The Human Side of Martech: Operations, Data, and the Patient Experience

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, Cardinals experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex: What’s going on, guys? This is going to be a blast. We’ve got one of the biggest names in health, one of the most fun people I’ve ever met, and we’re going to talk real cool stuff. It’s like what I’ve been hammering on about LinkedIn. about healthcare marketing, it’s not that sophisticated. It’s just not easy to do at scale, but we’re going to talk through that with Chelsea of how to roll out acquisition and what matters in tracking and all that fun stuff. She’s in New Orleans. Don’t hold the same fan thing against her. She’s still reeling from it, and they’re going to have a terrible year. She’s already down. Don’t kick her more. Chelsea, welcome to Ignite. Thank you so much for having me.

Chelsea Lockhart: Pumped to be here.

Alex: I’m pumped about your football team, but at least-

Chelsea: Yes, that’s okay. Let’s go.

Alex: -you’re in a safe place for the next 15 minutes. Tell them where you work, and what do you do there?

Chelsea: Sure. I lead marketing platforms at Sutter Health, which is one of the largest health systems in California, and honestly, in the country. We’re serving about three million patients, trying to get people care when and where they need it.

Alex: I love it. Your job there is what?

Chelsea: Mostly focused in the marketing operations world, so really, focused in the space of connecting all the dots in marketing technology, bringing our platforms to life, getting patients the right messages at the right time.

Alex: I love it. That’s not easy to do, right? The journey is complicated. How do you get to them in the right way, in a compliant way, all that fun stuff? Talk us through some of your favorite solutions. How do you get to mama at the right time when she’s making a decision for her family in a not-creepy and a very compliant way? How are we doing? What’s your-

Chelsea: Oh, certainly.

Alex: -favorite tech stuff, system stuff?

Chelsea: Your girl is very deep in the world of a Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Run deep with that tool, and it’s a favorite solution of mine, for sure. Sutter’s actually working towards growing our future with Salesforce as well. Currently working in some smaller marketing automation platforms that have been great partners to us as well. Honestly, love a good dashboard. Tableau is making the world go round over here.

Everything we’re doing is EMR integrated, and I think that’s the secret to our success, is really that timeliness and relevance of getting that personalized message to people. To do that at scale, you’ve got to have the fancy tools that make it happen.

Alex: Let’s talk about them. I went to Dreamforce, and half of the people that sat around the table were like, “Hey, it’s shelfware. We couldn’t figure out how to get it rolled out.” I think you might be the 1% that’s actually integrated it with EMR. Are you telling me that you know Cindy came in for- I don’t want to say mammogram, too serious -for an ACL tear, got a consult on the MRI, ended up getting surgery, and then actually became a patient value of that? Is that all tied to the ad, to the advertising stuff?

Chelsea: Today, Sutter is working with a partner called Cured to make that happen for our marketing automation system. It is. It is fully integrated into our EMR, so we’re triggering communication based on the different needs that we see that people have in a very non-creepy way to make sure that that messaging and people sharing their data with us is safe and secure, and being not used just to market to them endlessly.

Alex: I love that. What was the tech platform you just mentioned? Is that CD–

Chelsea: Cured. No, Cured is a marketing automation platform that’s-

Alex: Got it.

Chelsea: -different. Email triggering. It’s very focused for, I think- it’s sort of a startup in the healthcare targeting space -very focused on just getting things out the door for teams, trying to make it happen.

Alex: Everybody wants to know the new, latest thing to try to get an edge. Doesn’t Marketing Cloud have a lot of automation? How is it different from what you could have done with [crosstalk]-

Chelsea: It definitely [crosstalk]

Alex: Journey Builder, I think it was?

Chelsea: Yes, it definitely does. My background is all Marketing Cloud, but at Sutter, we’re currently encouraged to make it happen, so I’m very well-versed in the differences. Cured is perfect for a team that doesn’t have a ton of tech resources and really just needs to get something up and moving, and they make it simple to do that. They’ve got some prepackaged journeys that can happen. They help you tie all of your data together to do a Journey-type science. They’re still in the process of rolling out a lot of new features like dynamic content or multi-phase journeys, so they’re up and coming in the space, for sure.

Alex: Got it.

Chelsea: When it comes to Marketing Cloud, I always say like an Android phone, you can make it do anything, but it’s not that perfect iPhone out the box that’s going to walk you through how to do it all. You’ve got to know how to customize it. You’ve got to know– have an implementation partner on your side to do it. It really just depends on what type of shop you are and what sort of thing you can undertake when it comes to an implementation.

Alex: Yes, let’s talk through that. Cured, by the way, that sounds cool. I’m going to go check them out. We’ll get them on the podcast. That sounds interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about the Salesforce stuff. Everyone has grand aspirations. We need a CRM. We need to know where [unintelligible 00:04:46] . Let’s do something and then remarket and have journeys and all this fun stuff. They don’t all have a Chelsea on staff, right, for the implementation part. Are those the restrictions? You need a Chelsea. You need someone that has the time and dedication. Not one marketing director in-house, and now you’ve just added this [unintelligible 00:05:02]. Tell us what you need to make a CRM implementation successful.

Chelsea: You have to be ready to know what you’re taking on. If you’ve got tools and partners within your IS team that are going to help you with your connections and tying all those data points together, and you’ve got room to bring in a Chelsea to focus on this fully, then you can be in a good space to do this. Look, today Marketing Cloud, for a lot of people, still means learning SQL, and learning how to write queries of who’s getting what with SQL. That’s a reality.

They’re working on this, and there’s a lot of new cool features coming out with their data cloud platform where this is going to be a thing of the past in the future, it’s tough stuff. It does really cool things, but you’ve got to be in the weeds knowing how to do it to make it do those things.

Alex: Salesforce talks so much about their AI agents and stuff. Bro,

Chelsea: [unintelligible 00:05:49]

Alex: -if you’re still using SQL–

Chelsea: If my account AU was on the call, he would be like, “Girl, get Data Cloud,” and , “It’s a thing of the past, and you don’t have to do all that.”

Alex: For another $150,000 a month, we can solve it for you.

Chelsea: Right. Everybody’s got solutions, the AI Frontier, ChatGPT, to write your query. It’s a whole world. It’s your oyster now with all of this, but it’s not for everybody. If you are a smaller system that doesn’t have the ability to invest in these massive tools and this massive implementation,-

Alex: Don’t do it.

Chelsea: Don’t start.

Alex: Don’t do it. HubSpot’s now HIPAA compliant.

Chelsea: Great.

Alex: Can do a lot of that stuff, I’d say. I’m in bars, so I don’t get kickbacks from anybody. I think the smaller situation, maybe that’s a good starting point. I think Salesforce is off the chain. We have Salesforce. Can integrate with everything. We love when clients have it, if they have the right internal resour– all right, enough about Salesforce. You love tech. What’s your favorite? What would you drop?

Chelsea: For us today, when we look at the stack, if it’s helping personalization at scale, or if it’s helping get the right message to the right person at the right time, it’s got to stay. If we sat through a sales pitch, and we thought it was going to do this, and it ended up being another dashboard on the shelf, or another thing that we’re having to add all these manual workarounds to make it happen, it’s got to go. For us, it comes to the core of, does this make our foundational lives tick? That’s the stuff that we’ve got to have. For us today, that looks like Cured, and it looks like we’re in the process of bringing in Unlock, which is our HRA partner, and working through bringing in leads that matter to people. That timeliness and relevance, the partners that focus on that, that’s the ones we love.

Alex: Good. Hey, Unlock, another agency, right? Unlock agency?

Chelsea: They do do a ton of agency work as well to promote. They have just a ton of cool health risk assessment tech that we love.

Alex: Shout out to them as well. I love it. What would you drop? Obviously, not on important work.

Chelsea: Yes, they can’t go. We’ve got big marketing automation dreams. Cured is a fantastic partner to us. I think we’ll grow eventually with that. Nobody’s on my DataBurn [00:07:41] [crosstalk]

Alex: Oh, yes. Also, that would be weird because then we would have just told them that it’s not working out, so that’s a dumb question. [laughs] We’ll put it to them.

Chelsea: Nobody [inaudible 00:07:50] DataBurn. We’ve got a lot of people who try to come to us to sell solutions, things that we know what it would take behind the scenes to make that stuff happen. The sales pitch sounds really nice and really great, but I think we’ve got to get real about what it takes to do these things at scale.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. It’s not easy, and we just got to do some simple stuff, but even simple at scale is very hard. I know we talk a lot about journeys, but you are passionate about that because you talk to a lot of people. There is a big drop-off when they go visit. Tell them. What do you hear on the streets? What does the patient side that’s changed how you think about our jobs?

Chelsea: Totally. When you work in healthcare marketing, you become everyone’s therapist for how their experience with their doctor is going.

Alex: We’re in healthcare. That’s what I tell them. I’m in healthcare.

Chelsea: Yes, by proxy. By proxy, you start hearing a lot of stuff. Can’t get through a dinner party without, “Hey, by the way, this happened to me as a doctor.” I think the dots that I started to put together in my career were that, okay, patients do not know the difference in marketing, and they’re scared that it’s happening. To them, it’s all one and the same experience. You’ll start hearing stories about, “Hey, I got this message from my doctor, and they were asking me to do this thing. I tried to do it on the portal, and it didn’t work.”

I hear this, and I understand, okay, they didn’t have a visit type set up for that, or the integration behind the scenes wasn’t firing in the right way, or you got this at the wrong time because that journey logic did not do what they thought it was going to do. Patients don’t see any of that, and so when there is breakdowns in what’s happening in that experience, it’s not just a failure of the branding was bad or it wasn’t a great marketing experience. IThis is a failure of the health system not providing care in the best way. To me, that became like what we do really matters at the end of the day to help patients experience their care.

Alex: Yes, it comes back. When we screw up as marketers and there’s a disconnect, it becomes about the patient experience, and they hold the whole thing. I tore my ACL playing basketball. I went and got an MRI somewhere. While the health systems won’t name them, it showed that it was, in fact, torn. Radiologists, everybody called, in fact, torn. Not one email, not one call, not one text after to schedule me with an ortho to get the surgery, so I ended up going to another health system. Breakdown, boom, you just lost $50,000.

That’s probably the least bad scenario when the messaging is incorrect or inauthentic. That’s just a bad look. Looking forward, so we’re in the latter half of ’25. That’s crazy.

Chelsea: Wild.

Alex: Everybody’s talking about AI. Is that what you’re most focused on? What are you thinking about for the rest of the year?

Chelsea: Gosh. You know how you go on your own LinkedIn tirades about things. Mine as all about the AI space. AI this, AI that. I think healthcare marketing needs to get real. It’s definitely reality check time in our space. This tech is coming. It’ll change things. It’ll transform. What do our jobs look like in 20 years? Who knows? I think the big focus right now is getting your house in order because none of that works if your foundation isn’t clean.

Alex: What’s the foundation, in your opinion?

Chelsea: It’s all of your data. Pump garbage in, you’re just going to get faster garbage with AI, kind of thing. It is a multiplier is what it’s doing. If right now your tracking’s not working, and you’re not coding things correctly, and your data doesn’t work at scale, put AI in the mix, and it’s just faster and worse type deal. I think for us, it’s all about fully understanding how the baseline works. I think we’re also talking about how the divide between traditional marketing and martech, it’s growing exponentially deeper.

Gone are the days where you can be a marketer that doesn’t understand how tracking is working or how UTM code play into what you’re doing, or needing to see the visibility on a downstream lead and how valuable that is. The abyss there is growing, and the marketers who can’t get in that boat are going to get left behind.

Alex: Thank you for the reality check. Today on LinkedIn, I said someone who was talking about AI, I said, “Dude, stop.” It’s a force multiplier. It doesn’t actually do anything.

Check it out. I’m seeing so many guys in the business.

Chelsea: That is true.

Alex: Healthcare marketers, what’s up? It’s Alex from the future. Guess what? Scaling Up: The Healthcare Performance Marketing Summit is back. Scaling Up is focused entirely on driving patient acquisition to your group. You’re talking the largest provider group, health system leaders, everything it takes to drive a patient to your practice or health system. From media, BI, analytics, performance creative, SEO, AI, because we’ve got to have that acronym in there.

October 28th and 29th, thousands of healthcare marketers are going to be showing up to this. It’s virtual, and it is free. That’s the best part. Last two years, we were charging for it. This year, I want every healthcare marketing [unintelligible 00:12:27]. We need to connect more patients with care. We all do. We all need to do it together. I’ll see you there. Scaling Up.

Let’s first start with what you said, tagging, tracking, those things, and then we’ll talk about how you learn those. That isn’t their only job. First, I want to start big health system. Put it in context of the big health system, but I also think you know about provider groups that don’t have all the complica– what is most important tag, track, measure, in your opinion?

Chelsea: I think if you’re running a campaign, and you are just looking at, oh, we saw a lift in scheduling for whatever service we were providing, go back to the drawing board. Figure out how to make your tracking real. That is number one pet peeve for me is there are so many basic things you can put into play to be able to see like, we did this thing, and these people took this action we asked them to take, and here’s the actual dollar amount that we’ve seen from that. It’s going to make your strategy superpowered because then you can actually start to see what’s taking hold, and what’s making a real difference.

Alex: Overall lift, not good enough. We got more appointments, we got more procedures. Not good enough. We have to be able to measure. Is it possible to get down to return on average sizing? Is it good enough to know booked appointments, do you think, by service line? Most provider-

Chelsea: It’s a great-

Alex: -groups have one service line.

Chelsea: -start. It is an incredible start to have that. If you don’t have that, you’re client-blocked. If you’re going to go anywhere, I’ll focus there. The ROI science of healthcare marketing is really tricky because-

Alex: Talk. Reimbursement.

Chelsea: -I think we know we work in a large system that when I drive an orthopedic clinic appointment, there might be actual dollars lost from clinic appointments there because the real power of that service line is the lifetime value. We may lose money on that initial visit of someone going to an ambulatory space because the overhead is so high on making that happen. The service line as itself, as a whole, is profitable, but that is based on getting people in through that funnel and then having them do these bigger surgeries or having them need these higher levels of care.

You’ve got to get people in the door to do that. Finding a math that explains all that and makes all that work at a glance, really tough stuff, so I think if you can just show the appointment growth, that is a great place to begin.

Alex: Man, Chelsea, you’re one of the top five best people we’ve ever had on this podcast. Don’t tell the other 110. This is awesome. It’s what we preach every day, and I rarely hear, it is finding the math that works. It is hard finding a math that works, that gets down to the whole thing. We’d love to have you on our side every day trying to explain to leads and clients that sometimes you just got to get them in the door. You might lose on that first appointment.

Now I’m going back in for more knee surgeries because you get arthritis, and so just getting me in for that loss on the MRI would have been worth how much? Over 40 years here in Atlanta, right? I love what you’re saying. When we talk about just getting to booked appointments, it’s online schedule.

Chelsea: [unintelligible 00:15:13]

Alex: Email, form, and call. Is that good enough?

Chelsea: Yes. That’s like the bread and butter of it. There are a lot more sophisticated things that you can put into place, but there’s so many different privacy concerns that come into play for health systems trying to track all the way through. You got to work hand in hand with your legal and privacy teams, and make your BFFs there to make the world go round in that space. Using the information that people give you is a great foundation for it.

Alex: I love that. BFFs with legal and privacy. I assume ops, too, because you have to know where to drive capacity. Chelsea has a lot of BFFs, I’m sure, there.

Chelsea: So many.

Alex: I want to go back. You mentioned AI, very important, for as a force multiplier, it helps analyze. What I’ve realized is helps with analyze and creating variations with design and copy and all that stuff. It’s all based on inputs and if you feed it poorly measured and fact things, you’re just going to get more garbage. Let’s get back to how do you become great at the measurements and tracking and all that stuff, for those that have a big-time job? How do you get great at it? Is it just by doing? Is there anything out there that they can be watching?

Chelsea: It comes from the roots. I think the core of it is get curious about how it works. If there’s somebody in your crew that’s in charge of that downstream revenue and the downstream tracking, and you’re just trusting the vendor black box said that it’s worth this much money, how’d they do that? Where did that come from? Where does that math live? I think once you get into that mindset of how do we know this stuff and what’s possible to know, really transforms it.

It’s more of this, how do I see these different pieces coming together? How do I connect the dots, type thing here? Get curious about how it works, I think, is my first piece of advice. There’s also so many experts in this space on this. Connecting in healthcare is huge. The network and building, of meet other health systems who are doing this who are not your direct competitors in this space. I’ve met so many different health systems who I’ve learned from and seen, how are you guys doing this? What are you doing to make this happen? People are open. It’s a great community. Just lean on that.

Alex: Are you going to the big conferences? HCIC, SHSMD, all that stuff, or do you just hit them up on LinkedIn? How can more–

Chelsea: I would definitely run the [chuckles] conference circuit for sure. Yes, that’s a great foundation. Also, LinkedIn is great too. Find the people who are talking about it. Find the you somewhere else in the health system that you admire and reach out.

Alex: It is really that simple. Let’s try and get to the answer. I tell people, like, you don’t have to just sit there and wonder all day. Just go on LinkedIn. It’s in the connection request. Hey, I’m looking for help in healthcare marketing. You know the thing I think we all love about this? Everybody’s mission-driven and really wants to make the world a better place by connecting patients with care, and really wants, because we all believe in that, they will help you when you say, “I’m trying to get better at this thing.”

I think Chelsea also mentioned something that’s important. She’s talking about being– making BFFs with the finance team, but if there are tech wizards and IT in there and all that stuff, and you’re trying to figure out how to connect their website to the actual end product, CRM, EMR, just go sit with them and talk to them. Lots of AI courses, and I think people are getting really distracted with all of that before figuring out how to just cover the basics, because, Chelsea, C-suite is now coming to all of us and saying, what did you drive for the money I gave you? Times are tougher, and we just need to get back to that. Stop talking about this AI fancy stuff. Usain Bolt speed like you mentioned to me earlier.

Chelsea: Yes, totally.

Alex: You’ve got to crawl, bro. Why are you talking about spending?

Chelsea: Yes, totally. We’ve all got the Usain Bolt-level dreams, but it’s all about locking it in to, you got to crawl first.

Alex: You got to crawl, and that’s understanding what you’re driving for the amount. Then the fun part of that- actually, this will probably be my final question for you -the fun part of that is when you have the basics, you can also then forecast out where to spend the next best dollar because you know what’s working. That’s what C-suite also wants to know. That’s cool that you drove X for Y. Now, if I gave you W, what happens? That’ll help you grow your team. Okay, that’s fun. Are you guys doing anything cool with modeling, forecasting, any of that kind of fun stuff in media?

Chelsea: Yes. We are in the depths of the making the math happen and figuring out what numbers make the most sense for us to tell the story about what we’re doing, but I think it’s also bringing our team to the table of what problems is the health system trying to solve. I think people still really don’t understand the marketing automation space and what the power of the tech we have is.

When we get to the table in those conversations, it’s like, “Oh, if you would have told me you’re trying to solve for this, we could have sent a message at this point, and it would have intersected the journey here and really could have made a huge difference in automating rather than you all calling a million people to make this happen,” or whatever other strategy they’re putting in place.

Alex: You’re telling me that the gold is already in your first party data. You don’t, maybe, need more and more advertising. You just need to make sure people are following their plan of care and referring their friends and all that kind of fun stuff.

Chelsea: Totally.

Alex: That’s what Chelsea’s trying to tell us. Let’s make sure you’re nurturing people with the right message, not an annoying or an inappropriate one. Chelsea, that’s good. What’s the campaign you’re most proud of? In 60 seconds. The one thing that strikes you over the last year that you want to impart on people?

Chelsea I think it’s like a big amalgamation of what we’ve made happen. When I showed up at Sutter, I went from driving a marketing automation Ferrari to driving more of like a Toyota Camry, [chuckles] I feel, and I think it’s a testament of, look, the tech still does the basic things I need it to do, and at the end of the day, the only God we serve is timeliness and relevance. That’s going to drive things for our patients.

If we can get them that right message at the right time and the right channel type deal, you can move the needle. Even if you’re not out here journey splitting to the gods and changing all of this crazy dynamic content and all of these shiny things in our space, you can still do big things by just focusing on making sure the messages that people are getting are timely and relevant to them.

Alex: You gave us the headline of the century right there. “The only God we serve is timeliness and relevance.” God, you’re already here. I love this 15, 20 minutes. Longer than Chelsea would have liked, but I really enjoyed it because it got us back to foundation with so much fru frued French, and Reddit this and that. It’s too much right now. God, I’m seeing so many basic things not being done, and Chelsea’s bringing us back to it, which I love.

You know what the interesting thing about Reddit, I’ll give it credit, is you know why people are so into it? It’s because it’s humans. It’s humans talking to humans, and I think it’s showing that the AI robot thing is, maybe, not the future we all are ready. Probably getting there,-

Chelsea: Totally.

Alex: -but think we’re [unintelligible 00:21:28]

Chelsea: I’m a Google Reddit searcher as well, and I think it’s like you find these little niche things that the AI is having trouble surfacing for you. Like, oh, somebody had the experience that I had. God, let me figure it out.

Alex: There’s some really cool stuff, and they’re getting their doctors on there for AMAs. It’s cool. We’re hearing from actual providers, actual patients. It’s like, “The last bastion of actual humans on the internet.” Chelsea, thank you for this. This was awesome. One of the most fun times, educational times I’ve ever had on Ignite. Thank you.

Chelsea: Of course. Glad to be here.

Announcer: 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.