Pediatric trust beats chasing algorithms

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: Hey, everybody. Welcome back for another episode of the Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Ashley Petrochenko here, and I’m so excited for today’s guest. She has spent more than a decade in the pediatric space. We’re going to talk about all things, content marketing, building trust, and how do you reach parents who are looking for specialized pediatric care. Without further ado, let’s welcome Karen Wright to the podcast. Welcome, Karen.

Karen Wright: Thanks for having me.

Ashley Petrochenko: Thanks. I just heard that you also have ran a podcast in your career, so this is going to be really fun. Podcast to podcast. It’ll be a good conversation. I think to kick this off, let’s jump right in and talk about a core part of marketing is understanding the needs of the people you’re trying to serve, the people you’re trying to give care to. How do you think about that? What does that look like in practice in your career? How are you really understanding that need and then converting that into the content marketing plans?

Karen Wright: I think you need to be understanding your customers, the most important thing you can be doing as a marketer. I think all too often organizations, whether they’re within the healthcare space or not, they have in mind what they want to say and what they want to have have happen. Strong marketing is really the intersection of understanding who your customer is, what they’re looking to achieve, what problems they’re trying to solve, and then finding a way, the best way to communicate that you are going to help them achieve that.

I think any marketer worth their salt spends a lot of time getting to know their customer. As much as you can be doing things within your own customer base, when I was in a hospital, then you’d be trying to survey your patient families to understand what they like, what they don’t like. It’s also a lot of other surveys. You’re going to do stuff with third-party resources, but you really need to understand who they are, what are they doing every day. Sure, you can say, “I’m going to put something on The View to reach moms.” Plenty of moms aren’t sitting around watching The View, so you need to really think about different segments of your audience and the best way to hit them.

Ashley Petrochenko: Yes, and that’s a really good point. I’ve never watched The View. There is a segment of people who are doing certain things.

Karen Wright: Sure, of course.

Ashley Petrochenko: The parent demographics have changed. The majority of parents are millennials and a rising number are Gen Z even. These people are digital natives. Their first destination is not typically a hospital website. In your experience, when they’re coming to a doctor, a provider, what have they already read? Where are they looking for information? What is the expectation they have for a provider at that point in the conversation?

Karen Wright: I can say that parents, anybody searching for healthcare, whether it’s– I think it’s even more heightened when it’s for your child because anything, when you’re taking care of your kids, is paramount to a parent. I can say that as a parent, but people would never come as a blank slate. Since way before you and I were born, people would come to a doctor and say, “Oh, I heard this, or I read this, or I saw that.” That’s nothing new.

I think it’s more the preponderance of sources and information and the speed of it is really what has changed. When I was a kid and I wanted to watch Mighty Mouse, I had to think about the time and the day that it was on versus now. Anything people want is at the touch of a button, whether it’s their food delivered, something answered through AI, or anything, it’s just delivered that way. We have to understand that information is coming at people all over the place.

However, as a healthcare marketer, it’s also important to remember that people still trust their doctors above everybody else. They may come to their doctor with more information or “Hey, doctor, tell me about this medication, or this alternative therapy, or I heard this.” They may have more information or likely do coming into it, but they still are trusting that their doctor is educated and informed. I think it’s more trust and verify now than just trust, with the amount of information they’re getting in.

Ashley Petrochenko: Yes, it’s at their fingertips in many ways, but they don’t 100% trust anyone without extra reassurance from the person they trust most. Thinking about those sources of information, I mentioned that you guys had ran a podcast. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that? What was the goal? How did that help you reach certain segments of people, and how did that work out for you guys?

Karen Wright: Sure. At Boston Children’s, we thought a lot about all of the different audiences. The audiences are not just parents. You’ve got parents, you’ve got referring providers, you’ve got other caregivers beyond the parent. The world is not necessarily just a nuclear family anymore. You also had potential donors. You had people that are more in government that you need to influence for legislative purposes. There’s a lot.

For this particular avenue, for the podcast, the concept was it is targeting that specific caregiver audience. It’s mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, whomever that might be. Thinking about the questions that they have all the time about whether it’s a more complex health issue or something that’s more straightforward. Thinking about the fact that podcasts are continuing to grow in popularity, we want to be hitting them wherever they’re looking for their information. We want to be on all the major social platforms. We want to be on a podcast platform. We want to be out there on YouTube. We want to be out there with different avenues so that we can reach people where they’re interested.

For the podcast, it was meant to be– At the beginning of every episode, we had a parent question that would say– We had one on drugs and alcohol. It was saying, “When kids drink at a party at home, that’s okay because I’m there.” Then, the whole point is that by the end of the entire episode, that question, a whole lot more on the topic have been answered. You’ve got the voice of the parent.

Then each episode, we had a consistent host who was a simulation expert, a parent, a clinician that would answer a guest from Boston Children’s in a specialty, in that area. For the drugs and alcohol, it was someone that was the chief of the substance abuse program. That’s the way that we did it. It was thinking of what are the questions on people’s minds.

Ashley Petrochenko: You really had experts speaking to–, answering these questions.

Karen Wright: Yes.

Ashley Petrochenko: Nice.

Karen Wright: Whether it’s “Should my kid consider taking a GLP-1, or I’ve just found out my baby’s in my belly and they have a cleft lip or cleft palate, what do I do? How do I choose a pediatrician?” It was meant to be really targeting the kinds of questions just come up as a parent, from prenatal all the way through when they’re converting to adult providers.

Ashley Petrochenko: We’re finding so much that having those trusted experts, the people who are the top of their field speaking to these issues, answering these questions is playing a really big part of actually how do you gain authority within the LLM space. LLMs are looking for not generic content that anyone could speak to, but they want to hear from those trusted experts. Is that something that you guys were considering? How are you thinking about visibility and ChatGPT and other LLMs?

Karen Wright: That is what any healthcare marketer, and certainly at Boston Children’s, we thought about for any piece of content. It is about credibility, originality, and being clear. It’s not about chasing an algorithm because algorithms, as we know, are constantly changing. It’s being a source that is worth listening to.

Ashley Petrochenko: They do change. I think just a couple of weeks ago, Reddit got downranked as a contributing source for ChatGPT. Yes, they change all the time. The focus is really just being credible, authoritative voice in the space. That’s the number one principle.

Karen Wright: Yes. I would say in healthcare, and certainly pediatric healthcare, it’s also about being human. That is a challenge when everyone’s looking for AI to be a solution for everything in the world right now, but certainly in the marketing space. If you lose the humanity for pediatric marketing, you are going to lose your patients. Even when we talk about a provider video, we have the caregiver videos, and if you look at the profile on the website, it says everything about these people, “This doctor went to Harvard. They have these areas of specialty. They’ve been published in all these different places. They created this new innovative technique,” all of that.

That’s wonderful, but you also have to know that that’s somebody that you’re going to feel comfortable holding your kid in the most scary way, if it’s surgery. I think it’s really important to show the clinician, to show them interacting with the family, to understand that they got into this for a reason, that they love your kid, and they will treat your kid as good as you would have treated them yourself. Humanity is–

Ashley Petrochenko: It sounds like you guys are creating a lot of video content, kind of trying to humanizing the person in their bedside manner, how do they actually physically interact with people.

Karen Wright: Yes. It’s an overall approach, I think. It’s showcasing interactivity and relationships in everything that we do. I think that the table stakes is that they’re smart, successful. Because it’s not the hospital in the middle of nowhere. Boston Children’s Hospital is one of the top, if not, frankly, in my opinion, the top pediatric children’s hospital in the world.

It’s being able to show the relationships that they have. One of my favorite things ever is we had a doctor, her name is Martha Murray, she now heads the orthopedics department at Children’s. She had created this entire new way to do ACL surgery where she was repairing it instead of just taking a tendon from somewhere else and placing it in. There was this video where we saw her looking at the MRI results for her first patient. She saw that it worked.

Her reaction wasn’t look at me, I created this thing, and look at the great job I did. She was so happy for the patient, that genuine emotion. You can’t undervalue that or overvalue that. I think it’s just an overall thing. Whether it’s in a video or if you’re doing something on social, and you’re just getting at what really matters to your audience, what are they worried about, and how are you working with them on that? We did a podcast episode, and I’ve done other content on Lyme disease and ticks. Every single time, I would learn something new from talking to a clinician. That was really neat.

Ashley Petrochenko: That is cool. I think that enthusiasm that someone is bringing, they are genuinely excited and just happy about what they could bring to a patient and capturing that, getting that.

Karen Wright: Right.

Ashley Petrochenko: People ultimately want trust. They want to think that you’re credible, which is almost table stakes in many ways, but then also, do I want to spend my hardest hours of my life with you? Yes, that’s great advice. People are getting information from not only an LLM, just a generative answer. They’re also getting them through social media. Are you guys developing content to people be able to verify or vet, if they’re coming to you with a presumed idea, is there anything you’re doing from a content standpoint to correct things, or this is the right way or approach? How do you think about correcting those assumptions?

Karen Wright: I think that’s happening everywhere right now. For example, in the schools with kids, the beginning of them responding to AI was, “We’re going to check and see if you used AI.” Ultimately, it’s like when people thought, “Oh, the internet, that newfangled internet, that’s going to go by the wayside. We need newspapers.” You have to accept the way the world is moving.

Now schools are learning more that they need to be teaching responsible use. Particularly, I think the generation that’s coming up now, they really care about things being true and accurate, and they have that whole social responsibility aspect. It’s educating them to understand that AI is a tool, it’s not a replacement for using your own critical thinking. Getting the kids to understand that.

I know we did an episode with Dr. Michael Rich at Boston Children’s on AI. I don’t recall if that’s come out yet, but that was one of the things that we definitely talked about in there from the children’s perspective. I think people really should be taking the time to learn and understand what this is. You can literally use AI to create a course load for you to learn and understand AI, which is kind of funny, but terrifying.

Ashley Petrochenko: “Tell me how to use you.” [laughs] “Just check with me.”

Karen Wright: Yes. You have to check your sources. It makes up sources or it misunderstands sources because that’s not what its job is.

Ashley Petrochenko: You have to check your sources. You can’t rely on the machines because they do get things wrong. How does editorial guidelines, or how do you think about the whole content production in a health system space? What was the governance process or things there you would like to speak to?

Karen Wright: We had anything we were talking about clinically that would be having clinical review. Some things are basic. We know that eczema is a form of dermatitis. Okay, well, you know that. Some things a writer would put together based on their knowledge or from research sources, and a clinician would directly be involved in that anyway. In the end, that clinician is looking at it, that person that is educated and an expert in that particular subject is confirming that’s accurate. Because sometimes, if it’s not your area of expertise, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to get it wrong. It’s not intentional, but we have a responsibility to make sure that it’s accurate.

Ashley Petrochenko: Yes. You’re building on those guardrails, that you have these different clinical checkpoints to make sure that what gets out of gate.

Karen Wright: Absolutely.

Ashley Petrochenko: I think that’s so important, especially across other channels too. It’s really easy for things, the message to get muddled too, from website content to what’s published on social. Are you thinking about it across the spectrum of just that clinical review?

Karen Wright: You have to. That’s only when you’re talking about something that is actually clinical in nature. There are some things that aren’t, that don’t require that. We’re back to school, right? If you’re going to be talking about “Okay, here’s some things you can do to make sure that your kid doesn’t get back problems from carrying around a ridiculously heavy backpack all the time,” that doesn’t need clinical review, or if you’re doing something, we did a lot, and we opened up our location in Needham, and there was a lot of stuff about, here’s all the different things that goes into building a new location for a hospital and the level of detail that you care about and the people that are doing it.

Here, the fire engine came one day to come make sure that the safety protocol is there, but that doesn’t require clinical review.

Ashley Petrochenko: Yes.

Karen Wright: It’s being thoughtful.

Ashley Petrochenko: It’s really understanding where it’s essential and building those processes. There is this urgency. Teams are being strapped. They’re looking to AI to be a tool to help them to do more with the less that they often have, where do you apply more critical checks and where do you have more leeway. Looking ahead, we are almost at the end of the year. It’s hard to imagine that we’re about to start Q4 in just a couple of weeks. With that in mind, is there something that you think healthcare marketers should be paying more attention to? What is something that you think should be at top of mind for healthcare marketers going into 2027?

Karen Wright: I honestly think that responsible use of AI is what I’d like to see as more of a focus as opposed to using AI. There’s a lot of push of how you’re going to use it, how many hours, how many tools. I think the most important question that a marketer ever asks is the question of why. Whether it’s a really simple, “Oh, we want you to create a brochure.” “What’s the brochure for? Why do you need it? Does it need to be a brochure? What are we trying to solve?” All those kinds of questions. It’s the same thing.

You need to be thinking of AI can be an incredibly useful tool. It’s a great research tool. It can help you think through brainstorm problems. It can help with different automation and processes, but you need to be thinking of the best way to use it where you’re still maintaining privacy and policy and accuracy. All of that’s important. I would like to see a little bit more just in the general media of information on how to do it right and that it’s not the solution for absolutely everything.

Ashley Petrochenko: Yes. I like this conversation we started with, “Who are you talking to? What do they care about? Then why are you doing it? Are they asking for this? Why are you creating it? How does this align with your organization’s goals?” Those fundamental questions are at the root of content marketing and reaching people with content they actually care about and want to engage with.

Karen Wright: Even when I would talk to the people in the simulation department at Boston Children’s, they would have people come to them and say, “I need this tool.” The same thing. They’d say, “What are you trying to do?” I don’t think that people are intending to be so directive. They’ve gotten that far themselves. When you have the expertise to really do that critical thinking and the evaluation, you’re going to get a better result in the end rather than somebody that’s stereo fashioned and wants something that isn’t really a modern solution. There’s a lot of different aspects to it.

Ashley Petrochenko: The brochure, “Do we really need this flyer? Do we really need this brochure? Do we really need this app that maybe no one’s actually going to use too?”

Karen Wright: Right.

Ashley Petrochenko: It goes both ways. Is someone actually asking for this? Is it going to meet them where they’re at in their care journey, in their children’s care journey?

Karen Wright: I think the internet and then social media and then apps and now AI kept continuously being looked at that solves all of the problems. As things mature, you start to see, “Okay, it solves some problems, and it creates some problems, and now where are we?” I just think that we’re not quite– haven’t figured all that out yet with AI, but we’ll get there.

Ashley Petrochenko: “We’ll get there,” yes. I think it’s always going back to those fundamental questions. I like that. I’m going to ask you a couple of fundamental questions to wrap this up. Some quick tips. I think as marketers in the healthcare space, we are in our world, but sometimes it’s nice to see what other people are doing. Outside of healthcare, is there a brand that inspires you that is a model for what healthcare brand should strive for?

Karen Wright: I think there’s some real easy answers with this one, but what I’m going to go with is Chewy.

Ashley Petrochenko: Chewy.

Karen Wright: I think Chewy is fantastic. I have a Chewy box over there behind my computer. Chewy understands its customers, understand that they see their animals, my dogs are lying on the floor behind me, is a part of their family, but also that a lot of their products are almost commoditized. They’re really coming at it and understand what matters to the customer, consistently overdelivering, solving problems for them with the Autoship and what have you. Some of the things they do, even when somebody loses a pet, they are true to who they are all the way through, and they do a great job.

Ashley Petrochenko: I love that answer. I think they are someone–, what you said, I’ve had some friends who have received some really thoughtful messages after a pet has passed and stuff. That’s a good patient experience. The pet experience is so important because everyone, you like Chewy. I like that.

Karen Wright: Right. You want to foster brand loyalty, that’ll do it. Those people will get another pet, and then they will go back to Chewy.

Ashley Petrochenko: They’ll tell me about it, I’ll tell the next person, and it just snowballs like that.

Karen Wright: Right. People would pay a lot of money to get that kind of word-of-mouth virality.

Ashley Petrochenko: Yes, I know, people who post, my friends post their Chewy box on social all the time, “Look, I got my box today.” It’s like just free advertising, getting it out there, and getting that, like, recommendations. I’m like, “Oh, maybe I should get on Chewy.” That’s great. Okay, how about next question? How about if there’s one marketing opinion, that this is a hill I will die on and always defend, where do you feel like that?

Karen Wright: Oh, that takes me back to the why question. When people look at marketers as a service as opposed to as a strategy, that they’re really missing out. If you just have them do what you specifically ask them to do instead of really giving them the opportunity to weigh in, add value, talk about goals, talk about the customer, the problems you’re trying to solve, you have to talk about it. You can’t just direct. You’re really missing out if you do that.

Ashley Petrochenko: I think most of our listeners will agree. Make the marketing team your partner. They want to be collaborating with operations. They want to be collaborating with sales, referral teams. Marketing needs to be a partner in those conversations.

Karen Wright: It does all the way up. The most successful campaigns, whether– Marketing, it means that they have a CEO that’s really strongly on board. Marketing has to have a seat at the table. They have to be able to give that perspective. People appreciating that. Is a real skill. I think people think, “Oh, it’s marketing, it’s not finance, it’s not legal, what have you,” but it’s true skill. Asking those questions is what gets you to the heart of what you’re trying to achieve.

Ashley Petrochenko: Getting to the heart is such a big part of what marketing is today, that trust feeling, looking at your patients, all great advice. Thank you so much, Karen for joining the Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast.

Karen Wright: My pleasure.

Ashley Petrochenko: It’s been a good conversation. If listeners want to reach you, they can find you on where? LinkedIn, they can reach you there?

Karen Wright: LinkedIn.

Ashley Petrochenko: Great.

Karen Wright: LinkedIn. It’s [unintelligible 00:19:37]Karen, I think, or something like that. You can find me. I’m easy to find on LinkedIn. Karen Wright.

Ashley Petrochenko: We’ll drop it in the show notes so people can get a direct link. Thanks again for joining. We’ll be back next week with another episode of the Ignite: Healthcare Marketing Podcast. Until then, we’ll see you next week.

Karen Wright: Thanks, Ashley.

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