Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
S2 Ep19 The Intersection of Healthcare and Marketing with Stephen Fogg
55 Plays9 months ago
This episode of Dial It In features Stephen Fogg, the head of Fogg Media, a healthcare marketing agency based in North Carolina. Stephen specializes in marketing for healthcare specialty groups like orthopedics, gastroenterology, and anesthesiology. He discusses the importance of specialty marketing and his agency's focus on B2B services in the healthcare industry. Tune in to learn more about Stephen's background and expertise in the field of marketing.
…
Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave Meyer
Connect with Trygve Olsen
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Dial It In' Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations. Hey, Dave. It's good to see you.
00:00:25
Speaker
It's good to see you, Mr. Olson. How are you, Trigby? I'm thinking about getting older and I'm thinking about getting scared about my health. Well, as long as you're thinking about it, I highly recommend getting older. It beats the alternative.
00:00:41
Speaker
Well, I mean, yeah, I have more money, but I also take more time at all. So that's true.
Introducing Steven Fogg and Fogg Media
00:00:46
Speaker
You know, one of the things that we get all the time at our marketing agency is people say, well, you know, I really wish I had somebody who had more experience in X.
00:00:59
Speaker
So I'm going to go work with them, even though you guys are awesome, I'm going to go work with them. So I thought, let's spend some time with one of our friends talking about that. So I got Steven Fogg, who's the head of Fogg Media, a company based in North Carolina that specializes in healthcare marketing, to talk to us about specialty marketing. Steven's a longtime friend and a former client of ours, so we're happy to have him. Hey, Steven. Hey, guys. Good to see you. Good to see you.
00:01:27
Speaker
So let's do a little bit of your bio and your bona fides. Tell us about the agency first. Yeah, sure. So yeah, the agency Fog Media, we are a boutique agency based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We're wholly specialized in the healthcare industry, particularly with specialty groups that you think about the orthos of the world, the gastroenterologists, the anesthesiologists of the world. We do a lot of service with them and a lot of B2B work. Awesome. Has your background always been in marketing?
00:01:57
Speaker
Media marketing, I came from the traditional marketing media space, started working at CBS Radio, then jumped over in the TV business, acquired a few times during that whole process, had some kids during the deal, was diagnosed with cancer during it, and made the life change to jump over into owning the healthcare agency.
Cancer Diagnosis and Shift to Healthcare Marketing
00:02:18
Speaker
So you had the bad kind of cancer, which is the one that guys don't like talking about. Should we, should we be grownups about it or should we be funny about it? Oh, a hundred percent. We, I mean, however you want to go at it. I'm a fair game when it comes to that. I think it's a real, uh, if you were a pen, you'd be a uniball, right? There you go. Gosh, yeah. There you go. Yeah. You've been holding that one in there, haven't you? Uh, yeah, for about three, four years now. I had to go back to, go back to an old notebook. No, I, I think, uh,
00:02:46
Speaker
How did that all come about? I mean, you know, because that's a big reason why you started. You left general marketing and focused more on the health care marketing. So that's a big part of who you are in your journey.
00:03:00
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I love sharing this story because I hope it helps if other people are interested in similar things, help them get screened and whatnot. But for me, it all started back on May 20th, 2009. I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. And during that whole time, I spent time at two different hospital systems down here in Charlotte. And then I was with an independent oncology facility too.
00:03:24
Speaker
Now, I'll tell you, during that time in those hospital systems, everything was fine. It was great, wonderful. The messaging, the marketing side of it, it made it feel welcoming and okay to walk into those hospital systems. My treatment's done and walk out. Again, nothing bad happened. It was par for the course. Everything came out satisfactory and voila, everything's good. The last part of my journey was with an independent oncology center down the street from those two large hospital systems.
00:03:53
Speaker
And I didn't know anything about this place going into it. And I didn't really know much about the healthcare system or referrals or how that worked when I was doing it. And so when I walked into this place, I was not terrified, pretty damn concerned. Didn't know much about them. You know, didn't have much reputation online. I went to the building. The building was a little more rundown than these, you know, these massive hospital systems with lots of budgets. So I was concerned that was I getting the same level of care that I got at the hospital systems. Well, going through the whole chemo treatment,
00:04:21
Speaker
It was a remarkable experience. The people there were amazing. The one part I always share is I was dealing with a drug that kept redlining me and I had to go in allergic shock. It was called bleomycin. Because of that, they had to administer on the site Benadryl and different drugs to kind of rehabilitate me. So you were allergic to the chemo?
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, so I would be sleeping for, you know, I'd be sleeping getting the drugs. Next thing you know, I'd start gasping for air and then have to run over and inject me full of, I think it was Benadryl and there's probably some other things with too, but one of those drugs wasn't getting coded right in the insurance side of it. And so, you know, normally that's the patient's responsibility to go, you know, fight the insurance companies, whatnot, but I'm going through cancer and I'm lost my hair. You know, I'm already, what'd you call a uniball pen?
00:05:11
Speaker
going through all these things. And it's the last thing I want to do. And they just stepped up the plate and what was there for me is not just a facility, but a friend, a colleague and a support system. And they identified resources for me on a national level that would help do this on my behalf. So when they introduced me to these resources, they took over everything that I was doing with the insurance side of it and just allowed me to be on my cancer journey while these large patient advocacy organizations took care of the struggle part of it.
00:05:40
Speaker
Now, during that whole time, I realized, my gosh, I really came in with such a bad interpretation of this organization. And it came out this feeling so great that at the time I decided to launch a nonprofit. I was a lot younger, dumber, and immature than I am today, thinking that I didn't know what goes into launching a nonprofit. And so that didn't get off the ground. But I knew then that I wanted to help the health care industry that saved my life.
00:06:06
Speaker
And it took me a few years. I had to jump back into the professional space because I had life and we had kids coming and all that stuff. But as I talk about the corporate world with a lot of mergers and acquisitions going on, I just got really tired of the same thing over and over again and not being in control of my own destiny. And also those kids were becoming school age. And I knew I wanted to be more present and put my oldest at the time was getting ready to go to kindergarten. I wanted to put her on the bus every morning.
00:06:33
Speaker
And so that's kind of how fog media came to be. I hired a business coach. We investigated the avenues of how to do this. And in between then and now I also got a master's degree in communication.
Founding of Fogg Media and Its Specialization
00:06:44
Speaker
And we decided that why don't we put your expertise in media marketing to play with this industry that you are so passionate about. And that's where fog media came to be. And we started, I started, not we,
00:06:54
Speaker
I started as a fractional chief marketing officer for those same independent organizations that saved my life. They were one of my first clients when I got off the ground. Since then, we've morphed a few times overall, but we like to say that we are a boutique shop that specializes predominantly in the healthcare space. We have a couple main verticals
00:07:15
Speaker
strategic communications, which is we just talked about the CMO side of it, digital marketing, everything that underneath the sun from websites to social media, you name it, and creative services, business cards, billboards, and everything in between. I really enjoy the niche because again, I got to pick my kid up from the bus this afternoon, I got to take her to her soccer game tomorrow morning and also have a nice thriving business in the industry that I really am passionate about.
00:07:44
Speaker
I appreciate you sharing that story because I know that when I really talk about my health, I'm often recalcitrant to really get into the nuts and bolts because it is terrifying. I often find that the difference between men and women is that women are much more savvy when it comes to their own healthcare than men.
00:08:09
Speaker
I can remember the first time I had a prostate prostate exam. It was a horrible experience. Really wasn't, but the, the doctor looked like the Nazi from the blues brothers. Oh, yeah. And so he, and then he, and then he gave me the prostate exam and then he was like, all right, cool. And he put out his hand and I was like, nah, I'm good. And he got offended. I was like, I literally know where that's been. Then I called my wife and said, Oh, I had bad news.
00:08:37
Speaker
Well, oh my God, what? What? You went to the doctor, right? Yeah, I did. I had a prostate exam. And she said, and? I said, I had a prostate exam.
00:08:57
Speaker
And she said, what was the result? And I said, another man boldly went where no man had gone before Susan. And she's like, oh, for God's sake, come home and hung up. I want to applaud you for the sense of immaturity because much as I just shared a fairly immature story about my healthcare journey, I really admire that about you.
00:09:21
Speaker
What are some of the differences between, as a specialty firm, what do you find is really advantageous for you because of your experience in healthcare marketing for new clients?
00:09:35
Speaker
That's a very good question. I'll tell you the thing that took me about 18 months to understand was the acronyms. Literally, 18 months to understand what every acronym, especially in the healthcare space, there's acronyms for everything. I still don't know probably 30% of them. So understand the language that has evolved around healthcare. Also being able to navigate PHI rules, HIPAA compliance, all those things is very valuable in the healthcare space.
00:10:02
Speaker
And I think we do a lot of our business here in our backyard in the Carolinas. And I think that is added value or a bonus to other maybe larger healthcare organizations that might come in. Why? Because as we talked briefly about HIPAA and PHI and all that stuff, we have to be very strategic with our messaging. And we can be tactical to a point.
00:10:27
Speaker
But we can't go one to one with a lot of the stuff because of you know those those sad things we can't be granular so we have to be more. Grassroots approach with that and that's probably why you see a lot of health care organizations out there doing every fun run under the shirt on the streets sponsoring every billboard they possibly can because.
00:10:45
Speaker
You know, we're in generalized marketing senses. You can target somebody who's searching for HVAC on Google and then retarget them on Facebook or OTT or whatever it is. You can't necessarily do that in health care for those HIPAA compliance rules. So the aspect of being able to know the environment that we're working in,
00:11:04
Speaker
and be able to provide tactical solutions that might not be as granular as traditional marketing sense. I think there's been a significant value to being a boutique agency in the community that we serve. So let's break that down a little bit, because I think you just sort of hit the nail in the head, but also you went jargony at the same time. So for those people who don't know, explain what HIPAA is and how that affects
00:11:30
Speaker
Sure. HIPAA, um, and I'm not going to say what HIPPA means cause I probably will butcher a butcher right now, but health insurance, personal, private portability, accountability. I think there's a pirate in there somewhere. I heard a nine or somewhere too, but, but I, uh,
00:11:50
Speaker
The grand thing scheme is to allow patients to be able to trust the communication between them and their providers confidential at all instances. And that whereas we see nowadays with websites, you have to opt in for cookies whereas you have to opt out of them.
00:12:09
Speaker
There is no information being transferred outside of your communication between you and your provider or the providers or organization. If there is a leak, there's a really hefty fine at the very least from the healthcare. So it's a reassurance to patients that you can be confident with what you're sharing with them will not be exchange for other people. And so an example that.
00:12:29
Speaker
uh that i've used when trying to to give uh explanation of this to say you feel you're you know you feel a lump right breast cancer awareness and you feel a lump when when you're there and you're at your company computer and you're in your screaming what are symptoms for breast cancer on that company computer
00:12:46
Speaker
Now, the IP address knows that that company computer, the person sitting there has the phone next to them, but because it's a healthcare-related message, that breast cancer search can't be tracked back to your phone or to any other device. You can't be retargeted with more messages, whereas if you're on that same computer and you're all upset because your house is 110 degrees in the summertime because your HVAC kicked and you're at the company computer searching,
00:13:10
Speaker
HVAC repairman you can get that add sent your phone what not so there is that piece of it there's also the electronic medical records or e m r e h r depending on which we said that the large healthcare systems do so when you are communicating directly with your your provider.
00:13:27
Speaker
that information is one-to-one and there's no way that it will circumvent outside of that. So there's the two tangible pieces of it. There's the public side of it, the public domain, which we work in as marketers. And then there's also the side of it that is the one-to-one between the EHR, which is more direct between responsibility from the provider sense.
00:13:50
Speaker
Got it. Cookies, of course, are the universal tracking code that is put on a person's browser. So if you visit something, you click the accept all cookies because you really want to see what's on a website. That's how that company, that website knows that you were there. And the next time you come back, what you did last time you were there.
00:14:12
Speaker
So it's just kind of a tracking thing. And so that's how people know that. And that actually ties right into my question. As you look at the barriers to tracking people,
00:14:28
Speaker
The assumption that I at least have is that you have to get very creative on how to engage with a healthcare customer in a way that doesn't either use data that you're not supposed to or feel like it does. Good marketing is targeted based
Challenges and Strategies in Healthcare Marketing
00:14:49
Speaker
on who you're trying to reach. So how do you walk that fine line between authentic communication that is targeted
00:14:57
Speaker
and delivering a message that's trackable and usable by the healthcare organization? That's a great question. And I think there's two avenues to go about this. I think it goes to who are we targeting with it. Now, when the practices are trying to target patients. Now, we kind of go in the psychology of what is this? What is the healthcare industry supposed to do? It's ethos of it, right? It's there to help.
00:15:27
Speaker
So, um, or, or that's, that's the goal. Yeah. Allegedly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for the first part, I will say all of our clients are in that space that they're there, they want to help. And so, uh, the other aspect of it is it's kind of that, um,
00:15:42
Speaker
Let me think about how to map this out quickly. We try to be an educational resource, but there is a lot of quantitative data that we can use to help marketing. For instance, for the most part, and we could talk about the Google Analytics 4 after this, but for the most part, we can use Google Analytics 4 to map out demographics for our practices.
00:16:05
Speaker
And so based on that, we can see that, you know, X amount of, we've got one client that we know is overwhelmingly women and the women demographic is overwhelmingly 2554. And we know they're overwhelmingly in a geographic area in the South part of Charlotte. But we based on those things and we kind of mirror that with other data sets we see across the populace through, you know, Qualitas,
00:16:26
Speaker
U.S. census data we just combine all these together to kind of understand who is it we're actually targeting and then we do that and then based on that assumption we start putting out educational resources out in the space so this practice particularly
00:16:40
Speaker
We know those are the demographic parameters. And so what do we do with that? We want to be educational. We do recipes. We do helpful tips, helpful, like tips for it to be healthy in your own, in your own space. And then also, and then one-to-one like videos of like the docs talking about, we call them motivational Mondays, where they talk about, so like the one thing I've, I love this, this example and we've used it so many times is they did a recipe for a mango salsa on a Friday.
00:17:10
Speaker
And that went out on social media and got a lot of feedback. How do we cut a mango? How do we know if mango is ripe? Well, guess what the motivation Monday was. It was a doctor with a mango in her own kitchen talking about how to know which mango is ripe and how to cut it up and stuff like that.
00:17:29
Speaker
And so we do a lot of content around those things that might not necessarily have anything to do in the healthcare space, but we're being educational, impactful, and resourceful to that demographic that we perceive being the target for that audience. And that seems to be very effective what we're doing with that. We kind of use, we call it like a Larry Take approach when you use those things to drive them to what we call like the 10%, which is that piece of information about the practice.
00:17:55
Speaker
that might resonate with them. So we might sprinkle in that recipe on Friday with a motivation on Monday with a what is functional medicine, which is that's the practice of functional medicine practice on a Wednesday, content that will just distribute throughout different channels. And that will then that's kind of that's that is like the ethos of how we build our B2C funnels in healthcare space. I'll be honest with you, it's kind of a hard sell.
00:18:21
Speaker
Practices either get it or they don't. And some of them, we don't really typically do with a lot of cash pay healthcare. So you're thinking about like plastic surgery, or we don't touch dental or those things, which that might be a little different of a cell or just more insurance based or primary care focus. So those things really resonate in that space.
00:18:42
Speaker
The other example that we have is on the business to business side of it, and this is where we're talking about those specialty groups that 85-90% of all their business comes from referrals. So our marketing funnel there is we know that we want to target those referral channels and we still do a content driven approach in that space, but it's more spit shining the image.
00:19:03
Speaker
press release about Dr. XYZ that's doing whatever high and great. We build that content up on a quarterly basis and then push out a quarterly newsletter to those partners. We do that throughout the year. At the end of the year, we recapitulate the annual report. The goal is to have those leaders that are in charge of those referral channels open up that report. If we do, then we know we're doing the right thing. Did that answer your question? It did. I think the
00:19:33
Speaker
The question that that brought up for me is you engage with folks and have a kind of farming approach, maybe scattering seed to have something pop up with the right audience. You're targeting the right people and being knowable.
00:19:54
Speaker
How do you balance that with a client that says, well, I just need more leads and how can you, how can you boost that for me? Or if they're getting more aggressive or want you to get more aggressive, how do you, how do you balance that? Sure. So
00:20:15
Speaker
I'm thinking about the right example we have here because I'll be praying. I think it's a banana costume and a big giant arrow. I'm going to have an exam this way. Yeah. I mean, be perfectly honest with you, a lot of these clients have three month waiting times to get in. So it's along those lines. It's kind of protecting what they have.
00:20:36
Speaker
a blank measuring game for some of them. We're doing this, what are you guys doing for some of the clients? But there is that, for instance, that B2B business that 85-90 percent of it comes from referrals. There's still that 10-15 percent that is outside of that realm and we do use paid tactics in those instances to go after patients. I think of that as radiology. We have a couple of radiology clients under our belt.
00:21:06
Speaker
that eighty five ninety percent we we you know we we we implore those those tactics i explained with you but then we do a traditional landing page pay-per-click campaign for those things for and those that is more of a cash pay business
00:21:19
Speaker
which is kind of like a side business from there. So think about like people searching for varicose veins or, um, all right. Well, I would say aneurysms too, but let's just say a van, a varicose veins is that's what most people can relate to in that space. So when people are searching, like removing varicose veins on line, then the ad comes up and drives to a HIPAA compliant landing page.
00:21:41
Speaker
I stress HIPAA compliant on that piece of it. That is a piece of the puzzle that we do for that small piece. On my side, again, I've been in the business since 2016. I still struggle is not the right word.
00:21:58
Speaker
If the majority of the business is in X, but a lot of the budget is in Y, I still struggle with non-morality is not the right word of it, but I guess the relationability of that. A lot of the focus in that funnel, but some of our clients do prefer that and we do execute those campaigns. Let's take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about what happens when you have a bad doctor.
00:22:30
Speaker
Today's episode of Dial It In is brought to you by BusyWeb, your partner in driving growth for business service and manufacturing businesses online. Are you a business service or manufacturing business eager to expand your online presence, generate leads and boost revenue? BusyWeb has what you need.
00:22:47
Speaker
At BusyWeb, we specialize in helping businesses like yours with CRM, marketing, advertising and website solutions. As experts in HubSpot, Google, social media and email, we offer full-service digital marketing tailored to your unique needs. Our mission is to drive leads to your business and empower you to convert those leads effectively through smart follow-up strategies.
00:23:11
Speaker
visit our website at busyweb.com. That's B-I-Z-Z-Y-W-E-B dot com. Or, give us a call at 612-424-9990 to start a conversation. As a special offer for our dialed in listeners, we're offering a free download of our newest eBook.
00:23:31
Speaker
everything you ever wanted to know about HubSpot. With this free download, we'll share with you how to grow your business with an all-in-one sales, marketing, website, customer service, and CRM powerhouse. Explore the power of HubSpot to decide if it's right for your growth plans. This offers exclusively for Dial It In listeners. Don't miss out. Visit busyweb.com slash pod for more.
00:23:59
Speaker
All right, we're back with Steven who works in healthcare marketing. I had a bad experience last May where my son who was eight at the time had strep throat basically for two and a half months.
00:24:16
Speaker
And then we got sent to, he's a big kid, he's eight years old, he's five foot one. So he's basically, he's bigger than Danny DeVito at this point. We got sent to an adult clinic and the adult clinic said, they saw him and said, we will schedule the surgery in six to eight business days.
00:24:38
Speaker
at which point, and my wife was like, oh, okay, fine. And my wife is a wonderful person, but she's not very aggressive, certainly comparatively. So I was like, yeah, okay, fine. So I called the clinic the next day. I was like, no, no, no, we're scheduling it now. He needs it now. They're like, no, no, no, we're not doing that. You have to wait six to eight days. Well, why?
00:24:55
Speaker
Well, because you need our insurance preauthorization. So, okay, fine. So I called the insurance company. They're like, no, you don't. You can go right now. Give them this number. So I called them back and I said, well, you have, they're ready to go. You can schedule it right now. Well, no, we need the preauthorization. Well, no, you need, here's the number you need to get that. Well, we still need to wait six to eight days, business days before we even schedule your surgery.
00:25:19
Speaker
And now I'm just plain heated because now it's just an out and out run lie because you're adhering to a policy that doesn't make any sense. So then I said, okay, so let's take insurance off the case. I'll pay cash. Can we schedule today?
00:25:36
Speaker
And the lady was like, she laughed at me. She was just, nobody's, you're not going to do that. It's my son and he's hurting. I will pay any amount of money. And anyway, I had this very long, long, bad experience about this. And I think the, the, as we're talking to you, and it took a lot for me to not just light the place on fire digitally.
00:26:02
Speaker
and just completely go after the doctor and completely go after the shoddy level of care. And my wife calmed me down and made me realize that
00:26:15
Speaker
part of why you go to a pediatrician as opposed to a grown-up doctor for kids is that the boy needs care and feeding and a specialty care and the parents need specialty care and I did I was not getting especially Karen so we he ended up having the surgery from a
00:26:34
Speaker
pediatric surgeon, it went great. All that being said, which is the world's longest preamble, plus I got to have a dig about that customer and email me if you want to know who it is, at dialitinpodcast at gmail.com. Steven, with the emotional nature of
00:26:59
Speaker
people's health.
Managing Patient Emotions in Healthcare Experiences
00:27:01
Speaker
I would imagine, and in the B2C space, there is a propensity for people to be overly emotional in their relationships and have
00:27:14
Speaker
severe reaction to people who are just trying to run a business. So I imagine that reputation management sort of bookends what you do. So how do you deal with that when you have a client or a clinic that this isn't genuinely very nice to people or they are, but people flew off the handle?
00:27:38
Speaker
Right. It's a good question. I mean, listen, I think we've all had instances where we felt that the provider or the group or
00:27:49
Speaker
anybody on the other end of the phone or chat or whatnot is not listening to your problems. I first want to stress that a lot of people on that phone are entry-level and they don't know what they do. And that's no problem. That's no dig at them. That's just a dig at the system that is employed right now in healthcare. So I just want to convey that first.
00:28:12
Speaker
To address your concern, I think there's two there, right? There's the one of the side of it from the patient's perspective of how do we make sure the patient is feeling comfortable or even like that there are causes of being addressed after the fact. Then there's also how do we protect the reputation of the provider? Because nine times out of 10, it sounds like the provider is doing their job. It's the front desk or the office. That's really the issue right there. So there's two issues going on with this. And I think on your side of it, what we've seen is
00:28:43
Speaker
As a boutique agency, we don't have a dedicated partner in this space. We typically go in with Eyes Wide Open and listen to what our partner needs. Most of the time, there's a couple of big ones out there in our space, and maybe you guys are familiar from two, Raider 8, Arolytics, Bird Eye. These are three of the big recognition management. ODM was big. I think they're falling off a little bit too.
00:29:06
Speaker
I digress that really do a lot of the reputation management settings where they were they automate the patient responses to reviews i mean if anybody's been a doctor's office or dennis office you had sure certainly got something on their phone of how do you like your provider what not.
00:29:24
Speaker
I'm behind the scenes you know if it's if there's there's a limit set if it's above you know say four to five stars it goes on to it like if this and that final. It's above four then it goes onto would you like to leave us review on google wherever it's book where it is and then that's all good and great if it's below that.
00:29:42
Speaker
They ask for more information. It's quarantine. It's usually directed right to the front desk staff who should be, or excuse me, or a practice administrator, which would be the person who runs the practice as a whole to follow up with.
00:29:56
Speaker
And for some reason, and their job is to jump on those as fast as possible. It is imperative and we've stressed out on our side. And that's less of our job, more of a practice consultant that would help with that. But they advise them on, you need to talk to this person or get them on the phone or however, as soon as possible to address their concern and see how you can remedy it. There is a time and time when those go on to negative reviews and they end up in Google,
00:30:24
Speaker
And what we have to do is we work with lawyers to address a HIPAA compliant response, not to identify that they were actually in the facility, but to ask them to reach back out to them to express their concerns. And I'll tell you, of that 50% of them do, although 50%, they've changed their review from that point of it.
00:30:46
Speaker
I will tell you there's a concern and I'm pivoting a little bit into now the physician side of protecting him. That is what we see on our side as a bare concern based on the specialty that they're providing. So unless they're just maliciously incompetent through job. But for instance, we see a lot of negative reviews in pain specialties.
00:31:10
Speaker
pain clinics, pain management, and a lot of that's based on them not prescribing pain pills. Other than that, we did not see a lot of issues with patients going directly at the doctors themselves. There might be a one or two here or there, but that seems to be the, sorry, I don't want my alarm to go off. That seems to be the crux of what we've seen of bad people going after them in the interview space. We have a couple of clients that funnel into a hospital system.
00:31:40
Speaker
And within the hospital and they use their ehr their electronic health record system and because of that because of its that is part of the hospital system they don't allow them to provide reviews or to use that data to sound their own reviews so we've got a large. An example this is down here in charlotte if you walk into a hospital in charlotte.
00:32:03
Speaker
and you're in the emergency department or oncology or whatnot, those doctors are all contracted out by different groups. I'm not sure if it's the same in Minnesota, but that's the issue here. Imagine going in the emergency department and not knowing what's going on, you're signing a whole bunch of paperwork, but that paperwork saying that, hey, we're being treated by X doctors that are not employed by Y facility. Just let you know you're going to be getting a bill by it and then
00:32:29
Speaker
2-3 months later, you get a bill from them. But there's no way to combat this. I'm trying to find the best way to convey this problem that we have because we can't build up reputation online because we can't get access to the data. But we have all these negative reviews coming into the space.
00:32:49
Speaker
We try to just educate them as best as we can up front. It's not a perfect science. We do rudimentary things like QR codes on business cards. Doctors hand out to patients. It's one more touch while they're in there, but that is an issue that we still have. I don't believe it's outside of Charlotte. I believe it's a nationwide instance with that too.
00:33:14
Speaker
What are some of the other differences that you have to worry about, like some of the standard tools that we use or things like Google Analytics in order to track how many people come to a website?
Google Analytics and Data Privacy in Healthcare
00:33:26
Speaker
Can you do that kind of thing? Yeah, to an extent. And that is a recent phenomenon. If you're aware, people listen to this podcast that there's a major overhaul that happened with Google, I think it was last June, July. Yeah. Yeah, everything is switched over from UA, Universal Analytics, to GA4, Google Analytics 4.
00:33:49
Speaker
And going back to that PHI, the personal health information and the HIPAA, HIPAA information that was going on, what was found out. So GA for Google X4 is a universal tool that most small businesses use to understand the data, who's going to their website, what's conversions, Facebook, you name it. This is the data that we use to make sure that what we're doing is on the up and up. In the sense of healthcare, it was discovered
00:34:15
Speaker
I would say November of last year, that there's a hole in Google's system right now that if you're employing GA4 or Google Linux 4 on a healthcare system and there's any possibility of PHI, personal health information being transferred on that specific page, it can indirectly be
00:34:35
Speaker
Transmitted to Google servers for and I might be getting this wrong so I apologize for thirty or sixty days before it's ultimately ultimately deleted now that's a violation of HIPAA compliance because there's that one to one that we talked about earlier that that that is broken in essence.
00:34:53
Speaker
So what is going on right now with this? Well, a lot of businesses, the larger healthcare systems who have large checkbooks, they're employing paid analytics tools behind the scenes. There's analytics tools that cost thousands of dollars a month, but it inherits that HIPAA compliance with it.
00:35:11
Speaker
There's also lawsuits going on from health care clinics, I think in the not maybe it's Missouri right now that's in litigation right now with Google to try to get them to offer, we call them a BAA business access agreement, which basically puts liability on Google that, hey, if your system is hacked, then you guys are responsible for the HIPAA violation, not us.
00:35:34
Speaker
and that is contending. The third thing that people are doing right now is they're either scraping their site completely of Google Analytics and just flying blind right now, or what we're seeing more often than none is they're having their developer or web hosts or whatever in the background removing the snippet of code from these individual pages.
00:35:54
Speaker
These will be pages from landing pages, from contact us forums, you name it. Now, typically if you see those things, you go to your provider website and it's usually up in the top right hand corner of your patient portal.
00:36:09
Speaker
Those things are third parties, so those don't have anything to do with them, and those are covered by that software, so there's no problem there. Right now, it's a bit of a gray area, and there's being people advising you on all three of those tactics, which way to go with it.
00:36:28
Speaker
It's kind of still up and we're still waiting to see what's going on. We are advising our clients to either pull it off completely or remove it from any piece of the website that could be transmitting any patient data. I think you just nailed one of the key points that we were trying to get to, Steven, and that's
00:36:49
Speaker
a small practice that doesn't have a full-time person would have never known about this Google Analytics leak or hole. And so that's why it's important to work with a company and agency like yours to identify those because you need to be working with experts
00:37:09
Speaker
in your particular field and that's the best way to do it. So thanks for sharing that because I remember doing that for a healthcare related client of ours that didn't directly need the data. They were just being overly cautious and now I remember why because we had to do that for them. I want to pivot for a sec if that's cool and ask you, you know, healthcare marketing is
00:37:32
Speaker
hyper specific.
Role of AI in Healthcare Marketing
00:37:34
Speaker
There's lots of, you know, third rails or, you know, risk, risk of extreme danger on a few fronts. There's also some technology out there that could be incredibly helpful. I'm thinking like AI and other things, you know, how, how do you feel the future of healthcare marketing is looking, especially around those large language models and AI related things?
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, and we actually, shameless plug, I host a podcast in the medical space and we had the chief information officer for Microsoft on, I think it was our first podcast talking about AI in the healthcare space, more so in the physician side of things, but it is- Hold on, before you get into that, if you're gonna do a chief podcast, do a full blown, fully naked transparent pod. Where do we find that pod?
00:38:33
Speaker
It's through a medical organization called the NCMGMA, North Carolina Medical Group Managers Association. We try to do a monthly podcast. It's probably ending up being more quarterly.
00:38:45
Speaker
It's we're getting high level conversations within things that are very valuable to healthcare managers, practice administrators, CEOs on the evolution of the healthcare space. Now, I'll shameless plug, there was one that did talk a little in depth about a European trip that that group organization went on. But other than that, we talked about burnout and one
00:39:07
Speaker
I told you about AI and another one. Leadership was a big thing. We're addressing points that are very valuable in the future of healthcare leadership.
00:39:20
Speaker
Cool. Excellent. Yeah. The old NCM GMA. I know those guys. Yeah. You know those guys? Yeah. Yeah. There's one, I'm sure there's a Minnesota M GMA. I know there's an MG M M G M a there's a lot of M's up there for you. Yeah. But
00:39:38
Speaker
But yeah, back to the AI side of it. I think there's two sides of this, and it's interesting, I was just actually at an MGMA meeting earlier this week talking about this. On the healthcare space, I mean, we're using it in all the same places that I think every marketer is right now, from everything from cleaning up emails to putting together social media posts and really basic SEO articles. What I see on the future right now is, I'll tell you one thing,
00:40:09
Speaker
every group that we work with wants video. But then we bring videographers to the table and they get sticker shocked out of it. I get it. I understand it. They're pulling their hairs just to pay our budget, let alone a video or three.
00:40:29
Speaker
So what we're starting the test right now is using AI to create videos. And you'll be able to find on my LinkedIn page, maybe we'll put a link into this thing of I did a quick test where I spent 43 seconds, 43 seconds and I put in a GPT prompt of
00:40:45
Speaker
Create me a recruitment video for a health care practice in Charlotte, North Carolina. Now, the video is crap. It's using all stock photography, but in 43 seconds it did something out there that knocked me off my socks and made me think of what if I 10X this? What if I 100X this? What can come out of this solution? So I think that is a big piece of the puzzle moving forward. And I'm not saying using video to like maliciously that line, but to use it to recruit the practice or to talk about
00:41:14
Speaker
You know, we're in Charlotte and everybody's moving down here. And so a lot of these physician groups are trying to, and they need, and we need more physicians. And so they're actively recruiting physicians on the coasts and any state with high taxes that can imagine using these AI videos to describe why come to XYZ practice in Charlotte and work here.
00:41:35
Speaker
I think that's one piece of the puzzle with it. I think also, you know, introductory things on these business to business side websites where you where you see, you know, almost there. I got my wife works in the like legal, legal side of things where there are more stuffier conversations, right? But just something that they need in there. So video, I think it's a big piece of the puzzle. What I see AI doing outside of marketing in the health care space is remarkable.
00:42:04
Speaker
And I think it's going to really be a game changer here in the next few years. Most notably, there's two pieces right now. One is an online scribe and that's what a big conversation we had with Microsoft. Their program's called Nuance, Microsoft Nuance. I think they're actually just Nuance now, but a scribe is basically, you know, the, um,
00:42:23
Speaker
I guess Obamacare is the best way to call it. I was trying to remember the name it was called, but when Obamacare came into place, I'm sure we've all been familiar with how every doctor is now overloaded with all the documents and all the writing and stuff they have to do. Well, now they're using AI to be a listening tool during the appointment with the person to do that electronic scribing for them.
00:42:46
Speaker
along with it, they're also listening for tactical things that might indicate, you know, drug seeking behaviors and stuff like that, which is still a little, I think a link a little, we're still a little far away until that can be employed effectively and legally to that point. But that's the one piece of it. The other piece that we're seeing in radiology is it's helping read imaging.
00:43:08
Speaker
Right. I've seen that. Yeah. I mean, it's impressive that in the radiologists are, you know, they're, they're admitting that, Hey, we wouldn't have caught that if wasn't for AI side of it. So like AI, AI in this space. I mean, I still think, I think we all think backs who are, you know, 90s, 80s kids of Terminator two and, you know, AI Skynet taken over the world. And that does still scare the crap out of me that, that if we put, don't put that third rail in place, the guardrails in place that this can get out of control. But I think.
00:43:37
Speaker
And I shared some ways, I think it's really fascinating how we're using it in the marketing space and how healthcare can really benefit from it. And I think, I hope, I pray to God that this can help lower cost to care and barrier to entry for patients. Cause it's insane. It's insane. And that's a whole other conversation for another day of those things, but I think it could help with that. Right. And complicated stuff. But I think that's where AI really comes into its own is taking the complicated things
00:44:06
Speaker
and helping to slim them down. I actually think the healthcare industry as a whole or the marketing healthcare industry is a little bit more insulated from the apocalyptic, AI is going to take the place of all marketers. AI is going to take the place of easy marketing and smart marketers that can give
00:44:29
Speaker
great content that actually serves the needs of the customer is always going to be relevant. And you have the extra layer of we're dealing in healthcare related aka maybe even life or death things. So you need to have a real human being looking at looking at all of this content because the dangers are real.
00:44:49
Speaker
That's super cool. I'm glad that you're looking at this AI stuff and it's comforting to hear that not only I'm geeking out about it, but I'm hearing you're geeking out about the AI things and using them a little bit too because you have to be a consumer of this information or of this data in order to stay up with the times. Those who refuse to change are going to get passed by.
00:45:15
Speaker
I agree. And I think that's a big piece of it too, is the tools are changing. Constantly. Constantly, yeah. But I think ever more so now than they have. I've seen more change in the past 18 months with
00:45:32
Speaker
AI and the tools associated with that then i think i've done in the first since twenty sixteen we got going on. I think it's really just change and as you said for the good and eliminate a lot of those those not mean you're not the right word to those those those tasks that that were time consuming.
00:45:50
Speaker
I look at this podcast right here. There's AI out there that will transcribe this whole thing and give percentages of who's talking about who, places to edit. All these things that would take somebody 10 hours in a dark studio to pinch this up, an AI person, an AI technology bot is doing it in 60 seconds.
00:46:13
Speaker
In preparation for the show, we usually ask our clients and our guests, hey, can you tell us what do you want to promote?
Community Involvement and Events
00:46:22
Speaker
I've been sitting here listening and I've been trying to think of what's an easy way to ask this and I really don't have it. Steven, on your list, you would like to talk about 24 hours of booty and go.
00:46:36
Speaker
Well, yes, yeah, I'm looking at now and it's a promote anything you're up to. And when was the NCM GMA podcast, which already talked about and it was the 24 hours of booty. And I think I want to preface the 24 hours of booty with going back to what I really love most about being a business owner of this, this is this healthcare agency is I've learned from this experience that I love most. My passion isn't serving, serving others, serving the community I'm in or, or just being a part of that in,
00:47:06
Speaker
having this organization has really given me the opportunity to do that, to expand that field. And that's what really makes my heart warm to my heart at the end of the day. And yeah, 24 hours of booty, I see you on that. And outside of Charlotte or the Carolinas, you're probably, what the hell is that all about? Well, and I know Dave is a car guy. I'll tell you that. I'll explain to you what a meat raffle is if you tell us about what a 24 hour booty is.
00:47:32
Speaker
I will, I will. And I'll preface it with, I know Dave is a car guy and probably very familiar with 25 Hours of Le Mans or Daytona and stuff like that. It's a similar event. However, I'm one of those dorks that wakes up in the morning and we're speed-exing speedos and goes riding through the city of Charlotte like a nut with a group of guys. And one of my friends in that group founded this event
00:47:55
Speaker
Gosh, I can even tell you when 2005, 2006, to an event where you're basically cycling for 24 hours, or a team is, and that event does raise money for a children's cancer hospital here down in Charlotte, the Levine Children's Cancer Hospital. Why is it called 24 Hours of Booty? Well, it's done on this track called the Booty Loop.
00:48:20
Speaker
And why is it called the booty loop for everybody outside of Charlotte? It's a loop around a college in the city of Charlotte that was at one point a women's college. So back in the day, it's a well-known loop that people cycle on and people just call it the booty loop.
00:48:39
Speaker
So it's called the 24 hours of booty and we are putting together a team. I think as of right now, we've got seven cyclists on our team and we're getting custom jerseys and everything, all that good stuff. And we're going to each ride at the very minimum of 100 miles over 20, 24 hours and raise money for Levine Children's Cancer Center right here in Charlotte. My personal goal is to raise 5,000.
00:49:04
Speaker
But yeah, that's one of the things I wanted to put out there that I wanted to promote that we're doing. I guess the other thing with it while I'm thinking about it is we also do a coat drive in the winter. We're advocates in a neighborhood that is less fortunate than ours. It started with us tutoring before the pandemic and realizing that kids were showing up tutoring, not wearing coats.
00:49:29
Speaker
in the middle of December, which I know is not nearly as cold as it is up your way, but it's still cold enough that you would raise some hairs. And we just started asking around if people with coats had donated and it's just turned into its own little thing. So those are the things that, when you talk about promoting things that you're up to and that I really enjoy, those are the crux of why fog media is what it is today.
00:49:55
Speaker
That was not the answer I was expecting when I got 24 hours of booting. Considerably better, especially for the family podcast. And producer Andy, he'll have a kitten when he hears that. That cycling race, I think raised over like $1.3 million last year. A huge event. All the TV stations in town are a part of it. And it's a remarkable achievement, what he's done. And I'm just grateful to be a part of it.
00:50:24
Speaker
All right, so I promised I'd explain what a meat raffle is. Yeah. Because that's an actual thing and it's pretty unique to Minnesota. So usually bars will have a night where they do a meat raffle and you go to the bar and you buy your tickets and they partner with a butcher shop or a grocery store. And instead of, you know, like a 12 pack of beer, what you, what you win is two pounds of chicken.
00:50:46
Speaker
Or worse or worse or a steak or something like that. You just, you just take home, you just take home, uh, you know, cold cuts all year long. Or is this just a normal? Yeah. Yeah.
00:51:02
Speaker
Most mostly on weekends, you know, you go and you have a cocktail and then you go to the meat raffle and there's one in in the town that we like to hang out in up north in northern Minnesota where they do wiener palooza and you do pin the tail on the wiener or no pin put the wiener in the bun.
00:51:21
Speaker
Which, again, sounds way dirtier than it should. Producer Andy is going to love this. Tremendous fun. Yeah, but it's very cultural. We've taken more than enough of your time today. Steven, thank you. How do we find you online?
00:51:36
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, we are fogmedia.com. 2G's. 2G's, yeah. Like the low flying cloud with Next.G. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm sure we'll have it all in the show notes for this. And all the regular social media things. And yeah, I've always told people that or
00:51:56
Speaker
people in the healthcare space, back to our goal, why we do this is to help all these independent healthcare organizations. I always like to end when I'm talking to them of, at the very least, we're happy to have a conversation with you about what you do or if anything we can do to help. If not, and there might be a better fit, we'd love to just get a chance to talk with you and help point you in the right direction so you can succeed in everything. Thank you. This has been amazing.