Patient Experience Is the Growth Strategy

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, everybody. Welcome to the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name is Ashley Petrochenko. I’m the VP of Brand Marketing here at Cardinal. I’m stepping in today for Alex Membrillo as host. I promise to bring as much enthusiasm and energy as he does to these episodes. I think it’s going to be easy today because we have an amazing guest lined up. Let me introduce you to Ben Whitaker, the Director of Digital Strategies, Marketing, and Communications at UofL Health. Ben, welcome to Ignite.

Ben Whitaker: Thank you for having me, Ashley. Appreciate it.

Ashley: Great. To tee up the conversation before we dig into it, let’s get a little bit of background and context on your experience and the work that you do at UofL Health.

Ben: I’ve been in Digital Strategy for 25 years, rooted in an SEO strategy at multiple different industries from automotive to e-commerce, to healthcare and beyond. Throughout all those journeys, the common denominator is people. It’s connecting people with the products and services that they’re looking for when they’re actively seeking them. It’s always been something that I’ve really enjoyed doing.

Ashley: Yes, it’s definitely with people. It’s easy sometimes to think, like, “Oh, well, these industries are so different,” but no, it’s people. People have the same habits, no matter what they’re buying, to a degree. I’m really excited to dig into how these other industries have influenced your work in healthcare, especially the SEO piece. That’s going to be a big part of the conversation today, and a little bit about the patient journey, the digital front door, and the user experience, to make sure that it’s seamless and consumers are getting the care that they need.

We’re recording this now in December, we’re on the cusp of 2026, just a few more weeks. A big topic that is on everyone’s mind right now is what is the next big thing in healthcare marketing? What are you most excited about? What are you looking forward to? Maybe you can share a little bit about that.

Ben: I think that we’re in an exciting time right now. AI is definitely the buzzword right now. Everybody’s looking to figure out, “Okay, how does it work? Can we use it? Is it going to protect patient health information?” There’s a lot of buzz around that right now. I think, though, it is also giving the opportunity for everybody to evaluate where we are and then where the opportunities are ahead of us.

Making sure that your foundation is solid so that we can pivot and adjust to all these changes that are coming, because it’s very rapid, and I have seen some folks embrace it very quickly but then pump the brakes and they’re like, “Wait a minute, we need to make sure that we’re doing the right thing.” It’s certainly been interesting.

Ashley: Yes, it’s definitely been the buzzword for the past year. The rate at which AI-driven search has grown is very rapid, but I think in some ways we have found it to also overstate it. People are still going to search engines. A lot of the foundations still are the same. Right now, you’ve spent a lot of time building that foundation at UofL Health, what are the core things [unintelligible 00:03:01] still is important, is table stakes. What do marketers need to have in place for not only SEO but for the new AI landscape?

Ben: I look at SEO like a card catalog in a library. I’m probably dating myself on that. It is the simplest way that search works. Making sure that all of the content on our pages are labeled properly, making sure that they are searchable not only on Google Search but site search. We’re continuing to improve our site search. Right now, it’s easier to go to Google and search for what you’re looking for on our website than it is actually on the website. With that card catalog approach, that’s really what we’ve been doing, is going through our entire website.

We’re also monitoring search queries on the website. The search queries are anonymous, but it at least lets us know how people are searching, if it’s long-tail searches or if it’s keyword searches, and then making sure we will run through that search ourselves and say, “Okay, what pops up? Is this the right information? If not, then let’s correct our site search so that people can find what they’re looking for.” Believe it or not, one of the things that I found when I first started and started tracking those search queries on the website was that cafeteria was our number two highest-searched term on the website. Think about it from a healthcare mindset, you’re thinking heart care, cancer care, things like that.

We are the region’s only Level 1 Trauma Center, and so we get patients from all over the state, all over the area. They’re not familiar with the local area. They are looking for basic necessities like that. They may be staying with a loved one. They just want a cup of coffee or they might just take a break and go get a sandwich. That gave us the opportunity to build a webpage that was strictly dedicated to all of the food options, all of the amenities that we do have near the hospital. We’re continuing to expand on that. My goal when I started was to turn the website into a useful tool. It’s not just like a brochure.

We integrated a lot of FAQs on the website. Those FAQs are generated based on the search information that we get. We also talk with the frontline staff. We’re like, “Hey, 40% of your time is tied up giving people directions or answering simple repetitive questions that you answer every day on a daily basis. Write those questions down, send them to us. We’ll put them on the website. That way, users don’t have to ask you that information. They can just find it on the website.” It’s not going to take 100% of those queries.

We have people that just want to talk to a human, but I think it will significantly cut it in half. On that, we also encourage our frontline staff, “When you’re going to the office, you’re going to your facility, use Google Maps, use Waze, use Apple Maps. Let us know if there’s an error.” We have one location where the Google Maps is sending people to the back alley. That’s not where they’re supposed to be. We also learned that a lot of patients do end up taking Uber or some sort of a ride-share. If they’re dropping patients off in the wrong location, it’s not a good patient experience. It’s not good for the patients either, especially if they are immobile, handicapped, or whatever else where it makes travel difficult.

Ashley: Patient experience extends not just digital but actual real patient experience at the facility, at the practice, hospital, but that also then influences the digital experience and how people find it. If it’s not easy to get some of those answers, then we might choose another provider, then I choose another place because the organization doesn’t have the basic information that I need. I don’t know where I can park. I don’t know how to get there. It’s confusing, and people will just move on often to the next choice that’s more apparently obvious.

Ben: I really think would be a good investment for the system, is to have a way-finding, a digital way-finding solution, where users can put it in. They can click a link from their appointment email, pull up a map. It’ll give them driving directions from their doorstep. Once they arrive at the hospital, then it also gives the option to take a picture of where they park. It’ll geo-tag their parking spot. Then from that point, give them step-by-step instructions on how to navigate the campus to get to their appointment.

Ashley: We have the physical way-finding type of solutions, but digitally, you need way-finding too. You get to the homepage. If you’re not being through Google Search or AI Discovery landing to where you need to be, where do you go when you’re on that homepage? How are you helping build those way-find signals digitally? Is that something you guys are working on?

Ben: It is. It’s a lot more complex where we are right now. When I came on, I had inherited a website that had just been redesigned, so I didn’t have any input on the actual build-out or design of the website. We are going through service line by service line and looking for opportunities to simplify the patient journey. We’ve got nine hospitals. Instead of having a page that has information that is duplicated on nine different hospital pages, we can actually centralize that.

That way, when we do have an update, we’re updating it in one place. We’re just trying to streamline that whole process and make sure that we have the most accurate and updated information on the website. When I came on, we might get a query from somebody and be like, “Hey, this information on this page is outdated.” Then through research, finding out that, “Oh, there’s nine other pages that have this wrong information on here, and we have to go through and update it.”

Ashley: Maybe we can talk a little bit about that website project. I think you mentioned that when you came in, you inherited this site that wasn’t necessarily optimized for search. Is that right?

Ben: Yes. [unintelligible 00:08:15]will do your SEO and all of that. Again, once I get in, I can take a look at a website and see within three seconds if it’s actually got an SEO strategy to it. When I got into it, it was very obvious that wasn’t the case. Nothing had really been done, and so the opportunity was great. I trained my team on best practices. I showed them this is not only the what we do but why we do it and how we do it because the how can be much more important than the what. Anybody can do anything, but if it’s not done right or well or with strategy, then it’s just a check in the box. It’s like, “Oh, yes, we did that.”

Through that, within the first year, we saw a 74% increase in our organic search traffic. We’re dominating the number one search positions on Google Search for the majority of our service lines, so much that I got wind that a competitor hospital was actually looking to find an SEO expert to work on that. It ties back to how important a solid SEO strategy is. There’s a lot of people on [crosstalk] LinkedIn and everybody’s like, “Oh, SEO is dead, and this is going to be the SEO killer and whatever.” I was part of that evolution of SEO.

Before the algorithm updates came out, I could get a website ranked number one on Google within two weeks or less just through manipulating the search. Then, of course, the algorithm updates came out. They penalized people for doing things like that. It wasn’t necessarily blockhead, but it wasn’t–

Ashley: It spiced the game. Yes, they definitely have taken care of over the years.

Ben: Yes, he figured out how to do it and made it work, and it worked, and so he did it. That time when the algorithm updates came out, I had over 400 clients that I was working with, and I had to go back and update all other sites. I was like, “I’m not doing that again,” and so I started looking for the common pillars of, “Okay, what does Google want? What do search engines want?” Bing is still awful, but as long as you have that solid strategy that works with Google, most of the other search engines follow suit. I believe AI is going to do the same thing.

Ashley: There’s something that you’re looking at with AI in particular, this is a new layer to your SEO strategy, a new thing that you’re trying to optimize for, or a ranking signal that you have on your radar right now?

Ben: Yes. With AI–, and you’re going to see a lot more long-tail searches. With AI, people having conversations. With AI, they’re trying to talk through something. Maybe they have a medical issue, they’ve got a diagnosis, and they’re just trying to talk through it and figure out what are my options? When you get a diagnosis, you’re speaking with a doctor, your brain is not really in the right place to process information. My family, personally, has had a lot of experience on the bedside of healthcare. One of the things that we discovered is that it’s always helpful to have somebody with you that can be a second ear and hear the things that you can’t hear because you’re trying to process what’s being said.

We’re going to see a lot more of that conversational behavior. I believe AI Search is going to be looking for answers to questions, so it’s going to be important to have answers on the website, if it’s in a blog, if it’s in some sort of content piece on the website. We recently had something that we got a ton of traffic. Don’t tell anybody, but we did an article on what is a charley horse and how to treat it.

We got a metric ton of traffic from that because it is a common ailment. It’s not something that’s necessarily serious enough to have to go to the doctor for. Some people turned to the internet to look for answers to that. It was helpful for one of our doctors to chime in and have our experts, we’ve got our university side of the healthcare organization and the research. We do have a lot of knowledge on new techniques and new treatments and trials. We do have–

Ashley: Collaborating with them a lot to produce content, to share their insights as something that you work closely with your medical staff?

Ben: Nobody wants me telling them how to do medical stuff.

Ashley: [laughs]

Ben: I’m not doing the work for them. That’s the extent of most of my medical knowledge. We always prefer to have the experts. If you want to talk about SEO, come talk to me. You want to talk to about stroke awareness, then we want to talk to one of our stroke experts.

Ashley: We’ve found with one of the things that we’re watching, with how AI is changing the search, is the need for those authentic voices. We’re featuring the actual medical staff, featuring the people on the frontline, and building more of awareness around those, not their personality, their authority, like this is the person who is giving us information. It’s not just generic. There’s actually a person behind it because people are just craving authentic, real content. They want to trust having a person behind it, gives them that trust. “Here is the provider. Here’s his point of view, his research.” Give the signals to AI that this is credible, this is something that you can trust.

Ben: Yes, that’s going to be really important. It’s a huge responsibility on the AI side of things because the deepfakes and the misinformation that is flooding the internet right now through AI, it’s really dangerous. It is going to be more and more important. I think that people connect more with local medical professionals rather than Dr. Smith in Colorado has said this. “Well, I don’t know Dr. Smith, and nobody that I know knows Dr. Smith, so I would rather talk to Dr. Jones who my aunt or uncle went to and had a good experience.”

Then I can go online and see that, “Yes, they know exactly what they’re talking about. I like the way that they talk. I like the way that they deliver things.” They can make that connection when she is their doctor.

Ashley: That’s a great segue to another signal that has always been important in healthcare, is the review aspect. Reviews have always been important. That is something that it’s been just the foundational thing. We know we need to do reviews. I think AI, for that reason, is we actually want to hear from people, what do they think of this facility? Reviews are mattering in a new way. Is that something that you’ve seen and you’ve been working on at UofL Health?

Ben: Yes, 1,000%. We actually recently implemented a text message campaign to boost our Google Reviews. Not necessarily in our official way but common across healthcare, no matter where you’re at. Unhappy patients are much more likely to go leave a review on Google than happy patients. We do do patient surveys. The patient surveys were coming back glowing reviews, fantastic comments.

I’m like, “Why are we not telling the story?” It gave us the opportunity to say, “Okay, let’s not necessarily move some of the reviews but let’s see if we can get some positive Google Reviews as well.” Before we started, we probably averaged about 200 reviews a month, a 3.5-star rating. Now that we’ve become proactive on that, we’re actually seeing 1,500 reviews a month with an average 4.8-star rating.

Ashley: That’s incredible. People just need that reminder they’re happy, but if they’re not being asked–

Ben: Reminder, and it’s just like if you own a bakery, people love your bakery, they come back every single day, but never do they think about stopping and leaving a Google Review unless you ask. Sometimes those Google Reviews, well, I noticed that AI was returning– If you say, “I’m looking for a cardiologist. Who is the best cardiologist near me?” We’re talking to AI in that conversation. AI was pulling back a mix of Google Reviews, but they were also pulling back a lot of Healthgrades Reviews. Back in the day, Healthgrades had their SEO game on point. I mean, it was top search every single time.

That was one of the other things to say, “Okay, we’re not just going to get Google Reviews, we need to get Healthgrade Reviews too because that’s where AI is pulling a lot of that information from,” so we’re constantly mimicking patient behavior. At the end of the day, we’re all patients. The doctors are patients at some point, obviously they have more connections than the average person in regards to who they seek care with. We try to walk that patient journey to say, “Okay, if I’m looking for this, am I getting the accurate information? Is it right?” I’ve used AI queries where I’m looking for certain measurements, and it comes back in the metric system. I’m like, “I’m American. Why–“

Ashley: “You know where I’m at?”

Ben: Yes. I’m like, “I don’t need meters and 120 feet.”

Ashley: We talked about website a little bit, but just thinking about that digital front door and that friction and understanding who the patient is, the consumer is, what’s the number one friction point that you’ve seen and that you guys have worked on to improve?

Ben: Friction point is every single time we want to run a campaign or we want to inform the public about a new offering that we have, a new technology, or [unintelligible 00:16:27], or whatever that we have at our facilities, the question always is, “Who’s going to answer the phone? Who’s going to be taking these email inquiries?” We do have a call center, but me personally, when I’m trying to call my doctor’s office and I get routed out to a call center, it’s frustrating. I’m like, “I just want to ask one simple question. I don’t need to get run around, or there’s a deadline, or there’s a prior authorization requirement for a prescription.”

There’s a lot of these things that are extremely common, and I think it’s important to identify those commonalities and then streamline. Those are our opportunities where it’s, “This is repetitive, this needs to be solved, it’s a recurring problem,” and we need to be careful about technology, which maybe AI will come into that and solve the issue, but there’s so much opportunity to fix it. Booking an appointment with the doctor should be as easy as reserving a table at your favorite restaurant.

Ashley: 100%. How have you collaborated with the operations team, the front staff team? Is that something that you work closely with, or is there another counterpart? How do you get over those hurdles to get that front door just as seamless as possible?

Ben: That’s what we’re working on right now, and that’s going to be a big push for 2026, is breaking down those silos. Our organization is still fairly young. We’re five years in. It was comprised of multiple healthcare systems. We’re still operating on two different EHRs, which needs to be unified. That has some complexity to it, but conversations are starting to happen. We’re reaching across the aisles. We’re getting out of our silos. We’re putting the right people in the room at the same time. I can’t tell you how many times that we’ve gone to a class or a training.

I’m like, “Wait a minute, you’re on that team, or you’re on that team?” I’m like, “Let’s talk after this meeting. Let’s get together.” So much gets accomplished with that 30 minutes of just putting the right people in the right room at the right time. We’ve been able to make major strides with that, and we’re continuing to do that. We’re building upon that momentum. Again, just taking time to pause, “Hey, this is a common problem. Let’s fix it real quick. Let’s get the right people in the right room and come up with a solution.” We’ve got a high success rate on doing that.

Ashley: Awesome.

Ben: People are getting energized about it, and they’re getting excited. The only way to go is up from here. We can just continue to make– When they say, “How to eat an elephant?” One bite at a time. That’s what we’re doing. We’re taking bite-sized improvements. Every day, we’re inching forward to a better experience for our patients. We are looking at that full end-to-end journey.

Not only do we want to acquire the patient but we want them to have a good experience when they come in. We want them to leave, and then we want them to come back. We want them to remember that good experience and say, “Yes, I’m going to go back there again. I’m going to recommend my friends go there because I had a great experience.” All the marketing in the world, you can make it look as nice as pie, but once they get to the front door and they have a bad experience, they’re not going to come back.

Ashley: I understand. That’s something we see. Marketing can only do so much. We can make, like you said, the prettiest website, the best ads, the whole digital experience can be wonderful, but as soon as you get to that one phone call where they can’t get through, it falls apart. Marketing can’t fix that. We like to call it Marketing Ops. MOps is what we coined it. It’s not an overnight fix. It’s definitely a many-year elephant to eat, which you said.

Looking ahead, a lot of people have website projects on their mind. They’re trying to adapt to this new AI discover landscape and how can they prepare to make sure that if they are building a new website, if they’re building a new front door, what are the things that you’ve learned that you’re like this is the number one tip or thing that they really just need to be aware of and to think about looking ahead for a new website project?

Ben: If you had a whiteboard on the wall, you put the patient in the middle. Two primary things that people are going to utilize your website for is purpose or intent. It should be a mixture of both, but they shouldn’t have to hunt through 16 clicks and 15 pages of information to be able to find the call to action to get what they need. I’ve worked with agencies in the past where they’re all about predictive, basically through cookies.

If somebody comes to the website and they’re three months pregnant, then they come back to the website six months from now, then we can show them relevant content for somebody that’s six months along in their pregnancy versus three months, so it’d be more relevant content. It’s like quit trying to play the mind game and figure all that stuff out. Just make your website easy to navigate.

Ashley: So, they can take the direction, like you said, find the right signal, the right way-finding to get to where they need to be.

Ben: Yes. Personalization is what they called it, yes.

Ashley: Oh, yes.

Ben: The personalization, it’s just make the navigation easy, make it make sense. Not everybody thinks the same way in a categorical sense. A top menu may not make the most sense, but maybe you can drop a button down at the bottom.

Ashley: Do you do UX testing or anything like that to understand the primary ways that people think? There’s definitely variations, but do you do any testing like that to see how people think about information or how to structure a site, keywords, things like that?

Ben: That’s something that I’m hoping we’re going to implement more after we make our initial changes. We want to test and track that as far as getting some folks in, do a panel, have them come in and navigate this website, give us feedback; all education levels, backgrounds, experiences. I know when I’m approaching design and web, I’ll keep my mom in mind. She’s not tech-savvy. Like if my mom can find it, then we’re in good shape.

Ashley: Let’s wrap this up and think about one of the questions that we like to ask people, is if you just have a 20% increase in budget, if we just said start off 2026 with this much, what would you be focused on for 2026? Wrap it up there. That’s your focus.

Ben: Again, it ties back to that end-to-end patient experience enhancement, focusing on high-priority and high-impact areas, making it simple to streamline scheduling, mimicking simple online reservations at restaurants. It’s got to be that easy. That’s what people are coming to expect. That’s what they’re accustomed to. I do think that healthcare is going to have to take a retail-minded approach or an e-commerce-minded approach to the way that we serve patients moving forward because retail and e-commerce is training people how to use the internet, how to use search, how to find things, how to find information, how to book appointments, how to book hotel rooms. It’s all along those same lines.

We’ve got to get on board, and we’ve got to get up to the speed. With that, going back to the digital way-finding, that would be a big one because we do have a big downtown campus. It’s constantly changing with construction, road closures, everything else. The easier that we can help patients navigate that, we’re going to reduce missed appointments, we’re going to reduce [unintelligible 00:23:01] patients.

Also, it’s one of those things that at the end of the day, you think about it, somebody that’s been waiting three months to get on to see a specialist and then they missed the appointment because they couldn’t figure out how to get there. That’s delayed care, and it’s not fair to the patient. It’s not fair to the resources, to the healthcare system. Those are the types of things I think that we have to find solutions for.

Ashley: I love it. That is keeping the patient at the center of everything that you do, making sure that they have that access digitally, in person, working with the operational teams to make it a reality. It’s not easy. Marketing can’t do it alone, but it’s so important.

Ben: Yes.

Ashley: Ben, this has been great. This is such a great conversation. I really thank you for joining Ignite. If listeners want to connect with you, where can they find you?

Ben: They can find me at, just go to benwhitaker.com. It’ll forward to my LinkedIn page. I’m happy to connect on there. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.

Ashley: Great. Thanks, Ben.

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