH Camera, and this was around pre-COVID and post-COVID I was there. We had a couple shifts in the marketing team where we’d have new marketing directors come in and out. My job was basically performance marketing. It was SEO email marketing, and pay-per-click. What I loved about that is I could immediately see the results of our initiatives.

I look back at a specific moment where a new director was on and was like, “Hey, what can we do to improve performance?” I knew that we had a couple of competitors in the area that sold a camera for almost $100 cheaper than us. We were still sending traffic from Google Ads to this page, and it had the worst conversion rate. Margin is a huge game in retail. Margin relates to how fast can you sell it? What can we get back for it? At what pace are we okay with selling this item based on the margin?

We basically were getting undercut. It was an older model called the Nikon D750. We had about 100 of them in stock, and that’s way more than we’re used to. It was just basically diving into the data to see our offering is not competitive to what the market is right now. It is as simple as that, is just being able to see we’re wasting ad money, and we’re holding onto more inventory for longer, which in retail is just a terrible recipe.

Healthcare is even higher stakes because you at least have items you can sell that are not going to go away. Time goes away. If you aren’t taking action today to fill time, it’s going to go by, and you’re going to lose your opportunity to get the results that you need to maintain the performance of the organization. Especially, I’d say this month and last month, November and December in healthcare are funny months. They’re compressed because the end of the month, you have holidays where doctors are on PTO, patients have funny behavior, and so you really have to do all your performance within those first three weeks.

Those products on the retail shelf, they’re always going to stay there. Obviously, you want to have certain performance, but it’s a lot easier in retail, I’ll say.

Ashley: Yes, if you’re not using your full utilization of your doctors, it’s gone, and we won’t get that revenue back, that opportunity. Are there things that you’re doing to try to move patients to that booking? Are there moments when they’re still in that research phase, maybe they’re not quite ready to reach out? How are you approaching that to move them, building that funnel to book an appointment?

Joseph: The other thing that’s difficult about healthcare is that you can’t really do re-engagement campaigns with HIPAA laws. You can’t really define a person that’s visiting your site because of the personal healthcare data and how it’s defined by CMS. Yes, there’s directional things. I harp on this. I was not a statistics student in school, but I understood that you have ChatGPT today that really can help you learn these Gemini, whatever. There’s guided learning where you can understand regression analysis.

I think you guys harp on it too with your medium mix modeling, where you basically try to understand, we did this initiative, what was the overall impact of it? Nothing I’m going to say scientific like that, but basically I understand that the research people do is one to two weeks. If we spend money, we’re going to see it in one to two weeks. People, depending on their pain, they’ll pull the trigger within the day if they can get in. If they go and get referred to another clinic, they’re going to come to you.

It varies, but I would say that what we’re doing is we do tag our site with our analytics tool, and we’re able to see certain actions. We can put people into cohorts based on when they visited the site and when they came back, but I’m not doing that every day as much as I am the schedules. I’m able to understand, okay, we had this many clicks. Our conversions that we track on our website are how many phone calls lasted over two minutes, how many new patient clicks did we get on our website?

I essentially see those as leads, and I’m able to see when those people do book appointments. Sometimes it’s the same day, but the majority of them are people who’ve been in the buffer for about one to two weeks that are doing research on other doctors’ availability, the reviews of the doctors, and then they come in, and they basically make a decision, like “I need to take care of this,” and they book their appointments.

Those are things that you have to really look at. I think sometimes people can get caught up in, “How do I tag my site based on events?” I would just look up how to do it. It’s not something that you have to rely on someone else to do. It’s not difficult. It’s just something you have to learn. That’s what I’d say.

Ashley: Looking at the path people are taking over that one to two-week period, you mentioned reviews and understanding, is this a doctor for me? What are you doing to try to build that trust and presence that is going to make someone choose Synergy?

Joseph: If I started my role in it, there’s so many things I would love to have known. Really, the reputation management system and software, and how are we getting those reviews, is something I had to learn. I try to follow best practices with the tool that we have, and it didn’t really do what I wanted. One of the doctors was like, “Hey, a lot of our competitors are getting way more reviews, and I’m friendly with them, and they don’t have nearly the busy schedule I have. How can we get more of these things?”

I’m glad the doctor came to me in that situation and asked me that. I didn’t really have an answer for him at the moment, but I did some research. There’s a tool called Rater8. We’ve had people come on here and talk about it before, but you guys have great people come on and talk about tools all the time. Rater8 was one that was specifically for the price point they had was for each individual doctor. The strength they had is that they got more volume of reviews because they sent out the review request within three hours of the appointment, where ours was set at three days, and there wasn’t much we could do to change it.

Ashley: People are forgetting.

Joseph: Yes, exactly. From that, it was double the reviews in the month. Those are things where they’re leaving comments, unable to see the sentiment of the review. People who are getting surgeries and having great surgeries were a part of some associations where those patients take surveys. It’s called CODE, and I think MSSIC, and it’s related to the state of Michigan.

It basically just looks at the outcome data of the surgery. Was the pain better than what the patient expected? How likely would they refer it to a friend, and were they overall satisfied? A lot of detailed sentiment research on that, but that’s a project in 2026 where I’m taking that data, putting some marketing flavor on it, being vague in ways that I can be vague, but also expressing the positive sentiment not in an ethical way, and putting those on the profile page of the doctor so that if someone’s researching it, they can see the reviews and they can also see the outcome data.

If I’m buying a product or I’m picking someone based on something, I don’t want to see that. I think that’s really what comes today. There’s an accessibility strategy where visibility and accessibility, there’s going to be growth there. If you really want to go to the next level, it’s distinguishing your doctor amongst the competitive marketplace that you’re in and how they’re better than the others, or what makes them different, and that could be good for you based on what you’re seeking as a patient.

Ashley: The consumerization of healthcare, people are used to going to Amazon, they’re used to going to the internet and reading those reviews and seeing the outcomes. Does this product work? Is my knee replacement going to work? Am I going to feel good after this? They want that same assurance so that they can feel confident in the decision that they make.

Joseph: The product detail page, that’s a doctor’s page. That’s the same thing. It’s reviews, product specifications, all of those things. I go to Amazon, Nike, Apple, look at how they organize information and design it on the page so that there is some correlation that we can do on our doctor pages.

Ashley: They’ve jumped ahead. They have done so much UX testing, so much user research to understand how people are making decisions, what information. Healthcare can skip ahead and learn a lot from just studying those pages.

Joseph: Yes. Don’t reinvent wheel.

Ashley: Yes, definitely. Is that something that you’re investing more into, and into video? Is most of your testimonials now written? Is that something you’re going to explore more of video content next year?

Joseph: Yes. We are definitely investing a lot in video next year. We hired two brand new spine surgeons. One of them is brand new to the location that we’re at. In my mind, building up a new surgeon or a new doctor in a new location, right out of fellowship, that is one of the most difficult things in the industry, because you need to fill them up fast to get to where you were, or if you want to grow.

I think that you need to have a game plan in terms of, “How do I capture really satisfied patients?” It’s almost like any brand 101, where you have your customers, repeat customers, and your brand advocate. Finding the brand advocate in your reviews, and then reaching out to them personally and being like, “Hey, we were really excited that you had this.” I ask the doctors to give these to me, and the doctors are more than excited to find out more about what’s going on with their patients because the doctors are mini celebrities in terms of how people interact with them, and if they are going to be hand-chosen to represent what the doctor did for them, it’s easy to do.

It’s one thing to just have an iPhone and say, “How did you do?” There’s HIPAA compliance that you have to get over. It’s really systematizing it in a way, but you have to organize all the information up front so that it really can be a well-oiled machine to get the results you need.

Ashley: Are you hiring a whole video team? Are you being scrappy, doing a lot of it in-house? We have a mix of listeners who have the big budget, and others, even if they’re going to squeeze a little bit, but then others are like, “I’m one person, or a team of three.” How scrappy can you get to get some of the content that you need here?

Joseph: I think there’s two different fronts, and I’ve been in both worlds. I learned how to use cameras from being at KEH, that company I was at. That was a skill set that’s really helped me deal with things in my personal life, but also get scrappy. In terms of all our headshots, I take all of our headshots in the office at our place, and that’s one way to do it. I would say that, go to the OR, go to the clinic.

Email is a powerful tool. I know as a millennial, I like Teams, I like text messaging, but to really plan something out, you need to align it and find your allies, because everyone wants to grow. If you need to be scrappy, you need to write a script, you need to schedule time, and you need to ask the doctors. We’ve done some of those. We can, but I think more so the social video, the more authentic, the better. The handheld phone shot is a lot better for engagement on social platforms. You want it to be approachable.

I think, no matter what situation you’re in, it does just take growing up your sleeves. I think the video, it goes a long way in terms of, they say a picture’s worth a thousand words, like a video’s worth a billion words.

Ashley: People definitely want that user-generated-esque element. This shiny, full-produced video, sometimes they don’t feel trustworthy always. Oh, this is my neighbor telling me the experience they went through. In a lot of ways, I can feel more approachable and relatable, like you were mentioning. I think just getting started is the best thing.

Joseph: You look at anyone who’s started doing video stuff, look at their first video they posted. It’s never the best compared to where they’re at. Habit and discipline are powerful tools in this.

Ashley: Take your look ahead at 2026. What is your biggest priority? Where are you focusing for next year?

Joseph: Our spine service line. In our integrated care model, ortho and spine are the most profitable service lines. We want to really ramp up our spine service line. We have two new providers, and we’ve never had the volume of capacity that we’ve had here. We want to basically 120% increase our performance over 2025. Building an engine to do that is going to be a big deal. I think the demand captures one thing, and demand generation is another thing. We’re going to go into more of the demand generation side to drive patients to our spine doctors. That’s the goal there.

Ashley: What’s your channel mix look like? Are you focusing on the top-of-the-funnel Instagram, Facebook type to generate that demand?

Joseph: Yes. Our channel diversification is we have a PL team, physician referrals. I think a lot of the things too is that we really want to give them more tools. Obviously, you collect primary care doctor and referral doctors, but the primary care doctor didn’t refer them sometimes. If there’s a primary care doctor that’s not currently referring our patients, we want to make sure that we go out and get them, especially ones that are spine patients, because the demo of that person’s practice that’s a great one that we can dip into and create a relationship.

There’s definitely ways that we want to make sure that we do it within the PL and physician liaison, and referring marketing. In terms of just the people searching, yes, Meta is obviously one that we really want to go into because you can target without targeting any health data based on their demographic, where they live, what age they are, what gender they are. It’d be able to say middle-aged women are our best audience.

We want to go and target that, but I think the content strategy around that has to be like what are people engaging in that, and what are the common conditions that they have, and put a doctor and speak to them in a relevant way. It could be around what shoes are good for you, something that’s an entry point. That’s what we’re really focusing on is just creating content that’s relevant, not necessarily content that’s relevant to our business goal. It has to be that Venn diagram where we’re going to test and learn, and we like to adapt fast to what works.

Ashley: You’re starting with the patient first. What are the problems that they have? If you can answer that and get them to engage with your Facebook content, your Meta content, whatever, then you’re building that funnel of engagement, and then you can bring them closer and closer to actually achieve the goals of the same business goals that you have.

I love what you said. You’re also working with referral leads on teams, too. This growth engine isn’t just for the performance marketing side. You really need to have that strong alignment with the operational team to get information and understand the capacity and where the growth objectives are, and then also you’re working as one of those channels with the referral team.

Joseph: Yes. We have a team of four. We call them physician liaisons, where they go and they book lunches. In Michigan, too, we have unique automotive laws where if you get in a car accident, your auto insurance has to pay for the medical bills. Those ones pay, I think it’s a higher rate than Medicare. We call them premium patient segments because they’re patients that need care, and the reimbursement model is way better than what Medicare provides.

We’re trying to partner up with personal injury lawyers to understand how can we help your patients get care faster, and there’s not a lot of orthopedic practices in Michigan that take on auto insurance because it’s a slow cash flow cycle. That’s one that we’re doing, but self-pay is a huge thing. I know there’s been a lot of things in the media about insurance premiums, high deductibles.

We want to make sure that we’re offering self-pay so that people who have a wrist fracture, if they don’t want to pay $12,000, that we can offer a cash pay service that’s cheaper than a hospital and makes more sense than using their insurance that has a high deductible to it. Then, yes, the referral marketing is a big piece. We’re wanting to build within our software the ability for a doctor who referred a patient to speak to our doctor so that we can build that relationship up because there’s no better way to build trust with an external practice than being able to report on a patient they sent us, knowing that they’re going to get great care and get taken care of.

Ashley: I love it. The trust goes in every direction. The patients need the trust, but the referring doctor needs that trust too. Awesome. I love it. This has been a great conversation, Joseph. I really appreciate the time sharing a little bit about what you have going on for next year. If anyone wanted to reach out to you with questions and to learn or to connect, where can they find you?

Joseph: You can find me on LinkedIn, or my email address is joseph.maclean.icloud.com. LinkedIn is probably the best easy way to find me, Joseph Maclean.

Ashley: Great. Thanks for joining us, and everyone, take care.

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