Regional healthcare providers face a unique challenge: they can't grow through population expansion or traditional acquisition strategies, making data-driven precision essential. Heather Linder's work at OU Health demonstrates how a CRM-powered approach transforms healthcare marketing in rural Oklahoma, driving measurable outcomes on lean budgets while connecting patients to life-saving screenings. Her team built a sophisticated orchestration system that links campaigns directly to patient outcomes, proving marketing's value to financial leadership. In this conversation, we explore why precision patient marketing matters in rural healthcare, how to balance growth with compassionate care, and what others can learn from Heather’s success in serving communities with genuine need.
💡 Episode Summary
Regional healthcare providers face a unique challenge: they can't grow through population expansion or traditional acquisition strategies, making data-driven precision essential. Heather Linder's work at OU Health demonstrates how a CRM-powered approach transforms healthcare marketing in rural Oklahoma, driving measurable outcomes on lean budgets while connecting patients to life-saving screenings. Her team built a sophisticated orchestration system that links campaigns directly to patient outcomes, proving marketing's value to financial leadership. In this conversation, we explore why precision patient marketing matters in rural healthcare, how to balance growth with compassionate care, and what others can learn from Heather’s success in serving communities with genuine need.
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⏱️ Episode Timestamps
*(01:55) - OU Health's transformation: From safety net to academic medical center
*(09:17) - Balancing brand storytelling with surgical growth marketing
*(11:37) - Why CRM became the orchestration engine for patient engagement
*(16:19) - First party data and EMR integration: Choosing the right channel
*(21:16) - Mobile cancer screening campaigns and improving state health outcomes
*(32:20) - Proving marketing ROI: From vanity metrics to downstream revenue
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💬 Quote
“ We have people's lives in our hands. There's someone searching or looking in their inbox or coming across us somewhere out in the ether that is maybe really stressed out about a potential diagnosis, about a symptom, about some unknown in their life, and where do they go and how do they make that decision? There's so much coming at us all at once. If my campaign can help someone feel like they were confident in making the right next step toward getting an answer, toward getting the care that they needed, that's the goal.” – Heather Linder
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🔗 Links
Connect with Heather Linder on LinkedIn
Connect with Ray Mina on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
[00:00:00] Heather Linder: We have people's lives in our hands. There's someone searching or looking in their inbox or, you know, coming across us somewhere out in the, in the ether that is maybe really stressed out about a potential diagnosis, about a symptom, about some, some unknown in their life, and where do they go? And how do they make that decision?
[00:00:27] Heather Linder: There's so much coming at us all at once. If our, you know, if my campaign can help someone feel like they were confident in making the right next step toward getting an answer, toward getting the care that they needed, that's, you know, that's the goal.
[00:00:41] Ray Mina: I make a joke a lot about being a spoiled B2B SaaS brat, which means that you have completely different dynamics.
[00:00:48] Ray Mina: Like I can sell anywhere in the country, or we have like explosive growth in certain areas. But, when you can't grow through expansion of volume or in healthcare, even through real estate expansion and, and, and buying up other systems. Something like a CRM becomes really critical as an orchestration engine that lets you basically figure out how to surgically meet demand or fill capacity in certain areas, and then ultimately prove that, like level of ROI that you're looking for at the patient level. And so I brought a guest, I invited Heather Linder is the VP of Brand and Growth Marketing over at OU Health in Oklahoma. Thanks for joining me, Heather.
[00:01:30] Heather Linder: Thank you so much for having me, Ray. Happy to be here.
[00:01:32] Ray Mina: Yeah, so I, I mean, a lot of the conversations I've had are around using, you know, acquisition tools, so, you know, advertising ecosystem and building multi-channel strategies. And I, I, I know that's something that you've had experience, I'm sure in the past, but when you arrived at, I think you moved from Chicago to Oklahoma about a year and a half ago.
[00:01:54] Heather Linder: I did.
[00:01:55] Ray Mina: When you arrived at OU Health, like the dynamics were a bit a bit different given the regional like focus on healthcare and the rural nature of the state of Oklahoma.
[00:02:05] Ray Mina: Maybe just as a starting point would just like, what, what is different about, you know, running growth and, and brand marketing at OU Health and it's been in, in the rest of your career?
[00:02:15] Heather Linder: Yeah, very, very different. Very interesting. Obviously very different kind of ecosystem and marketing world than Chicago in a lot of ways.
[00:02:22] Heather Linder: When I was first kind of interviewing for the job and discussions with the leadership team, you know, I was researching OU Health and it's, it. The flagship academic health system of the University of Oklahoma, the Sooners, and it's the only NCI designated cancer center in the state. At the time, they had the only level one trauma center, the only freestanding children's hospital, you know, the only academic health system in the state.
[00:02:46] Heather Linder: So I thought, Well, clearly, you know, market dominating, but not the case actually. So OU Health has had kind of a very interesting history trajectory for many years. It was basically the hospitals were owned and operated by a for-profit system. And kind of disconnected from the university environment.
[00:03:03] Heather Linder: Didn't really have that true kind of, you know, tripartite mission we talk about in academic health where the research and the education really infuse into the patient care and it just wasn't a good model for Oklahoma. It's not what the state needed. So, thankfully after, it was before my time, but by the time I got there, they kind of spun the health system back into the university and tried to move forward as this true kind of research teaching care entity for the state.
[00:03:29] Heather Linder: And it's something the states desperately needed. So, you know, I, a big passion of mine actually have a Master's in public policy is social determinants of health, health disparities. And this, you know, the institution here is such an interesting kind of situation for me, and that there's so much need in the state of Oklahoma that in a marketing seat.
[00:03:48] Heather Linder: I actually get to help people get access to doctors that might not be getting care anywhere, not not something, you know, in Chicago, you're really just fighting for kind of the best payer mix patients in a lot of ways, but a completely different ecosystem out here.
[00:04:02] Ray Mina: When you moved from Chicago, was it a prerequisite that you went to a city where you're gonna have an NBA world champion? Or was that, was that just a coincidence?
[00:04:10] Heather Linder: You know, I also have the privilege and honor of managing our partnership with the Thunder, and when I came in I was like, who the, okay, great, great. You know, another sports sponsorship. Fine, fine. What a fun year to join. My first, my first full year in Oklahoma, I got to, you know, see them rise to the world stage.
[00:04:29] Heather Linder: So, yeah. And you know, just because you have to, it's kind of the law when you live in Oklahoma, you always have to make a lot of thunder comparisons. So whenever we talk to our team, we're like, okay, we're gonna be like Alex Caruso, because when he comes off the bench, the team scores, even though he's not always scoring, like, so you have to know all the players.
[00:04:45] Heather Linder: You gotta learn the vernacular. Very crucial.
[00:04:48] Ray Mina: I love that. I love that you're already leaning into community as well, because I, I hear from a lot of marketers that in healthcare, like being a part of the community is, is such, such a driver. That's, that's really cool.
[00:04:59] Heather Linder: Yeah, I mean, I feel really lucky that there's such a focus at OU Health about, you know, our CEO talks about the covenant that we have with the state as the only academic health system.
[00:05:10] Heather Linder: Again, in a lot of bigger markets, you know, you can kind of throw a rock and find a great health system. It's more about the, you know, the specific program or doctor that you're looking for there, there isn't another system in this entire state that really has, you know, again, that ecosystem where we train almost 80% of the state's doctors, any kind of research bed, bench, bench to bedside.
[00:05:33] Heather Linder: That's coming through is coming from, you know, this research environment. So it really is the obligation that we have to improve the health of the state. And I have the ability to kind of direct our nonprofit dollars to partner with nonprofits that are impacting patients to try to help get those resources.
[00:05:50] Heather Linder: So it is very rewarding and you know, obviously we'll talk a lot about marketing and, and volume driving, but that is some of the volume that has to be driven in this state. When you have, you know, when you're 49th for cancer outcomes. When you have, you know, 49th or 50th for screenings, for a lot of diseases there are people that are just not getting care.
[00:06:09] Heather Linder: So, you know, it's not, it's not all about just picking the right health system. It's convincing people to trust the system to come in and get screened, to have relationships with doctors. So I feel a lot of social good in the work that we do too, which is rewarding.
[00:06:22] Ray Mina: You have the brand hat as well, and I'm curious, there's something you said a few minutes ago that kind of surprised me, which is, I, I just would assume that when you're one of the only games in town, then everybody knows about you and, and you have the lion's share of the market share and the brand recognition, but you, you seem to signal that that wasn't, that wasn't the case.
[00:06:42] Ray Mina: I'm, yeah. I'm curious like maybe like why, and then what are the areas of care that you're really invested in making sure that Oklahoma knows about?
[00:06:52] Heather Linder: Yeah, and it, I mean obviously it's shifted kind of since the integration as we call it, the last couple of years. And there are some areas where like I, for instance, we have the state's only freestanding children's hospital.
[00:07:01] Heather Linder: So Oklahoma Children's really is a market share leader in almost every specialty and subspecialty within it because it's, you know, kind of the place. You have to go in a lot of instances if you ha need complex care and we're building that in other areas, but it really is kind of service to service. And some of it, you know, was the, the kind of neglect of the for-profit system, just in terms of that their care model wasn't, you know, market dominance in every area where maybe.
[00:07:28] Heather Linder: It should have been, or I've also been able to recruit really strongly in the last couple of years. So it's been very exciting to see, you know, hundreds of new faculty come in from outside of the state. And a lot of people that I meet, and I don't find this in medicine often, they similarly to me, move to Oklahoma because of the great need in this state where we recently just got the state's only pediatric rheumatologist.
[00:07:53] Heather Linder: So if you had a kid who had, you know, any kind of issue with an autoimmune disease, you have to leave the state. And that's not acceptable. We live in, you know, one of the richest countries in the world. You should never have to travel that far to get, you know, basic care that your kid needs. So, you know, there's, there's been some of that kind of change due to recruitment, to building up programs, but I've kind of had the, the challenge and the pleasure of reintroducing OU Health to the state.
[00:08:22] Heather Linder: You know, again, years ago it was kind of looked at as the safety net hospital, and maybe you only went to, if you had to. And in the last, you know, five to 10 years, we've drastically changed that. So if you're in in the world, in the ecosystem, you know it, but there's still a lot of work in storytelling to do to kind of catch up the rest of the community.
[00:08:43] Heather Linder: And I feel very strongly about putting your money where your mouth is too. So I can tell people all day, you know, we have the best of the best. You know, our chair of our Dean of the College of Medicine came from Harvard, and he is recruited all these amazing doctors, and here are outcomes. But if we're also not showing up in community spaces, meeting the needs of patients who you know might have otherwise fallen through the cracks, it, it falls on deaf ears.
[00:09:06] Ray Mina: There's, you know, it's interesting 'cause you, you, you own brand and growth, which can be sometimes, this may be controversial statement, but sometimes a bit opposing forces because a lot of growth marketing is like very surgical and, and, and targeted and specific where a lot of brand sponsorship, like sponsoring, you know, the World Championship NBA basketball team is a little bit broader.
[00:09:28] Ray Mina: If it is, why is like a targeted approach to both brand and growth important to you and your strategy?
[00:09:36] Heather Linder: I really see it as, you know, brand big, brand storytelling, right? It's the way that we kind of win hearts and minds. We have a, a recent campaign in market that was really fun to put together because it really is kind of that the promise and the commitment that we're making to the state and these kind of patient proof points to showcase that as well as kind of our incredible, passionate workforce.
[00:09:59] Heather Linder: And then that filters into the service line level marketing, right? So then you have your. The, you know, that you talk about the surgical placements, we're able to take the platform and the framework that the big brand campaign provides and get really niched down into, you know, a specific treatment or, you know, um, diagnosis that we would like you to come in and have treated.
[00:10:19] Heather Linder: But it still fits within that framework. So I think it just kind of helps unify our identity that no matter the touch point, if you're watching a thunder game. And thank you for acknowledging that they're world champions.
[00:10:30] Ray Mina: I know I had to. Yeah.
[00:10:32] Heather Linder: Anytime I see national champions, it's like, no, no, they're, they play Canada.
[00:10:36] Heather Linder: If it's, you know, you're watching a Thunder game and you just see a 30-second spot spin by and it might kind of plant that seed like, oh, they're doing something interesting there. Or, you know, I should check that out. I'll think about it. I'll talk to my friends. Versus the targeted kind of omni-channel marketing that we hope is meeting at the intersection of need and access to get you in the door for something that, um, you're, you're at a decision point for.
[00:10:58] Heather Linder: Then using, you know, kind of, I also have market intelligence within my span, so validating that work with, you know, our brand studies, with our market data to show are we hitting our KPIs? Are we moving the needle again? I think it just works really well in concert together so we're not kind of splicing and dicing across teams that might not be functioning collaboratively.
[00:11:18] Ray Mina: I love that. I know you, when we talked, you mentioned that when you joined, there's obviously so many, so many things that you could have done as part of your strategy. Uh, and I, I generally don't get into specific tools that much, but it's hard to avoid the name of the tool in this conversation. But a big part of your bet on the strategy was like really investing in a CRM and, and leveraging a CRM as an orchestration point.
[00:11:45] Ray Mina: Like why was, why was that, why was that your bet a year and a half ago when, when you, when you joined?
[00:11:50] Heather Linder: We’re obviously looking to grow market share, right? You have to, you're trying to find ways to survive, to keep being able to, to fund the work that you need to do. But our kind of model is not trying to buy up a bunch of health systems or buy a referral network.
[00:12:05] Heather Linder: It's really being a destination of complex care for patients in the state. So how do you find them? Right? How do you retain them? There's also a lot of people that, you know, have used OU Health for maybe a complex care issue that they had years ago, but they haven't been back in a long time and there's so much value to helping, you know, not just new to, to.
[00:12:25] Heather Linder: Your organization, but new to the service line, right? To reengage patients that are already in your pipeline. So CRM really became. Kind of a huge wing of this whole data enabled growth strategy where we have to be using harness, say our first party data, leveraging in, you know, claims data. Third party where we can, to really paint a picture of where are people, where are they going, how can we re redirect them and find them for very, very specific areas.
[00:12:53] Heather Linder: You know, there's some, like I said, you know, we have some of the only subspecialists in the state. There's some areas where you're just not gonna be able to get in right away, and I don't wanna blanket the market for something and then create a bad patient experience because, you know. We're booked up. So it's also about knowing exactly what's going on operationally, exactly who you're trying to reach, what the message is that's most likely to convert, and be able to, to see people across the lifetime of their engagement with your organization and really keep nurturing that and keep reengaging and finding more touch points and kind of building trust. And we couldn't see any of that without a really strong CRM that's tied back to our EMR data.
[00:13:29] Ray Mina: Do you think this becomes especially more important because you're in a, you're in a fixed market, and is it, is it a naive assumption? At some point you'll have an interaction with the consumers and patients in your market, and then it's not necessarily about acquiring new patients.
[00:13:46] Ray Mina: It's about like making sure that you're servicing the patients that you have with all the different needs that they have. Is that, is it a naive assumption as a non-healthcare marketer, view it that way?
[00:13:56] Heather Linder: No, that's perfect. I mean, our kind of first phase approach with CRM really was precision patient marketing, and a lot of that started off with unpaid tactics to our own patients.
[00:14:08] Heather Linder: Right? We had a lot of, you know, example, for example, women over 40 who had never had a mammogram before. So you know, there already are patient, we already have their consent and access to them. But for whatever reason, they either haven't made the appointment yet, they haven't been nudged to through other tools.
[00:14:24] Heather Linder: Maybe their doctor mentioned it to them and they just forgot, or, you know, there's some kind of crack again in the system. But we can, you know, pick them out specifically reengage them, gives them, you know, multiple kind of soft touch points. As well as saying schedule, schedule, schedule, and you know, we were able to build a significant volume of business from people again who already trust us.
[00:14:44] Heather Linder: They're already in our EMR, you know, they could easily schedule, uh, really kind of low barrier, low entry, and low cost to us. Which is, you know, my CFO is somewhere, you know, applauding because that's, that's what the, the business loves too. Right. This is someone who should be getting the service here.
[00:15:02] Heather Linder: Obviously you don't make a ton of money off of screenings, but they're super crucial to longevity, to keeping people engaged. God forbid, if you find anything, making sure they know exactly what to take the next step. So yeah, that's, that's absolutely right.
[00:15:18] Heather Linder: A lot of it, I think in marketing we often overlook reengaging with your existing patients. 'cause everyone wants that new shiny patient. It's fun to say we brought, you know, this many thousands of new people into the system, but often a lot of our patients have engaged with us once, they just haven't been back in a while because maybe it wasn't appropriate.
[00:15:34] Heather Linder: Maybe they needed to be seeing their primary care provider, provider close to them and that's great. But, when you're ready, when it's time, when you do hit, you know, those different age checkpoints and you need to get a certain screening or get a test, come and see us. We're here.
[00:15:48] Ray Mina: I love that. The B2B SaaS equivalent, in my early days, I remember founders were like, you just need to fill the top of the funnel. I just need net new leads. And I'm like, well, maybe not. You actually have like a lot of these really valuable engaged patients and consumers. Why don't we like optimize for their experience. And it sounds like throughout this conversation you keep touching on that like part business part, like we're here to service the community and we're here to like help people like have a great outcome in their lives, which like pretty, pretty cool to be a part of.
[00:16:19] Ray Mina: You mentioned first party data, you mentioned things like claims data. What, what other data needs to be in your CRM to know that what you just described is working? That you know, if you're not gonna be the single source of care, you're gonna be the network effect to help people find the care they need.
[00:16:36] Ray Mina: What, what else do you need to make sure that you know that that's working?
[00:16:41] Heather Linder: Yeah, I mean I think for, you know, the CRM that we're working with right now, being able to connect to the electronic medical record right, is crucial and a lot of kind of true marketing CRMs don't do that. They have other ways to judge ROI or you know, you're looking at clicks and time on page and you know, kind of metrics that are nice to have, but they don't truly give you the appointment level data.
[00:17:02] Heather Linder: I think that's something that, you know, we need to be able to see is, and you know, again, not to be brand neutral, but it's Epic. Right? So you wanna be able to see who you refer in Epic. Because we also, within our CRM world, we have, you know, so there's the, the patient focus, there's also physician relationship management, right?
[00:17:21] Heather Linder: It's kind of, there's CRM, there's PRM, you know, our team gets to, to run with all of it. So there's another level of, there's the referral data, so you know where people are coming from, where they're going back to. We’re keeping an eye on kind of, you know, transfers. We do a lot around how much are we providing for rural areas in the state.
[00:17:38] Heather Linder: Are we, you know, being the service that we need to, to them? Are we filling gaps there? And being able to, again, holistically really look at someone's appointments and their claims across their life span. And we, you know, also in some really cool machine learning that we can do to layer risk on top of that.
[00:17:54] Heather Linder: So, kind of one of my, you know, favorite next iterations is. Yes, you try to assume what you think someone wants or you know, or they've come in in the past for, and you can kind of anticipate, well, they might need this, or it's, you know, the age related. But having risk assessment scores or propensity modeling for consumers that are not yet our patients allows us to even get more sophisticated and really giving them messages that they wanna hear and upping your chances of conversion.
[00:18:21] Heather Linder: 'cause you know, unfortunately we can tell with pretty, pretty good accuracy when you might be, when you might have cancer, you might be on the path to it, or you know, just for one example, it's creepy. Right. But it's also amazing because you want to get, they don't wanna spam people with messages that aren't relevant to them.
[00:18:39] Ray Mina: Yeah, absolutely. That's, that applies in all marketing, but especially in healthcare, when it could feel really insensitive.
[00:18:45] Heather Linder: Yeah, right. There's, oh my gosh, there's so much of the, the ethics and the morals and the consideration. You never wanna hurt someone's feelings or turn them off. They will, you know.
[00:18:56] Heather Linder: It's the, the trust is the glass star of marbles, right? It takes so many marbles you put in over time of building that up and you send one wrong email or something that's mistargeted or you make an assumption about a patient and you just like shatter the whole thing with them and it takes a long time to rebuild that.
[00:19:11] Heather Linder: So with great power comes great responsibility.
[00:19:15] Ray Mina: That's pretty funny. There's a lot of things a brand could do, but the one thing that people always talk about is the, is the haphazard email. It's like the thing that there's no, there's no grace given for that. So.
[00:19:25] Heather Linder: Yeah, and something that I think is important, this just kind of reminded me too, is you know, we talked about Epic really briefly, right?
[00:19:30] Heather Linder: Yeah. So we have a really powerful tool that manages patient level data. I think one of the beautiful things about having a CRM that is tied in but is separate, is you figure out which tool is the right place to. Get that message to the patient and having it governed really holistically. Because you know, if I'm in my MyChart, that's where all of my actual health interactions, I know they're stored, right?
[00:19:54] Heather Linder: So if my doctor reaches out and says, Hey, this looks suspicious. I really like you to come in for X, Y, Z, great. I trust that doctor. I know that they know me. If I get that from my marketing email, I might be like. What, how do you know that, you know, it brings up this kind of level of suspicion about the type of data.
[00:20:12] Heather Linder: So I think it's, it's figuring out what's the right channel to reach a patient. And then for consumers, obviously you can't use an EMR to reach someone who's not yet your patient. They're not in the system yet, so that has to be done. But really what's the right channel? What's the right point in their patient's journey and their, you know, condition life cycle.
[00:20:30] Heather Linder: Should it be coming from something like a MyChart or should it be coming from something like a CRM platform?
[00:20:37] Ray Mina: I, you know, I obsess over like channels, like how, what's the right tone, what's the right asset by the channel? And I've never thought about it in the way you just described in healthcare, because at the end of the day, multiple tools do the same thing.
[00:20:51] Ray Mina: Send an email, send to text, but it really, it really matters where, what the source is coming and what the content is. I, I, that, that was like a, an unlock moment for me. Thanks for, thanks for framing it that way. You mentioned earlier in our conversation about, and I did, I wasn't aware of, of some of these data points about how Oklahoma ranks near the bottom in some aspects of health outcomes.
[00:21:13] Ray Mina: I'd love it if we could just go like a layer deeper and maybe talk about a campaign that your team has been a part of that you're really proud of. That help is helping to like change some of those outcomes. Especially as it, as it relates to what we've been talking about of orchestrating that through, through the CRM efforts.
[00:21:32] Heather Linder: The Stephenson Cancer Center is our flagship cancer center. It was founded all the way back in 2001, actually by a state mandate. So the state of Oklahoma came to OU Health and said, well, it wasn't OU Health at the time. That's a newer brand, but came to the University of Oklahoma and said, we have to have a cancer center in this state.
[00:21:49] Heather Linder: We need it to serve the entire state. We need it to achieve NCI designation. Go forth. So, you know, however many, 25 years ago, the state, you know, was desperate for some kind of way to tackle this. So the cancer center started has, you know, worked toward achieving NCI status. We're going for comprehensive status in the next couple of years.
[00:22:10] Heather Linder: But a huge part of that is you have to serve the whole state. You have to bring research, you have to show that you're changing those outcomes. So we talk all the time about, you know, changing the outcome. Changing the outcome, because it can't. It's, it's macro and micro, right? It's the single person you're trying to get in the door, and it's changing the trajectory for an entire population of people that might, you know, we also have huge, you know, an underserved populations here, huge tribal nation presence in Oklahoma.
[00:22:39] Heather Linder: It's a very kind of socioeconomically and, you know, just diverse state in so many ways. A lot of complexity that goes on with that. A lot of, you know, kind of disparities, social determinants of health. It's a lot. It's a lot. There's a lot of history, a lot of systemic issues that the state has. So the cancer center itself put together mobile screening units to try to, you know, get out there in the state.
[00:23:02] Heather Linder: And that's kind of one of our, one of our ways to really reach more rural populations, right, without building more facilities, is here's this incredible state, state-of-the-art, you know, low dose CT scanner that's on a bus and we're gonna drive it around the state. Yeah, it's actually pretty amazing. You go in there and you feel like you're in a doctor's office and it's a, a coach, right?
[00:23:23] Heather Linder: So we have these, these kind of tools that can reach people anywhere. Well then how do they find them? So there's, there's the actual cancer centers, there's the mobile units, there's the Affinity network. You know, we have all sorts of different places, but if you, you know, don't know where to go if you don't know how to reach 'em.
[00:23:40] Heather Linder: So we've used CRM really? To, you know, breast cancer screenings, lung cancer screenings. The big four really we talk about is breast, lung, colorectal, and prostate. And especially with breast and lung, getting as many people screened as possible, that qualify really is the best way to then start directing them toward care.
[00:24:01] Heather Linder: So something like a CRM that helps us both in multi-segmented journeys pick people that we know are at a high risk. Nudge them toward making an appointment with a physician. People we don't know yet that, you know, help them understand what their possible risk might be and nudge them toward getting screened.
[00:24:21] Heather Linder: And then there's also the second opinions. There's the, you had a, a scan come up and there was something on it. Were you ever connected with, you know, the right person to read your scans or to operate on your. Possible tumor. So all the different kind of ways you can reach someone within a single kind of disease state.
[00:24:41] Heather Linder: But cancer for us really is a huge area where we have to improve outcomes and get people in the door for treatment sooner.
[00:24:49] Ray Mina: Yeah. It's really inventive approach in the rural community that, as you mentioned, which is like getting screening in front of people versus trying to motivate them to come to this, come to this screening.
[00:24:59] Ray Mina: What, what does geeking out at the campaign level like? What does that look like? Is it what we're gonna, we're gonna have mobile screening in these regions or geos and then people in our CRM that, you know, have certain data that match like, um, people that we should get in front of. Is it simply just the first touch of letting them know that, Hey, we're gonna be in your neighborhood at this time? Is it, is it that simple?
[00:25:24] Heather Linder: Yeah, I think it has to be both or all of it. Right? There's the, yeah, there is the geotargeting aspect of it. There's also, you know. We do it at a cool campaign level, but there's also business partnerships and again, like that community layer of saying, you know, what are some of the biggest employers in town?
[00:25:41] Heather Linder: Let's park those, you know, mobile units in front of them and work with them to communicate with their employees about getting access. We have a lot of really great partnerships with different tribes in Oklahoma that often have their own kind of health systems and networks to supplement that, to bring, you know, our screening units to them.
[00:25:59] Heather Linder: As someone who grew up in a really rural, really rural area, my dad was sick years and years ago, and he literally couldn't get an MRI, 'cause there was one machine that was on loan to a different hospital. Right. So that's a reality too, is even if you have a hospital nearby, they might be sharing equipment.
[00:26:14] Heather Linder: They might, you know, just not have any. So there's the, the geography of it, there's the helping people identify their risk, you know, to then proactively seek out that kind of screening or treatment. I think that is a huge part too, where people just don't wanna face a lot of this. They don't wanna think about it.
[00:26:30] Heather Linder: And something like colorectal cancer. We're seeing younger and younger diagnoses. It's one of the highest climbing cancers for young people. And the, you know, screening indication isn't until you're in your fifties, I believe. So what do you do then? And that's where some of this kind of additional layer of kind of that machine learning, that risk scoring, I hope.
[00:26:52] Heather Linder: And you know, this isn't proven out yet, but I hope that it helps us get people in the door sooner for the care they need. So they don't get to that, you know, late stage diagnosis where they didn't really, didn't even know anything was wrong.
[00:27:03] Ray Mina: I love that you touched, because we've been talking about like the CRM as a way to prompt, but you also touched into the, you know, the orchestration outside of that, which is like the community aspect is there I, in, in BW SaaS, we think of it as like air cover.
[00:27:18] Ray Mina: We have human beings that are working with people, but there's also a level of air cover in. Maybe digital channels to create awareness. Is that, is that sometimes part of the orchestration effort as well?
[00:27:29] Heather Linder: Oh yeah, absolutely. So I love that, you know, we can use the CRM as kind of a home to track everything that's, you know, out there.
[00:27:37] Heather Linder: So if it's programmatic, digital, or paid search or you know, native advertising, it all kind of is tracked back into the CRM. So we can, we have a campaign tactic model so we know exactly what tactic it was that caused, you know, the interaction. Then there's the, the, the human relationships, right.
[00:27:54] Heather Linder: That we leverage the networks of connection that we have, our nonprofit partnerships, but then we can put, you know, we can still use our CRM to blast out to those groups, but we're able to kind of harness either the information and the data they have. There's I, you know, I, again, like we love new shiny objects and obviously something like CRM really helps you track in a much better way and much more holistically.
[00:28:18] Heather Linder: But the human relationships are so important, and I never want to get away from some of the kind of the fundamentals, right, of being a community leader. Again, we're not necessarily this health system 10 states away that we just want you to come fly here and get treated for. We want to be. Known as being ingrained in the community, being a frontline of, you know, all of the kind of major issues that Oklahoma City, that Tulsa, as we're expanding out there are dealing with, that we're kind of right there helping people tackle them.
[00:28:48] Ray Mina: Yeah, I think the point is, is like, you know, there may be some people in your audience that just need a gentle prompt based on like convenience. But you touched on something even more important, which is like, and I remember my dad also went through cancer years ago. You know, he was reluctant. He didn't wanna hear any bad news, like he didn't wanna go talk to more experts about it.
[00:29:10] Ray Mina: And so there's this level of education of, you know, bad news early is better than bad news late, like get, you know, get on top of it. How, how does that, how does that show up in, you know, beyond the prompt? There's a bit more of a, of a lift there to help educate someone. How does that show up in your campaign efforts?
[00:29:31] Heather Linder: Yeah, it's a, it's a tricky challenge, right? And we un, and I hate this, unfortunately, we talk a lot about the chief family health officer because we know statistically that women make most of the appointments across families, whether it's for their aging parents. Their partner, their children, and their, you know, friends probably, I don't, I'm sure there's some woman out there doing the, you know, emotional labor of friends.
[00:29:55] Ray Mina: A hundred percent.
[00:29:56] Heather Linder: And you know that, so there's, there's the, the known of that where a lot of times when you are putting campaigns together, you're like, okay, well we have this kind of chief family health officer in mind, but how do we make moves over in, you know, how do we get men to make doctor's appointments? Is there, you know, a combination of kind of that soft CTA where you're educating.
[00:30:15] Heather Linder: Versus schedule now that we can kind of warm them up and prime the pump. I am a big fan of a health risk assessment, but I think there is that curiosity, right? Like we all are. You know, sitting here asking ChatGPT to diagnose us. Why not find a tool that is more interactive, that's more engaging to try to help engage people in taking that next step?
[00:30:36] Heather Linder: It's not, there's, I think there's no one answer, right? So it's kind of trying all of the different things as part of, you know, this AMC connection. We are able to work with the Hudson College of Public Health at the University of Oklahoma, which I think it's very cool to have access to some of that research that's underpinning the messaging that we create.
[00:30:55] Heather Linder: So is there, you know, a way to talk about lung cancer for different communities that resonates differently and there absolutely is data, you know, out there in the public health world about this. So that's kind of another layer of even just the same ad to a different, you know, person of a different race or socioeconomic status, might need to say something different to either, you know. Make it a community.
[00:31:19] Heather Linder: You know, just get treated to save your family, right? 'cause you're the most important person in your family that they need versus someone that's a less communal, you know, framework to say save your own life. And that's just kind of another layer of complexity to try to, to figure out how people make decisions.
[00:31:36] Ray Mina: Yeah, you mentioned like the idea of can we get, can we get men to book more appointments? How do you feel?
[00:31:43] Heather Linder: Come on on men.
[00:31:44] Ray Mina: I know exactly, you know, guilty as charged. I, I, I need to get an eye doctor exam. And I can't book it online. I've brought this up, up twice on the podcast. So if you're in Truckee and you have an eye doctor and you give online appointment booking, I'll book more.
[00:32:00] Ray Mina: And I've been so busy and my wife was kind enough to like call yesterday and book me an appointment, but I was on it. She just like raised her hand, but.
[00:32:10] Heather Linder: She just offered to make sure you blind.
[00:32:13] Ray Mina: Yeah. Just proof that women are always looking out to, to make our lives easier, so yeah. Hats off to all of you.
[00:32:20] Ray Mina: How do you feel today about your ability to measure to those outcomes? Like we're running campaigns, we're hoping that men are gonna make, you know, take care of their health more, make more appointments. Do you feel pretty good about your ability to link from the campaign to the outcome at this point?
[00:32:37] Heather Linder: At the end of the day, the ROI reporting is kind of the most crucial piece of all of this. And just as kind of a side note too, right? As budgets are getting cut, as healthcare is becoming just a smaller and smaller margin business, I mean even in a very red state, we're all fearfully looking toward the next few years of Medicaid cuts that might be coming, right?
[00:32:58] Heather Linder: That's terrifying. As a state with a huge Medicaid population and the largest provider of care for Medicaid. Patients, what's, what's the future? So I think we're all kind of operating on borrowed time in a lot of ways, and looking at how to cut costs, cut costs, cut costs, right? And you never wanna take it out of the areas that directly affect patient lives.
[00:33:18] Heather Linder: So marketing becomes kind of the easiest way to really stay lean and having a tool that actually shows you, okay, here's, you know, the downstream revenue that this campaign generated. Here's exactly how much, you know, money we should be collecting versus the actuals to be able to get to their really granular level and to sit down with your, you know, financial leaders to say, look, you gave us, you know, a million dollars or whatever it is to build marketing campaigns, and we brought you more than that, right?
[00:33:48] Heather Linder: To say we, you know, made good on your investment and we grew it. That hasn't always been a conversation in marketing. It's been a lot of the vanity metrics, right? A lot of the, Well, we can see that more people are talking about us. So it probably was linked to this campaign, like a lot of kind of correlation, and I feel lucky to be able to be on a pathway to actually saying, no, no, no.
[00:34:09] Heather Linder: I have always known this has been valuable, but I can tell you exactly how many dollars worth this work is.
[00:34:15] Ray Mina: You know, that was gonna be one of my closing questions. If there's another VP of brand and growth at a health system or an organization across the country, what would be your advice on the first thing they should do?
[00:34:27] Ray Mina: And it, it, it almost sounded like the advice would be is like, given what's about to change for us in the next, you know, few years, make sure you link your campaign level data to outcome. So, you know, like where to invest or where could you cut?
[00:34:42] Heather Linder: Yeah. I mean, you, you absolutely have to prove the value of the work we do, even though we know it's valuable.
[00:34:46] Heather Linder: Right. And marketing works. It just, it does. There's a reason why it's, you know, a very aggressive business that everyone has a marketing team, right? We know it works, but if you can't tell exactly what worked and to, you know, for us to be able to, at a campaign level, say which tactics are converting and which ones aren't.
[00:35:05] Heather Linder: Yeah, okay, let's shut those off. Let's move our spend over here and do it in really real time so that you're not looking at a six month wrap being like, oh, I don't know if that was the best way to invest those limited resources. We can do it, you know? Three weeks in, as we see stuff start to drop off, we can make shifts.
[00:35:22] Heather Linder: That's, you know, in another kind of beautiful way about the world where we have all of this dashboard of data right at our fingertips is to really be able to hone and optimize, but just, you know, ways to, again, prove our value. And sometimes marketers are really good at telling stories externally, but not internally.
[00:35:37] Ray Mina: Yeah.
[00:35:38] Heather Linder: So that's something I really focus on with my team too, is we have to be able to tell the story of the work we're doing back to the organization to help them understand. I've had a lot of meetings about CRM and you know, a lot of very smart people still don't really know what it is because they're not in marketing, they're not in that space.
[00:35:56] Heather Linder: And so, you know, keep helping them explain how we're able to do more targeted marketing, how we're able to segment, you know, reach audiences, help people you know at their time of need with the right message. Like, Hey, I'm great, great, great. But if you can't really kind of boil it down into what matters to them, you've lost your audience.
[00:36:12] Ray Mina: I love you touched on two things. One, I learned that lesson the hard way early in my career is like you can never talk enough as a marketer internally about why and, and what, like what is the outcome. And so if you think someone got it, you probably need to tell it seven more times in different ways.
[00:36:29] Ray Mina: And the other part is like a lot of what we do as marketers is like, yeah, there's external forces. We have to prove to our leadership. But you, you nailed it, which is like, if you're really, really passionate about doing great marketing, it's the intrinsic thing. Like your intrinsic thing is like, I don't wanna do campaigns that are fruitless.
[00:36:48] Ray Mina: I don't want to ask my team to do work that's not gonna benefit my, you know, customers and consumers. So, like you, you need the data to, to feel really strongly and convicted about the work that you're investing in beyond what a CFO is asking, beyond what some board member wants to know. I, I love that you touched that rail.
[00:37:06] Ray Mina: That's, I think that's what separates like a really, really great marketer from like a mediocre marketer to be honest.
[00:37:14] Heather Linder: Well, I appreciate that and I mean, it's so true though that we, again, we have people's lives in our hands. There's someone searching or looking in their inbox or, you know, coming across us somewhere out in the, in the ether that is maybe really stressed out about a potential diagnosis, about a symptom, about some, some unknown in their life, and where do they go?
[00:37:35] Heather Linder: How do they make that decision? There's so much coming at us all at once. If our, you know, if my campaign can help someone feel like they were confident in making the right next step toward getting an answer, toward getting the care that they needed, that's, you know, that's the goal. I wanna make healthcare less complicated for everyone.
[00:37:53] Heather Linder: Even in it, in this industry, I, there's still times where I'm like. I'm at a loss. I don't know where to go. I don't know what to do. And I can call up, you know, a friend over in the clinic and ask a question. Right? And most people don't have that access. So how can we bridge that gap for them to make it feel like they're an insider?
[00:38:10] Heather Linder: Everyone should be insiders.
[00:38:12] Ray Mina: Everyone should be insiders. Exactly. Yeah. I've really enjoyed this conversation, Heather. Thanks for joining our Marketing Rounds. It was super fun.
[00:38:19] Heather Linder: This was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
[00:38:21] Producer: Today's episode is brought to you by Freshpaint. If you're a healthcare marketer under pressure to do more with less, Freshpaint helps you stretch fixed budgets, prove what's working, and protect the strategies that drive growth. Freshpaint brings performance and privacy together in one platform, so you can see real outcomes across channels and double down where ROI is highest. With Freshpaint, privacy becomes your performance advantage. Turn better data into smarter decisions, find more high value patients, and keep your growth plans on track. Learn more at freshpaint.io.