The Edge of Healthcare: Building Digital Muscles: Adapting to Healthcare’s Changing Needs

Martin Cody: Welcome to the Edge of Healthcare, where the pulse of innovation meets the heartbeat of leadership. I’m Martin Cody, your guide through riveting conversations with the trailblazers of healthcare. Tune in to gain exclusive access to strategies, experiences, and ground-breaking solutions from influential payer and health system leaders. This isn’t just a podcast, it’s your VIP ticket to the minds shaping the future of healthcare right now. Buckle up, subscribe, and get ready to ride to the Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are ready for you to use today.

Martin Cody: All right. Welcome everybody. This is Martin Cody, SVP of Sales and Marketing for Madaket Health, with another episode of The Edge of Healthcare: Lessons from Leaders to Use Right Now. Everybody and anybody is talking about AI and enhancing the digital experience for their health system, for their physician group, for their payer, for their plan. And it all gets down to making connections with the right audience. I thought it would be interesting to grab someone who’s been doing this for a living, and is actually the chief marketing officer of Praia Health, an organization intent on improving the member customer, patient, whatever we want to call them experience, which therein lies part of the problem. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Jared Johnson.

Jared Johnson: Thanks. So glad to be here.

Martin Cody: Appreciate it. And I think I hear every conference I go to around the country, and I’m about to go to one here in Las Vegas next week, everyone is talking about the digital experience or the digital front door of their health system, of their physician group, of their value-based care organization. And you’re in the business of making that front door a heck of a lot easier and more intuitive to enter. So tell me a little bit about, Jared, your background in the digital space and the marketing space. And then what did you do in are currently doing before Praia?

Jared Johnson: Sure. You bet. So I’d consider myself a champion of consumer experience in healthcare. So what that means is I’ve been in the senior marketing and digital experience space for a number of years now, both on the consulting side and on the client side as well. I recently did come on board a new health tech startup called Praia Health, where I am the Chief Marketing Officer, and Praia Health is an identity and personalization platform that helps health systems address those disconnected digital experiences you were just referring to. In Praia’s case, we’ve had the fortune of being incubated by a provider system, by a health system, by Providence, a well-known health system in the Pacific Northwest; their digital innovation group. And the company just spun out of Providence Digital Innovation Group with the $20 million series A round that was just announced at the beginning of April. So they’ve had this fortune, though, of being incubated at a health system with the intent of being used at other health systems. Right? And so it’s been a really fun journey to be a part of that experience itself, because the goal here is to help address a lot of different pieces that get really deep, and they’re all connected, and there are things that need to be improved to provide the type of experience that anyone who’s engaging in healthcare wants and expects to have these days, right? And then in addition to that, I have this labor of love, I’ve hosted my own podcast, Healthcare Rap, every week for the last six years. So we’re at 325 episodes, and I feel like I’m just getting started with that because there are so many stories to tell, as you know. There’s so many stories to tell and so many points of view to consider and learn from. And then lastly, I’m a husband and father. I spend as much time as I can with my wife and children.

Martin Cody: Did you ever consider starting your podcast episode count at 200 instead of one, so that it just made people think that, wow, this person is really far along right off the bat?

Jared Johnson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And in my case, that wasn’t the first podcast I had done one a couple of years before that for a little bit. It was probably for about a year. And so I think I was feeling a void, wanting to get back into it. I was very tempted to start one because I’m like, this wasn’t my first episode to host, so maybe I shouldn’t start at episode one. That’s a good idea.

Martin Cody: I think there might be some data behind that, I don’t know, but we considered it. But I think we’re just going to stick with the traditional starting at one and just build from there. You talked about the health system was wanting to have a more enriching digital experience. And there’s a phrase that I hear about in healthcare, and I think everyone hears it now, the digital front door. Do you have any idea what that means?

Jared Johnson: Isn’t it funny that we’re still asking that question now? I mean, yes and no.

Martin Cody: I honestly, I don’t. I don’t have any idea what that means.

Jared Johnson: Right. I’ve heard it in a lot of different contexts, and so it depends on which side of a health care encounter that you’re addressing, right? If you’re talking about where the health system is involved, where a provider or provider organization, a hospital of any kind, where they’re involved, I do hear a digital front door referring to any of the entry points into getting your care done. So anything from scheduling appointments to a website to all of the dozens, if not hundreds of point solutions that are underneath that public website that are involved in all the different aspects of your care. It’s funny because that digital front door is to a house with a lot of different back doors and side doors and windows that we do all get confused on, and so it’s no surprise that that’s not always as smooth as it can be.

Martin Cody: You know, it’s funny, when I started in healthcare, many, many, many moons ago, we used to live by an axiom to where you wanted to replicate the patient journey or replicate the buyer experience in advance so that you knew what the buyer was going through. Is there still a conventional wisdom on the digital side that says, you know what, Mr. CEO, CFO, Mr. or Mrs. Vp of Patient Services, you go out and try to make an appointment on your own website and come back to us and let us know what your experience is like. Does anybody ever go through that exercise anymore?

Jared Johnson: Absolutely. Hospitals everywhere do that. Good health system leaders are constantly inviting their executive team, their leadership team, to try it. And don’t use that secret line. You know, the back line that you usually get to use, use the front door. And there’s very few other ways that you can convey the opportunities to improve.

Martin Cody: And so what is, in your opinion, and there’s a bunch of people, I’m sure, listening that they interface with their marketing department from a user experience or member experience or patient experience. And why don’t we, I’ll pause my question right there, because I think I would just want to address the nomenclature challenge I just introduced in the question. So how do we standardize on terms, or do we need to standardize on terms to make it a more cohesive and intuitive and better user experience for whatever we’re calling the user?

Jared Johnson: That’s a great question. And I think if you’d asked me 2 or 3 years ago, I may have said, yeah, we need to standardize on this. And I feel like I have loosened up a little bit on that simply because we’ve gotten distracted by that whole debate. When is somebody a patient, when are they a consumer, when are they a member? And the term I’ve heard recently out in the industry is total experience. And I think maybe that’s just the better baseline for us to have the conversation about, okay, we agree it needs to be easier. We agree that how things are set up right now isn’t convenient. It’s not transparent. All the things that you would expect from any experience in your life as a human being, most of those aren’t in play, and there’s a lot of reasons, and we don’t have to spend as much time figuring out the reasons. Now we just want to fix it. We just want to get better. And so I’ve seen conversations get lost in the nomenclature of no, they’re not a consumer. They’re a patient. They don’t have choice in this thing. They have to pick who’s in network for them. So let’s not focus on whether somebody has choice in their healthcare. Right? And I think the more useful or beneficial discussion there has to do with whatever part of that health and wellness journey someone is, there’s probably an opportunity to make any aspect of it easier right now, and it almost doesn’t matter who built what part of the system anymore. Let’s baseline it and realize there are things that we can do to have fewer steps, to make it less confusing, to make it clear what you’re doing, to make it clear how much you’re going to pay for something, to make the choice itself easier and kind of go from there. So I feel like that shift from the conversation itself can benefit us all.

Martin Cody: Agreed. And I’m interested in both your perspective from the new Chief Marketing Officer role at Praia Health and your comment earlier about all the digital entryways into a facility or an organization. Is one of the items in your purview kind of like the find a doctor search on a healthcare system’s website of where a total experience patient, customer, member, user is trying to find a doctor, and how easy that search is and whether they’re in-network or out-of-network office hours? Is that considered part of the digital experience?

Jared Johnson: I would definitely consider that a main piece of the digital experience, and there’s a lot that happens before and after that, as we all know. And so a lot of times I’ve heard it referred to as consumer experience. Everything that led up to somebody looking to schedule an appointment with a doctor or a nurse practitioner with the provider at all. There’s a lot that happens up until that, and I think for years, I at least, I would assume that those things were just happening, that people are going to set up an appointment with the doctor when they need to see a doctor. And you know, it’s not that easy. So that is definitely a part of the experience. All those other engagement points that can happen that aren’t just from a marketing standpoint, but that are from you think about a health system when you are a logged-in user of a health system, when you’ve become a patient at some point, there are so many different things that health system can engage you in to lead you to a better state of health and wellness in your life. And it does revolve around, in many cases, ultimately scheduling an appointment, getting in with a provider again. There are also additional points that there’s the recommendation side of that, right? What would a health system recommend to me? Maybe a service I don’t know about, or a program I don’t know about, or a digital health partner that I don’t know even exists, but could benefit me based on something that it knows about me. That’s a whole different conversation than, hey, are we servicing a consumer or a patient? And that’s why I feel like it almost doesn’t matter what we call them anymore. We know whoever’s engaging with the healthcare system wants to do it in a more convenient way. They have an expectation that’s higher for what that looks like. So let’s focus on that. Let’s learn what they want. Let’s learn how a person expects to engage with them and see what we can do to improve and get further down that journey. I think that’s a very different conversation than what we’ve been having over the last few years.

Martin Cody: I would agree with you, and I think within that conversation, I would find two challenges and I’d be curious your take on both challenges, because one we’ve been kind of talking about, and I would say, I’ll put this in a bucket of technology stack. You know, what is our current health systems tech stack? What are we doing from a standpoint of usability? How are we writing our pages? What are our call to actions? How do we make it easy for the user to experience our health system and take advantage of the services? That’s one bucket. And I’d be curious how much of an influence that has compared to what I see as bucket number two. And that’s the people that are over the decisions of bucket number one that may be in a self-preservation mode or a fiefdom protection mode to where they kind of like the status quo. I’m over my little compartment over here, and it’s been working well since I had my first MySpace page. And I’m curious, how do you combat that stale thinking process to take advantage of all of the new opportunities and things that the patient member experience are desiring?

Jared Johnson: That’s a great question. I would agree, by the way, on that assessment of the two buckets. And I do think one does influence the other. They would both influence each other in different degrees. When we focus on what happens if we do maintain the status quo. There are a lot of things that appear unsustainable right now, and they all come back to the business of providing care in this provider hospital appointment-centric way. And it sure looks like.

Martin Cody: Give us an example of something that you think is on your experience is unsustainable. I want to pull on that thread a little bit.

Jared Johnson: Sure. Let’s just look at primary care, which has traditionally been something that health systems and provider groups have seen as kind of a loss leader, where in and of itself, fee-for-service primary care doesn’t make them much money on the bottom line when you look at high-cost procedures, more acute procedures and acute work that’s being done. So it’s always been seen as an entry point for people to get familiar with and trust your health system, and then ultimately fill out some of the other services, the specialty care, the secondary and tertiary care that you need from that health system. But from a marketing standpoint, it’s been that top-of-the-funnel care is primary care. And then what we’ve seen is that not only doesn’t happen a lot of times, people don’t just stick with one health system, they don’t even stick with one provider. And we still have millions of Americans who don’t have a primary care relationship; they don’t see the need for it, or it’s not easy for them to have one. So that in and of itself doesn’t keep the business going; the business of health care. So that appears unsustainable. And what adds to that is the growing number of people who are going to need primary care over the next 20 to 30 years, and the shrinking number of primary care providers. That part is unsustainable, as we currently project it out in terms of the number of providers and the number of people who need that care from them, and the way that it doesn’t fuel the business, it doesn’t make sense on the bottom line. So that’s why a lot of health systems are looking for solutions, trying to get innovative there and looking at different care delivery models. But all that does come back to the conversation we were just having of how does an individual, how do you or I or a family member or somebody we know or even a stranger down the road, how does anyone engage with healthcare if it’s so hard for us to understand, let alone convey that to people and communicate what that’s like? So the two are related in my mind.

Martin Cody: Completely agree. And it’s interesting too. And we haven’t even touched on it because it would be a much longer episode with regards to the number of people that are currently putting off care, and then the compounding financial effect that has on them from an anxiety and standpoint, mental anguish standpoint, because 63% of Americans are one medical bill away from bankruptcy. So they put off care. And then that creates, you know, much more anxiety. And then by the time they do need care, it’s not primary care or preventative care. It’s catastrophic care. They’re in the emergency department, which is one of the more expensive entry points to the healthcare system. So what are your thoughts? And I know you’re non-clinical, but from a marketing perspective, with a health system, how do they address that in sustainable tsunami, if you will, that you talked about with regards to more people requiring primary care and a dwindling of primary care physicians so that they can get folks into their health system now and get them assigned primary care, which, yes, is the feeder source to the specialty aspect of the services they provide?

Jared Johnson: Well, I do feel pretty strongly that marketing has a pretty big role here, and we may not have felt that way traditionally, but when I’ve worked hospital side, we worked really hard to not only communicate the value of each individual provider because you were referring to the provider directory on a website, you know, there was a lot of time and effort spent to making that not only easy to use, but making the information useful and helpful. And, you know, many years ago when we were first adding provider reviews to their profiles that they weren’t too excited about having, and we showed them actually, look, most people are giving you, you know, 4 or 5 stars out of five stars. You know, like it’s not bad. These are usually just about all good reviews. You should want your other patients to read these because you give great care. And so marketing has the job of emotionally conveying that connection, and at the same time, making sure that matches up with the capacity of their providers. The easy thing to do would be try to build up the queue of patients for your highest contribution margin providers, and then there’s an eight-month, 12-month, 14-month waiting list for them. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to wait two days for shipping anymore for their, you know, for their Amazon packages, you know? Like it’s just not enough. So we don’t want to wait for things. And while marketing can’t change the capacity or the operations challenges, they can balance that need more carefully and more like, align it more carefully as they go about what service lines they are promoting and really get to the bottom of it that way. The other thing they can do is the trend that’s happening with a lot of marketing leaders these days at provider organizations and health systems is they are being tasked with patient experience or consumer experience more often. And for a lot of different reasons, I’ve been an advocate for saying marketers know the people who they’re serving more than just about anybody, you know, maybe other than the clinical teams themselves, but they know a lot about the behaviors that led somebody up to that point where they did schedule with them. So why not have marketers be at the forefront? They’re the ones who usually are the ones who are really familiar with the process that it takes, you know, to your example of having the CEO or a senior leader go through the scheduling process, right? Like their marketers are very familiar with what those steps are, and they have a great sense for what those digital touch points are along the way, and they’re usually the ones in charge of a lot of those digital properties. So it’s an opportunity that more and more health system marketing leaders are not only being tasked with, but I feel like they’re stepping up and they’re delivering there, and they’re spending the time that they need to get into these areas where they recognize that’s not just a clinical issue, that’s not just an operational issue. We do have something we can do about it, and we’re typically the ones who are contacting those consumer-facing or patient-facing encounters. So, you know, let’s do that as better than we have been in the past. Let’s do that in a way that conveys things properly and emotionally connects with people at those times of need. So it’s more than the traditional marketing game of just emotionally getting somebody to think that they need to buy something. There’s a lot more involved with healthcare marketing.

Martin Cody: It’s interesting you mentioned that marketing can’t solve the capacity issues or waiting eight months or 12 months for an appointment. And I completely agree with you. The irony of that is that that’s one of the things Madaket solves. We solve capacity issues and I can guarantee you a hospital ROI. I guarantee it within 90 days and they will have excess capacity in any service line they pick. So it’s not necessarily, and this is a longer conversation for a different day, but they’ve got the bandwidth. There’s physicians are drowning in what’s referred to as Epic messages and a nightmare of inbound baskets that they don’t have an idea of what to do with. So that’s an experience that no provider wants to endure. And that’s something that we can help with. So it’s a side note, but I want to get with you on the aspect of, let’s say, a hospital or provider organization is looking to solve this problem that we’ve been discussing. What are the top two areas? Or if someone is listening, that they’re in charge for their organization, and solving this challenge and making it easier for customers to use the facility and services, what are the first two things they should be looking at?

Jared Johnson: First two things. I think we always have an opportunity to get to know consumers better. And so that means some kind of consumer research initiative or team or person who’s responsible for that service. The devil is in the details. The devil is in those individual insights that come up through continual consumer research. The ins and outs of the pandemic are the perfect example. Within a 12 to 18-month period, the number of stats I saw about virtual visits and how many people like, had virtual visits liked them better or worse than in person. The stats kept changing. They changed every few weeks depending on the source you saw. There was a ton of research about what people were experiencing with a virtual visit, and that’s continually happening. So there has to be a capacity to continually get to know people’s current state feeling for whether an experience is matching their expectations. It’s not just the fact that they have a choice of certain aspects of their healthcare. And again, that’s a whole debate that hopefully we understand the basics of, in that not everyone has choice about every aspect of their health care, but there’s more than we used to have. And more importantly, we have expectations for how it should go. We do think it should be easier, and we choose to not get care if it’s too hard for us a lot of times. So that’s number one: the consumer research; definitely getting to know consumers. And then designing for them. The skills of having human-centered design of consumer design experience design and a lot of different related aspects related to that are essential if you want to actually create something in real time that is going to improve the way somebody engages with the healthcare system. And that design, it’s, you know, we can think of it as building your design muscles or your consumer muscles, right? Like, you got to get some reps in, you got to get some practice with it. And it’s something that can quickly ramp up an organization’s ability to build those right experiences. But you have to know what somebody wants and then how to design for them to get what they want. Before you can do all of the digital experience work and actually build that experience, you need to know what you’re building towards first.

Martin Cody: I think the muscle, behavioral muscle aspect you talked about is spot on because it’s, I read a statistic this morning, 40% of hospitals are losing money. 40%! So nearly one out of every two hospitals is underwater. Not a good thing for a populist that is about a 61% obesity rate. But the behavioral muscles and the digital muscles, it’s comfortable to stay in your comfort zone. You have to build these muscles to be able to grow. And that usually exists going outside of your comfort zone, which by definition is uncomfortable. So you have to kind of guide and bring these people along to pursue that experience. And then, as you say, build upon it. And I think that’s a great analogy from building the muscle side of things, because you’re not going to get the growth day one in the gym. The busiest day at the health club is January 2nd, and you go February 2nd, and it’s 80% less traffic. But for those people that stick with it, same thing with these digital experiences and pushing the envelope, there’s good things waiting for them. So I love that analogy. I think those two areas right there are very, very helpful. All right, you ready for the speed round of word association.

Jared Johnson: Go ahead. Yep. No that sounds fun. Let’s try this.

Martin Cody: Okay. I’m going to say a phrase or a word, and you are going to telepathically instantly tell me the first thing. Well, not telepathically. You’re going to utter it verbally. Tell me what pops into your head. You ready?

Jared Johnson: Yeah. Let’s give it a shot.

Martin Cody: ChatGPT.

Jared Johnson: Peak hype. It’s near the top of that hype cycle.

Martin Cody: Interesting. And I think it’ll be interesting too, because the first reaction was laughter. And then there was peak hype. So yeah, it seems to be on the peak of the hype cycle. All right, next one. Podcast ROI. Yes or no?

Jared Johnson: Yes. But not the way that you might expect in that it’s not another piece of marketing content that’s going to directly lead to a marketing result you might expect. It’s more relationship-based, and it’s more of an opportunity to create content in a lot of different formats, and to build up relationships that are useful in a lot of different ways.

Martin Cody: So definitely, if someone’s thinking about, hey, our hospital or our provider organization doesn’t have a podcast, we should get one of our leading orthopods to produce a podcast. And they think it’s just going to fuel the dreams. You know, if we build it, patients will come type of thing; that would be a misnomer.

Jared Johnson: Yes and no more often than you might expect, right? The fact is, there’s still a discoverability challenge with any podcast out there. So you’re going to have to promote it. So, you know, you want to nail that audience, your differentiated approach to the audience, what are you saying that’s of value to them. And then you’re going to have to promote it just as much as you spend time producing it. So there’s definitely a game plan to do it successfully. And it’s just going in with those expectations, being aware of how many podcasts are out there, you know. If you’re focused on delivering something that’s of value to them, yeah, it can absolutely be successful.

Martin Cody: And I think it’s funny, we talk about value delivering a lot in our organization about making certain experiences valuable. So whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s the patient experience, whether it’s someone walking into your hospital lobby, it doesn’t change. If they feel valued, they’re going to feel appreciated. And they will more often than not continue to do business with you. So I think it’s the same in podcasting. If you’re giving value, you’ll genuinely do well. All right. This last one I think, is very germane to the marketing world because it impacts your ability to do what you do, and it has been in the news as much or more than AI. The two words I’m referring to are cyber security.

Jared Johnson: Oh yes. Yes, it has. It’s, there’s a joke that’s like every health IT, right before every health IT conference like a HIMSS or a HLTH or a ViVE even like any health tech conference, there’s always a major breach right before it. It feels like there’s always plenty to talk about. Okay. So cybersecurity, it just makes me think of it, it’s still, at the end of the day, extremely important more than ever. And there are so many creative ways, unfortunately, for breaches to happen. So it’s important it evolves quickly. You’ll always have to do something about it. So, you know, let’s be as educated as possible.

Martin Cody: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. You don’t address cybersecurity in one PNL cycle or an annual thing. It’s okay, we’ve got that under our belt now. It’s an ongoing perpetual investment. All right. Last question. The adult beverage question. Who in health care, living or deceased, would you like to sit down and pick their brain over an adult beverage? Who is that individual and what are you drinking?

Jared Johnson: Oh, this is fun. This is fun. So I’ll make the admission right now, I’m not a drinker, so it wouldn’t be much of an adult beverage. I’m based in Phoenix. I have coffee …

Martin Cody: … Fresca.

Jared Johnson: Don’t get me wrong, I still love myself some fully caffeinated soda way too much. So dude, that would be like just a tall glass of water. But I would love to have 30 minutes with Mark Cuban. You know, even before he got into healthcare and the cost plus drugs and all of that, I always considered him a, yes, he has that maverick mentality, but he seems to be interested in doing things that matter. And I always thought that he was just, you know, watching him on Shark Tank and just from a distance. Right. I don’t have any close relationships with anyone in his inner circle or anything or by any means. But I’ve always respected his approach to encouraging entrepreneurs. You know, when I spent many years running my own business, I always respected that. I always felt indirectly that he was supporting me. It was kind of weird how that works, but his foray into healthcare trying to fix drug pricing is just one of the things I’ve been keeping my eye on the most. I just think he’s creating a formula that’s disrupting things that I’m happy are being disrupted. There’s no reason certain prices on drugs have to be opaque and so costly. And so he’s doing some really great things there. So I would love that. If you can make that happen, we would be in a very happy place here. But yeah, that’s who I would say.

Martin Cody: I’m going to rely on the universe to make that happen, because if I scroll C’s in my smartphone, unfortunately, Cuban’s name is not in there yet; yet being the operative term. So I look to remedy that soon. Jared, I love the insight. I certainly, appreciate the wisdom from a digital perspective that you not only shared today, but possess. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens to Praia Health. And I appreciate you being on the Edge of Healthcare.

Jared Johnson: Really appreciate this chance. Thanks so much for giving me this opportunity. Really appreciate it and really appreciate all the things you’re doing and having this show. And I wish you the best.

Martin Cody: Awesome. We’ll talk soon and maybe at a ViVe or HLTH conference coming up.

Jared Johnson: Yeah, for sure.

Martin Cody: All right cheers and take care.

Jared Johnson: Thank you so much.

Martin Cody: Thanks for diving into the Edge of Healthcare with us today. I hope these insights will fuel your journey in healthcare leadership. For more details, show notes, and ways to stay plugged into the conversation, head over to MadaketHealth.com. Until next time, stay ahead of the curve with the Edge of Healthcare, where lessons from leaders are always within reach. Take care of yourselves and keep pushing the boundaries of healthcare innovation.