We're here today with Kevin Schmidt at Baptist Health Kentucky.

Kevin is the AVP of digital engagement.

Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

You're welcome.

For our listeners, you don't know Baptist Health Kentucky is A9 hospital health system based in Louisville, KY also operating out of Indiana with 2700 beds and 1500 providers.

And 1500 providers, we're going to cover a wide range of topics today, but the kick us off, I'd like to ask you, Kevin recently HHS has released guidance on 3rd party tracking technologies and the effect of health system and hospital digital efforts.

I'd like to ask how about this health?

Kentucky has been responding to that guidance coming out of Washington.

Yeah, I think it's a good question.

There's a like most of the people that are in our space were a little bit, you know, taken aback or surprised by some of the the broad interpretations that were released in 2022, specifically the the most recent bulletin, I think, which was December 1st of 22 or somewhere around there.

Uh, there's a specific.

Part of that last bulletin that specifies what you have to do for people that are on unauthenticated pages, and that's something that didn't that wasn't necessarily part of our as digital marketers for healthcare.

Part of our really rubrics for grading some of the the analytics systems that we were using.

So for Baptist Health in particular, we obviously went to our compliance and legal and all of this and had some very high level and granular discussions on what that means for us and what that means for us moving forward.

But in talking with tongues across other healthcare systems, I think the the majority of us in really pivoted to looking for new solutions, whether that's something like CDP or a new out of the box solution that was to replace GA 360 or Google Analytics, that would have a little bit more, a little bit different of a of a stance on on privacy and bias.

There's.

UM, it was uh, it's been a year or so.

Of shopping and evaluating with security and legal and compliance.

Not just on that topic.

A follow-up question there been different kind of obviously HS releases guidance on many different things, particularly pertaining to CMS and that can affect payment, but sometimes there's been less than vigilant enforcement of these regulations so many times institutions may find that they're out of compliance with a certain regulation, but there is no penalty, there's no auditing, there's no compliance.

And so really, some institutions have found that it isn't really a compelling business reason to invest heavily in complying with these new regulations because there won't be much of a penalty for being out of compliance.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

That would not be a Baptist Health interpretation instance.

Uh, perhaps we're we're more conservative than other healthcare systems or or, I don't know, but.

Being compliant, especially in something like this and the change in atmosphere of of privacy, personal privacy tracking, not even just healthcare Phi stuff.

This is we're seeing, we're seeing sea changes around privacy coming out of state legislatures.

We're seeing it coming out of different browsers, all kinds of tech companies, more and more people being aware of some of the the information that they're voluntarily giving to social media and everything else.

And it's my.

It would be my distinct opinion that we need to do what's right for our patients and our consumers and that's protect their data as best as we can.

So Baptist standpoint was really to to really pivot quickly and as soon as we can to ensure that we are in compliance and we will stay in compliance in the future state.

Right.

And what are?

What are some of the business impacts on Baptist Health Kentucky in trying to come into compliance?

Like what sort of, you know, budgetary impact.

What kind of change your strategic road map?

Umm.

How are you actually putting to the pedal to the metal and saying look, we need to change and find a new solution?

Maybe we need to replace Google Analytics?

What do we need to do to actually make sure that our front end and our back end composite these new regulations and kind of how would you evaluate the magnitude of the impact of this regulation on your actual business?

Well, I guess, uh, we might be unique in this and that we we launched a new website on a new entire new platform everything on December 9th of 22 and we removed all analytics from that new website.

I think on no, just the 15th or the 22nd or somewhere around there.

OK.

Umm.

So we've had a, you know, a fully fleshed out, extremely new architectured website for the system for over a year now without any sort of you kind of on page analytics.

So in terms of business impact, it's been astronomical to not know.

Uh, at a good level.

Yeah, even how the the the kind of migration and and new architecture is rolling out.

We did a a whole new architecture from our systems that was much more service line oriented and locations for us and not being able to know some of the issues of bottlenecks for the that we are presenting in.

Umm.

That is really a big issue for us.

My teams responsible for, and, I believe wholly in, that the a good and smooth and frictionless online patient experience can positively affect patient offline patient satisfaction and not being able to prove that with data is, uh are is dark days.

OK.

So we're rolling out new stuff now.

It's has definitely affected our budgets.

We had to shift shift budget from analytics buckets this year, request more budget and and the the current FY in order to.

It's.

Not only investigating new platforms, but also to to work with different integrators to be able to do an implementation.

It's been a OK.

So I want to segue into another topic that's closely related to what we're talking about.

Umm.

So you're responsible for website optimization, accessibility, and search engine optimization.

Recently you overhauled and standardized your website as you mentioned, by consolidating 60 different sites system wide and you also let an 18 month project to execute redesign Rearchitecture relaunch to integrated internal website strategy and has you mentioned the business objective was to make a frictionless online experience for your patients without having the kind of data by capturing the web tracking of clicks of time spent on page.

Umm.

Just with analytics of patients interacting with your digital front door, how are you able to meet your mandate of providing a cleaner, more efficient, more patient centered approach to your digital presence?

Being.

What is your strategy and how have you been able to be responsive to patient needs while not being able to track whether things work or not?

Umm.

Yeah, we.

It's in some ways you can't, uh, at least not in the way that we've been used to.

You can't track users to the extent that that or even impressions or clicks to these.

OK.

To the extent that you used to be able to do to know the entire consumer journey from either from a micro or macro level of how users are getting to different places on your website where they're getting blocked, kind of where they're losing their way, ohm, the best thing that we could do and it's something that thankfully we implemented quite a long time ago was implementing things like schema and other sorts of signals on our website that are optimizing for search engines and allowing our users to find their answers quite often on the search engines themselves.

1st.

Right.

Because we don't know what they're doing on our site, we can track things like clicks and impressions and organics and all that.

Maybe through message and we can try to cludge together some performance reporting on you know some some other vendors or third party vendors that aren't necessarily tracking technologies that aren't implanted on our site, but it's not providing a holistic overall view of what individuals and what groups are doing on our site.

So I would say that the the ruling and the kind of broaden interpretations of some of this really hampers the ability for a lot of digital marketing teams to fulfill that mandate.

OK.

Uh, so?

Uh.

So I'm thinking about so you have some, you have some AI uses for marketing efficiencies and research, and recently you've improved your online presence after developing enterprise content marketing strategy that's been focused on creating and distributing value that's relevant and consistent content to attract and retain this patient audience, right?

Umm.

You've also worked on increasing ROI, improving performance, and previously you had used reporting through Google Analytics.

So I'd like to ask you is actually the two part question.

There are other ways of figuring out how to engage patients digitally than just through analytics, right?

You can convene patient focus groups.

You can present surveys.

That's kind of a lot of what HEDIS measures are all about.

Umm.

How are you getting patient feedback?

Or is there?

Is there any way you're getting patient feedback, either formally or informally through discrete data or or through more qualitative data or quantitative or qualitative surveys or other methods?

And then how are you leveraging Jen AI, if at all, to kind of assist with these efforts?

Umm.

So we do use a lot of feedback.

Uh, we have patient advisory councils at all of our hospitals and our system wide that we can rely on to talk to them about their experience on the website.

Typically, those advocates are quite often in the cohorts of what our typical users are going to be.

OK.

Mm-hmm.

So we can go to them and use them for user testing and feedback on some different aspects of the website.

We also work with some third party vendors that will allow us to do focus groups and kind of user testing on our new site as well.

UM, the issues being that those can identify some mistakes and.

Some large mistakes, if you have them or some issues within service lines or some very specific areas, but it doesn't give you a large view of the entire site and how a user is doing it.

Yeah.

Quite often the questions are you have to be so specific for in kind of setting up the questionnaires and setting up the the asks for those testers that you lose a lot of potential value from those.

In terms of AI, Umm my team has has a couple earlier adopters and kind of the the digital marketing Gen AI space that have been able to do Ohm's like significant amount of work and trying to you trying to figure out how we can utilize an AI model or an AI platform to to do some of the more tedious work that some digital marketing teams have to work on like keyword research or taking a certain piece of content and generating other piece of content out a bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nothing gets on our website that hasn't been or nothing that's clinical has it's on our website that hasn't been evaluated and approved by subject matter experts, whether it's heart care condition or urgent care or diabetes or anything else like that being able to take some of that condition or treatment specific content and then use it to generate a use AI for generating quizzes and social posts, maybe making FQS and summaries or language translations out of already approved content that we can then spin out on different platforms to drive users back to that canonical content is really.

Uh-huh.

Uh, OK.

OK.

One of the the strongest uses and time savers that we found for for AI at this point.

Right.

Uh, aside from some of the like I said, some of that really tedious kind of uh, banging out of research.

So I would like to kind of go to another topic that is also focused on digital engagement.

This topic would be provided directory and taxonomy search.

Obviously, there are regulations requiring and just good practice to enable your patient population to find providers with accurate information on your website.

Umm.

You want to make sure that they're availability.

They're locations, their contact information is well up to date and accurate.

What have you been doing to improve patient experience when they're doing provider search?

How's that affecting your provider data management strategy and what's going on about this health, Kentucky on that front?

Yeah.

I think one of the biggest struggles that we had at Baptist and and it's a struggle that I've had at other healthcare systems also is, UM, bringing in data from different platforms that are multiple different platforms where provider data lives within a healthcare system.

And then importing the data, cleaning it and creating really a a a source of truth for provider data.

4 digital marketing because that can be very different than a provider data source of truth for an employee Medical Group or from an entire system.

There's a lot of information that those groups need that digital marketing doesn't use for outward facing, for the public.

And then there's a lot of information that we would like to show to the public, like languages spoken or insurance.

Take it you know, enters, accepted, accepting new patients.

Hobbies. CV.

Research papers or publications.

Education, all those things that maybe your are hidden in some different file for a different, a different kind of platform within a system.

Being able to kind of get all that data, make sure it's clean and into a single record for each MPI or for each provider, and then building on to that source of truth for data points that don't exist anywhere else in the organization.

But that could be important to to a patient is one of the biggest things that you can do with the provider directory, making sure that that the public facing profile that are that a patient or a potential patient is going to look at is going to be, you know, appealing and correct and include data that they that they are gonna use in their choice parameters is paramount.

And beyond that, you have to obviously know enough about your providers to be able to set up a, a robust and constantly fresh fresh in an updated taxonomy.

So that when users are searching, you know if they're searching for elbow pain, they're not simply getting a list of orthopedic surgeons or they're not getting a list of of radiologist or something like that.

They're actually getting a a a list or a ranked list of individuals who are perhaps specialized in that specific part of the body that can really do what you need to do and ensure that they're following the internal rules for your hospital system that if you need to see a PCP or something first to get a referral before you can see a specialist that that that is sort of reflected in the the the provider search, or at least we make those things apparent and surface that information to to patients as they're searching.

I appreciate you going into detail about exactly how that taxonomy needs to be structured, and I think that would actually be potentially different for different patients depending on their payer status, right?

If you have an A Medicaid MCO or some HMO, you know you may need to see that PCP before being able to have referred to a specialist.

Really.

But if you have some PPO, maybe you're able to see the orthopedic surgeon or the pain specialist right off the bat without needing a referral.

E umm.

So that sort of kind of responsive taxonomy is really interesting.

Have you been exploring different solutions or how have you been promoting the different?

How have you been facilitating the integration of different data so that you are able to help that front facing website actually meet the needs of different patients?

Now I think there's a there's a certain line in there, right that you're talking about that that I'm not sure we can do right now.

You know there's there's, uh, there's a knowledge about the the user who is using your website that we don't have in terms of what sort of of kind of insurance they have and things like that that we have to provide the information for them to call or to how to find that information because we can't do it ourselves or we can't determine that kind of usage themselves.

Yeah.

Umm.

One of the things about the the taxonomy are you talking about the personalization of each user or their insurances.

Another thing is just simple geography now.

You may think of it as you know, what's the closest provider to this, but geography can also determine, you know, what you call things, you know, different synonyms for different body parts or synonyms for different conditions and treatments that need to be built into the taxonomy as well.

That's, you know, you can't just take it out of the box and assume that it's going to be one size fits all for your areas.

You know, we have hospitals that are in urban areas and hospitals in rural areas and those have some very different, uh, different demographics.

Umm, you're.

Ohm and different users and different patient bases.

So Kevin, as we approached the end of this podcast episode, I'd like to close this out with an anecdote, some concrete story of something that's happened in the last few years.

It could be where you spoke to the patient advocacy panel and you actually got some feedback about a problem on the website, what it was and then how you fixed it and what the outcome was or it could be something like, you know there was you had some issue in the back end just with your text stack with reconciling and integrating a different data for provider directory.

How did you find out about that problem?

How did you address the problem and get the stakeholders and then solve it and just in a few minutes, could you provide a concrete example that has improved the digital experience for the patients at the end of the day?

Umm.

They're the biggest one that I can.

I can speak to is probably from.

I started a Baptist in 2014, so this probably would have been 16 or 17 or somewhere around there.

Ohm Baptist had rolled out the health risk assessments, which are are pretty popular and prevalent on almost all healthcare system websites now.

But at the time they were new for Baptist, there was a little pushback within our service lines at times because there was, there was a lack of education amongst our providers that we had to combat.

Of what they were for that the HRA's are really to to educate the users, educate the patient and and allow them to take control somewhat of their of their healthcare journey.

And I ID if there is a potential issue.

It's not to diagnose or anything like that.

Now.

Uh.

And there was a little bit of ambivalence between our our original providers about.

Yeah, we need to.

You know, I'm not sure this is the right questions I ask and some other things.

And we have one a a individual in our one of our Richmond hospital that came in and he had taken an HRA for lung cancer and presented as I think medium risk or somewhere around there and because of that he made an appointment and came into our hospital and went through some of the you know the testing and all that and come to find out that there were conditions conditions within him that would not have been found that this individual did have some cancer issues that he took the NRA literally as a I won't say it.

Yeah.

OK.

A whim.

But he kind of he saw some, some, some advertising kind of took control of his healthcare and was like, oh, let me check this out.

Took it and when he came in they just they discovered multiple issues that that were caught early and that was a proof endpoint to our to our providers and to our system that there are digital manners that different ways that we can get people into our system that are going to be beneficial not only to the system but more importantly to that individual that can actually help help them in their healthcare journey and their health continuum.

You know what?

I really appreciate that story, Kevin.

I think in the world of public health, there's a phrase that you're saving lives millions at a time as opposed to doctors saving lives one at a time.

And I think that public health.

Frasier phrase is equally applicable to the world of digital health.

Wearily, I think you're able to address population health and individual health issues through some of your digital interventions, and in this case, in this concrete anecdote, you were able to potentially have saved this individual's life.

So I think that's an empowering story.

I appreciate you sharing that with our listeners today.

So for everyone who's listening, to remind you, this has been Kevin Smith, the VP of Digital Engagement at Baptist Health Kentucky.

Sure.

Kevin, I would like to thank you very much for joining us today.