We Are, Marketing Happy - A Healthcare Marketing Podcast

Patient satisfaction is high — 93% high, according to Alchemer’s 2026 Healthcare Patient Experience Report. But dig a little deeper into the data and a more complicated picture emerges.

In this week’s episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow walks through the report’s key findings and what they mean for healthcare marketers, from the gap between patient feedback and follow-through, to the gender and generational divides shaping how patients find, choose, and leave providers.

Key findings from the report:

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The Feedback Follow-Through Gap: Over 73% of patients received prompt acknowledgment after giving feedback, but only 50% actually saw any action taken as a result. 11% said nothing happened, and 18% were never told either way. If patients are taking the time to share concerns, having a real resolution process (not just an auto-responder) is a significant opportunity.

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The #1 Trust Driver: Feeling listened to. More than 50% of patients said feeling heard by their provider was the most important trust factor — beating out clinical expertise (41%) and communication clarity (43%). As Jenny puts it, this can be a tricky one for marketers to navigate.

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The Gender Divide: When patients said they were leaving a provider, women most commonly cited poor communication. Men most commonly cited long wait times. The reasons were starkly different.

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The Generational Divide: 78% of patients aged 18-44 read online reviews before choosing a provider, compared to only 35% of patients 65 and older. Younger patients have a low tolerance for administrative friction and will readily switch providers over a poor digital experience. Older patients prioritize continuity of care and relational medicine.

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A Notable Example: Despite a strong clinical reputation that came through consistently in reviews, Mayo Clinic’s average rating was dragged down due to scheduling and front desk friction. Marketing can’t fix everything, but online scheduling and reducing administrative burden are squarely in the lane.

Jenny’s bigger takeaway: marketing rarely succeeds in a silo. Patient experience, IT, and clinical teams all play a role in what patients find, access, and experience, and the marketers who build strong cross-functional relationships are the ones who move fastest.

Full report available here: Alchemer 2026 Healthcare Patient Experience Report

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Healthcare marketing is rewarding work — but when the service line involves behavioral health, addiction treatment, oncology, bariatrics, or sexual health, the playbook looks a little different.

In this week’s episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow shares how to compete for attention on sensitive topics without violating platform restrictions, alienating patients, or creating content that feels clinical and cold.

Four key strategies for marketing sensitive service lines:

Target the moment, not the condition: Rather than trying to identify and target people with a specific diagnosis (which platform restrictions make increasingly difficult anyway), build content around the searches people actually make. Someone with depression isn’t searching “depression treatment” at 2 a.m. — they’re searching “why can’t I get out of bed?” Meeting patients at their actual moment of need sidesteps platform restrictions and delivers far more relevant content.

Market to the care circle, not just the patient: For service lines like addiction, behavioral health, and memory care, the decision maker is often a family member. Campaigns that speak to caregivers — who face fewer stigma barriers and are often in active problem-solving mode — tend to convert better. Think about CTAs and content designed specifically for the people who love the patient, not just the patient themselves.

Lead with normalization, not services: Before a patient will ever click through or submit a form, they need to feel like they’re not alone. Content that says “this is common, this is treatable, you’re not broken” builds the trust that service-forward messaging simply can’t.

Design the landing page experience for privacy: Clear confidentiality messaging, discreet contact options (text or chat over phone), and minimal form fields go a long way for patients who feel vulnerable. Every field you ask for before someone is ready is a barrier. View every touchpoint through the lens of empathy before anything goes live.

Jenny also references a recent eMarketer piece — Healthcare Marketers Can Make Patients Laugh If They Listen First — which adds four layers worth knowing: listen to the community for 6-8 months before creating, make the situation funny (never the patient), recognize that awareness alone doesn’t drive action, and earn the right to use humor by building trust first.

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

SHSMD 2026 is in the books — and the Hedy & Hopp team is back with takeaways, highlights, and a few sessions worth talking about.

In this week’s episode, Jenny is joined by Marissa Gurrister (Director of Growth), Sarah Cutcliffe (Director of Epic Services), and Lindsey Brown (VP of Integrated Marketing) for a full recap of the conference, from their sold-out workshop to their favorite sessions to the booth backdrop everyone raved about.

The Workshop: From Access to Action: Turning Epic Into a Growth Engine for Healthcare MarketingJenny and Sarah presented a 90-minute lunch workshop on pulling patient appointment and revenue data out of Epic and using UTM parameters to build a complete picture of campaign performance. The room ran the gamut — from attendees furiously writing down tool names for the first time to seasoned Epic users asking detailed implementation questions. The Q&A made one thing clear: marketing and IT are still figuring out how to work together, and that conversation is happening everywhere.

Favorite Sessions:

Jenny — From Acquisition to Acceptance: Building Awareness and Preferences in New Communities (OhioHealth)A session led by Cody Albert and Christina Thompson, MA on integrating newly acquired and rural hospitals into a broader health system, covering communication strategies and lessons from previous acquisitions. M&A’s impact on healthcare marketing isn’t slowing down.

Lindsey — Nine Lessons from a Values-Driven Culture (Dayton Children’s Hospital)This was a presentation led by Kristen Bowser, APR and Ashley Junkunc, MA on what it actually takes to build a values-driven culture; not just externally, but all the way through to clinicians, nurses, and front desk staff. A great reminder that a rebrand without internal implementation isn’t a rebrand at all.

Sarah — The Playbook: Where Rivals Unite to Champion Women’s Health (Ohio State & Michigan)Ohio State and Michigan (yes, those rivals) partnered to present how they reimagined women’s health care at their respective institutions, driven by data showing poor outcomes in existing structures. A powerful session led by Luanne Thomas Ewald, Jennifer Dauer and Priya Bathija on using data to make the case for change and then actually making it.

Marissa — Beyond Automation: Human-Centered Community Engagement in an AI Era (Rochester Regional)In this session, Rachel Conley took a refreshing step back from the AI conversation to talk about community sponsorships, local events, and what it looks like to build trust with your community the old-fashioned way (a jazz festival, a 5K, and genuine human connection). Quality over quantity in action.

One more note: AI was woven into conversations at SHSMD this year, but it wasn’t the star of the show the way it was in previous years. The novelty has worn off. What the room cared about was meaningful outcomes…and that’s a healthy shift.

Stay tuned: the team heads to HCIC in Orlando in two weeks. A similar recap is coming!

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Sarah:

Email: sarah.cutcliffe@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-cutcliffe-294a8971/

Connect with Marissa:

Email: marissa.gurrister@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissa-gurrister/

Connect with Lindsey:

Email: lindsey.brown@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseycbrown/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

SHSMD 2026 is just around the corner — and we're heading to Baltimore with a brand new face on the Hedy & Hopp team and a session we've been looking forward to all year.

In this week's episode, Jenny chats with Sarah Cutcliffe, Hedy & Hopp's new Director of Epic Services, for a quick preview of what's coming at SHSMD and a little background on the person bringing deep Epic expertise to the team.

About Sarah:

Sarah's Epic journey started nearly 20 years ago when Epic recruited her straight out of grad school. Since then, she's worked as a trainer, consultant, and analyst across health systems nationwide — most recently as Director of Performance and Optimization at Hospital for Special Surgery. Her superpower: understanding what health systems actually need and translating that into what Epic can actually do.

The SHSMD Session:Jenny and Sarah are presenting a sold-out, 90-minute lunch session on Sunday titled From Access to Action: Turning Epic Into a Growth Engine for Healthcare Marketing. The session covers the analytics and data tools available within Epic's tool suite and how to use them to measure and report on campaign performance in a meaningful way — with 30 minutes reserved for Q&A.

Can't make it to SHSMD? Keep an eye on our social media for session recaps and to be the first to know when the free webinar repeat is available!

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Being the smartest person in the room doesn't mean much if you're not in the right room.

Too many talented healthcare marketers are stuck in an order-taking trap: executing requests without strategy, reporting activity without outcomes, and watching from the sidelines while leadership makes the decisions. In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow discusses five concrete moves that can help you reposition marketing inside your health system.

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Move 1: Ladder Up to the Strategic RoadmapStop building your marketing plan in isolation. Get a copy of your organization's strategic plan and map every marketing objective to it line by line. For every initiative, be able to answer: which strategic pillar does this support?

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Move 2: Stop Reporting Activity. Start Reporting Outcomes."We published 12 posts this month" is not a business result. "Our orthopedics campaign was associated with a 14% lift in appointment requests" is. Pick 2-3 metrics you can confidently connect to actual patient volume (call tracking, appointment request form fills, new patient volume by specialty) and report on them consistently quarter over quarter.

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Move 3: Learn to Speak CFOMarketing has its own vocabulary. Leadership cares about revenue, margin, and acquisition cost. Before your next leadership meeting, take one campaign result and rewrite it twice: once in marketing language, once in finance language. The difference in how the room responds will tell you everything.

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Move 4: Pick One Winnable Proof PointYou don't have to prove marketing's value everywhere at once. Choose one high-margin service line, run one well-scoped, fully tracked campaign, and turn the results into an internal case study. One clear before and after. That's your proof of concept for everything that follows.

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Move 5: Get in the Room EarlierPerception shifts when you show up with market intelligence before anyone asks for it. Bring search trend data, patient sentiment themes, and competitor moves to strategy meetings proactively. When leadership starts seeing you as someone who knows the market, the invitation to the table follows naturally.

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

We've had a lot of great guests on We Are, Marketing Happy, but this week's guest might be our most special yet. Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow is joined by her 16-year-old son, Owen Dibble, who spent his summer interning at the agency and attending an AI-intensive camp. The result is one of the most honest, refreshing conversations we've had about marketing, AI, and what the next generation is actually thinking.

What Owen Expected vs. What He Actually Found:

Owen came into the internship thinking healthcare marketing was mostly client emails and creative strategy sessions. What he found was a complex, rigorously process-driven operation with more tools, quality control steps, and backend work than he ever imagined.

The experience stuck. After spending the summer working alongside Hedy & Hopp's team, Owen went home and immediately applied what he learned to his own businesses. Within weeks of implementing SEO and GEO improvements, the phone started ringing from the exact geographies he had optimized for.

The AI-Intensive Camp:Owen also attended a week-long AI camp this summer where he learned everything from Python to how AI models actually work under the hood. His biggest takeaway: AI is less mysterious than it sounds. At its core, it's a math problem predicting the most likely next word. He also learned firsthand why trying to "jailbreak" a model and remove its safety guardrails backfires.

Gen Z & AI — The Real Story:Owen's take on his generation's relationship with AI is honest and nuanced. Most of his peers are using AI at the surface level — and many view it as a job threat rather than a tool to master. His perspective? AI is like the internet when it first came out. People were afraid of it then too. Now it's a baseline requirement for working. The students who learn how it actually works will have a significant advantage.

His advice for students considering marketing or AI as a career path: stop watching and start playing. Sit down, explore the tools, and figure out how everything works. That hands-on curiosity is what separates the people who use AI from the people who understand it.

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Your patients aren't Googling you and landing on your website anymore. That foundation has shifted, and as healthcare marketers, the moment we've been nervously anticipating is officially here.

In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp’s CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow talksabout how patients are actually finding and trusting health information today,what that means for your content strategy, and what to do about it.

The AI Search Shift:
The numbers tell the story:

● 88% of healthcare-related queries now trigger an AI Overviewat the top of Google search results

● Organic click-throughs drop more than 50% when one appears

● Healthcare site referral traffic from Google is down about35% year over year

● 1 in 4 adults are now using AI tools for health information

● About 40% of patients use AI directly to research providers

What Triggers an AI Overview:
AI Overviews are most commonly triggered by longer, more specific,research-style queries — showing up 74% of the time for those, compared to 36%for short queries. A search like "dermatologist near me" may be unaffected for now. But "how can I tell if a mole on my arm is potentially cancerous?" is almost certain to trigger one. The goal shifts from ranking in the top three to being cited, and that's where Answer Engine Optimization(AEO), also called GEO, comes in.

The EEAT Model:
Google and AI tools evaluate health content through the lens of Experience,Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT). Real clinician involvement, cited sources, and dated reviews are three of the most important signals for showing up in AI Overviews. The good news: educational content hasalways performed better with patients too. Educational posts historically get 2 to 3 times more engagement than promotional ones, and patients who engage witheducational content are 60% more likely to book and 40% more likely to referothers.

What to Actually Do About It:
Start with an audit of your last quarter of content and ask: what percentage is "why you should choose us" versus "here's something useful to know?" From there, build content structured around real patient questions,lead with the answer up top, add schema markup so AI can parse your content, get clinicians visibly credited with bylines and review stamps, and keep yourstats and clinical information current.

Connect with Jenny:
Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

If your organization runs on Epic, you may already have everything you need to prove ROI for your marketing campaigns.

In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow talks about the analytics tools and reporting options built directly into Epic, and how healthcare marketers can use them to connect campaign spend to real patient outcomes and downstream revenue.

The Tools Inside Epic Worth Knowing:

Chronicles: Epic's real-time transactional database where live data lives. This is also where Reporting Workbench runs: the home of pre-built reports you can pull from any time

Clarity: A relational database that runs nightly data extracts. It’s a reliable source for deeper historical reporting

Caboodle: Epic's internal data warehouse, built for deep campaign analysis and connecting marketing data to clinical and financial outcomes

LinkSource: Epic's native tool for campaign tracking. When a patient visits a landing page and schedules an appointment, the UTM parameter from your ad gets attached directly to their patient record, so you can pull downstream data on appointments attended and revenue generated

Analytics Catalog: A search engine for existing reports already living inside Epic. This makes it easier to find what's already built before starting from scratch

SlicerDicer: A flexible, self-service tool for pulling and slicing data out of Epic on your own terms

The big picture: when these tools work together, you can put UTM parameters on your ads, attach them to patient records at the point of scheduling, and pull through appointment attendance and downstream revenue, all within Epic. From there, you can build dashboards that show true campaign ROI and make smarter decisions about where to allocate your media budget.

If this all sounds unfamiliar, but your organization is already using Epic, don't miss Hedy & Hopp's free webinar series, Summer School: Epic for Marketers! ​​Although the series wrapped up this week, you can still access all sessions on-demand when you register.

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

There's a reason marketing budgets are the first thing cut when a health system hits a hard quarter, and it's not because the work isn't valuable. It's because most marketing leaders are presenting their results in a language the C-suite doesn't speak.

In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow gets into the specifics of how healthcare marketing leaders can walk into a board meeting and command the room — by ditching the marketing metrics and picking up the financial ones. Here’s what’s covered:

The Three Financial Metrics the CFO Actually Cares About: Patient Acquisition Cost by service line replaces cost-per-lead with something the board can actually act on, like a precise price tag for bringing a new patient through the doors of a specific clinic. Contribution margin takes it a step further, showing the revenue generated by marketing-driven patients after accounting for the variable costs of their care. And service-line ROAS, broken down by high-margin procedures like cardiology, orthopedics, and neurology, replaces blended averages with numbers that actually mean something to a CFO. The shift in language is everything.

Building the Executive-Ready Dashboard: The golden rule of board presentations: if a slide takes five minutes to explain, it's already lost. The three-column framework simplifies everything: the input (marketing spend by service line), the output (EHR-verified new patient encounters), and the impact (contribution margin and estimated lifetime value). Anchor it to your organization's current strategic plan and your dashboard becomes a strategic alignment tool.

The Defensive Play — Framing the Cost of Inaction: The most powerful thing a marketing leader can do when budgets are on the table is reframe the conversation. A 20% budget cut isn't "saving money,” it's ceding market share to the competitor down the street. Show the historical correlation between reduced ad spend and the downstream drop in high-margin elective procedures, and give leadership a real choice: "We can reduce spend by 20% to hit this quarter's cost-cutting goal, but our models show this will result in a $150k drop in surgical contribution margin next quarter."

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

AI in healthcare marketing is an exciting topic. This week, we're getting into the specifics of how it actually works in practice.

In this week's episode, Hedy & Hopp CEO & Founder Jenny Bristow explains the five pillars Hedy & Hopp uses to integrate AI into paid media management, and what that's actually meant for client results. The golden rule that anchors all of it: AI accelerates and informs, but humans own the strategy and validate the outputs.

Hedy & Hopp’s Five Pillars of AI Integration in Paid Media:

• Smart Planning & Budgeting: Rather than relying on platform-suggested defaults, we use AI to analyze multiple first-party data points alongside real inventory data and performance signals so budget allocation is driven by real intelligence, not guesswork.

• Precision Persona Building: AI makes it possible to build out multiple granular personas (pulling in demographics, household income, personal values etc.) at a scale and speed that traditional processes simply can't match. Human teams then pressure-test every persona before anything goes live.

• Emerging Channels: Patients are already turning to ChatGPT and other LLMs with healthcare questions before they ever book an appointment. Hedy & Hopp is placing clients within those results. Think of it like paid search for the AI era.

• Real-Time Insights: AI layered on top of custom Data Studio dashboards (many of which now include Epic patient appointment and revenue data via Hedy & Hopp's UTM Connect tool) means trends get flagged faster than any human analyst could catch them. This enables quicker feedback loops and smarter optimizations.

• Creative Optimization: AI handles the versioning work like regional variations, DMA-specific copy, and localized iterations so campaigns can move faster without sacrificing quality. Concepting, however, stays firmly in human hands.

Ultimately, this isn't about automation for automation's sake. It's about building smarter, human-led paths to paid media performance!

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Healthcare marketing is leaving the glossy, corporate-ad era behind. What patients actually respond to now is real faces, real stories, and real expertise — and that's reshaping who gets a microphone in your marketing strategy.

This week, we're breaking down a framework for healthcare influencer marketing built around three distinct buckets, each serving a different purpose: reach, trust, and content fuel.

1. External Social Media Influencers (Buying the Audience): This is about borrowing an existing audience. You partner with established creators (lifestyle, parenting, wellness, or condition-specific) to break into demographics you haven't reached yet. The healthcare wrinkle: the FTC and FDA don't play around with disclosure, so #Ad labeling is mandatory, and you'll want to vet a creator's history to make sure nothing in their past content conflicts with your brand. CreatorIQ or Sprout Social both help with exactly this kind of audience and brand-safety vetting before you sign anything.

2. Internal Brand Experts (The "OG Medfluencers"): Your own doctors, nurses, researchers, and therapists who are already building an audience bring something no outside partnership can buy: built-in clinical credibility and hyper-local trust. Because they're still employees, they need clear boundaries between personal opinion and your organization's official position, along with genuine support like studio time and compliance help. Tools like EveryoneSocial or DSMN8 make it easy to push pre-approved, legally cleared content straight to your internal team so they can share with confidence.

3. User-Generated Content (UGC): Rather than paying for someone's following, UGC means sourcing the raw, unscripted content patients are already creating (recovery journeys, clinic walkthroughs, unboxings) and putting it to work across your owned and paid channels. The one rule you can't skip: a HIPAA-compliant release form before any patient face or story touches paid media. http://archive.com automatically captures organic content your brand gets tagged in, while Bounty and Skeepers help you run micro-campaigns for content that's pre-licensed and ready for ads from the start.

The takeaway: external influencers expand your reach, internal experts close the trust gap, and UGC delivers the content that actually performs!

For more on this topic, check out episode 107: Influencer Marketing in Healthcare.

Connect with Jenny:Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Many healthcare organizations face the challenge of centralizing marketing initiatives across local offices or different departments. In this week’s episode, our CEO Jenny shares a model for successfully implementing shared marketing services that’s especially useful for private equity groups, expanding hospital systems, and nationwide organizations that offer local autonomy. By collaborating with individual teams, rather than forcing mandates, organizations can minimize teams “going rogue” and producing off-brand materials.

The Four-Pillar Shared Marketing Model

Self-Serve Brand Toolkit: Provide an easy-to-use digital asset management (DAM) system or use tools like Canva Enterprise, to allow teams to customize approved templates with relevant information, making it easier for them to stay on-brand than to create their own materials from scratch.

Network Effect and Knowledge Sharing: Treat the organization like a marketing laboratory by testing strategies in one market and productizing successful results to roll out to other locations. This ensures offices benefit from collective intelligence rather than just purchasing individual services.

Centralized Strategy with Local Execution: Have the headquarters handle time-consuming, expensive tasks like strategy development and creative asset production. This offers a financial incentive for local offices to opt in, while still allowing them to manage their own local media buys.

Shared Reporting Dashboard: Develop a performance dashboard that provides leadership with a macro view of the total marketing ecosystem while allowing teams to drill down into their specific micro performance. This provides value for local offices by solving complex infrastructure and analytical challenges.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

In the healthcare marketing industry, just when you think you have everything under control, a new change comes along. And, honestly, it's a heavy responsibility for leaders to build a team structure that can withstand the pressures of the ever-evolving healthcare marketing space, but it also keeps things exciting!

In this week’s episode, our CEO, Jenny Bristow, shares two key concepts from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) framework that have helped Hedy & Hopp build a solid marketing team that has withstood many industry changes: the accountability chart & the “Right Person, Right Seat” framework.

The Accountability Chart: The accountability chart is distinctly different from traditional job titles and organizational charts in that it focuses on the essential functions a team needs to operate efficiently. Start by mapping out core functions, such as content strategy, paid media, analytics, etc., and assigning responsibilities to each “seat.” When developing an accountability chart, it’s critical to ignore current personnel to design an ideal structure from scratch, ensuring zero ambiguity regarding who owns each function.

The "Right Person, Right Seat" (RPRS) Framework: Once the ideal structure is developed, evaluate current staff through two lenses: Right Person & Right Seat. Right Person assesses whether the individual shares the organization’s core values. Right Seat utilizes the “GWC” framework (Get It, Want It, Capacity to Do It) to determine if a person is suited for a particular role. In other words does the person understand the requirements of the role? Are they genuinely excited and motivated to perform the responsibilities of the seat? And do they possess the mental, emotional, and technical capacity to succeed in the position?

Separating the person from the problem is vital when restructuring. If a team member lacks the capacity for a specific modern technical role, it does not necessarily mean they must leave the organization; they may simply belong in a different seat.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Why healthcare marketing? For many people in the industry, healthcare marketing is a deeply purposeful career path that allows them to positively impact others’ lives and improve access to healthcare. In this week’s episode, our CEO Jenny offers guidance for new grads and professionals on rising industry trends and important skills for success in healthcare marketing.

Major Industry Trends

Shifting Search Journeys: The percentage of patients using Google for traditional searches is shrinking, as people turn toward generative AI for pre-diagnostic research.

Authenticity Beats High-Production Value: With the rise of deepfakes and AI-generated media, there is a growing demand for transparent, unpolished video content.

Privacy and Measurement Challenges: Marketers need to get creative in order to prove ROI while maintaining compliance, as HIPAA and state-level privacy laws have made it more difficult to track campaign performance.

Essential Skills for Success

Keep a Human in the Loop: Use AI as a productivity tool, rather than a replacement for critical thinking. Be sure humans are in charge of the storytelling.

Engage Audiences with Microlearning: Work on translating complex clinical topics into engaging, short, mobile-first videos that can quickly educate and build trust.

Adopt a Privacy-First Analytics Mindset: Focus on downstream business outcomes, like patient appointments, while ensuring patient information remains secure and compliant.

Proceed with Empathy and Health Literacy: Focus on writing copy that is easy to understand and empathetic, that AI cannot easily replicate.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

With the recent introduction of the American Medical Association’s (AMA) seven-priniciple framework designed to protect physicians from unauthorized use of their likeness, AI-generated deepfakes are having a clear impact on the healthcare landscape. In this week’s episode, our CEO, Jenny, presents strategies for marketers to maintain undeniable authenticity amid the current “crisis of trust.”

Episode Notes:

Marketing Strategies for Authenticity

Keep It Raw: Move away from high-production value toward raw, behind-the-scenes, unedited content that is easily authenticated.

Put Physicians at the Forefront: Focus on content that explicitly highlights real doctors and clinicians. Use interactive features like live Q&As that are difficult for AI to replicate.

Multi-Channel Footprint: Social media videos are easy to fake. Create a cohesive ecosystem where a patient can verify a physician’s profile and likeness across multiple channels, including your official website.

Localize Content: Orient content on local issues and regional health trends to anchor a physician’s authenticity to the community they serve.

Organizational Compliance Tips for Marketers

Audit Your Consent Forms: Review and update media release forms to ensure they meet the new standards for explicit, revocable consent.

Create a Rapid Response Plan: Develop a plan to execute fast takedowns of unauthorized content on major social media platforms.

Communicate Internally: Use this as an opportunity to build trust with physicians by proactively communicating the steps being taken to protect them and ensure the dissemination of reputable information.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

The summer months bring an uptick in travel and an increase in “unplanned” care needs, with travelers searching locally for urgent care, sports physicals, and pharmacies. In this week’s episode, our CEO, Jenny Bristow, provides strategies for optimizing during the summer months to capture “near me” searches from individuals and build trust with those who may not be familiar with your organization.

Episode Notes:

Strategies for building a strong foundation of organic SEO:

Start with the basics, ensuring your Google Business is up to date with accurate hours for the summer months. Then optimize your organic presence for local searches, by creating local hyper-local landing pages and optimizing them for the conversational, long-tail searches that people are likely to type into their phones.

How to leverage paid search for a precision strike:

If your area allows, increase bids around airports, train stations, or popular resort clusters to capture travelers through those areas. Utilize local inventory ads to show the real-time availability of common summer needs, like EpiPens. Consider call-only ads to capture people with minor crises who want to talk to a real person rather than spending time browsing a website.

Tips for optimizing for AI (GEO & AI Agents):

AI models now summarize the “best” local options, using website’s structured http://schema.org data, that clearly defines location, services, and credentials. Be sure to maintain a positive online reputation, as AI models increasingly pull from sentiment in reviews. Clearly state insurance acceptant, wait times, and out-of-state policies to assist potential patients and feed accurate data to AI platforms.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Our CEO, Jenny Bristow, and Director of Growth, Marissa Gurrister, have just returned from Salt Lake City where they were attending the recent HMPS conference (Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit). In this week’s episode, they recap their experience, describing the event as energizing and collaborative, an environment that fostered meaningful connections and professional growth.

Key highlights from the conference included:

CEO Communications Playbook: This session was notable for its "no-recording" policy, which encouraged vulnerability and candid discussion regarding professional leadership.

AI in Action: This session outlined a shift in the AI conversation toward sophisticated, strategic implementation and process efficiency rather than fear of job replacement.

Promise to Practice: This session focused on aligning brand strategy with patient experience through real-world case studies.

Governing Patient-Facing AI: This session explored how health systems can effectively meet patients where they are regarding AI interaction.

Brand Frankenstein: This discussion covered the emotional and strategic complexities of navigating joint ventures, affiliations, and rebrands.

Epic Marketing Implementation: H&H presented a case study with Bayhealth, outlining a roadmap for improving patient experience and volume through technical audits and leveraging existing infrastructure.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Marissa:

Email: marissa.gurrister@hedyandhopp.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marissa-gurrister/
If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

This video features a discussion on the evolving role of Epic’s marketing and patient engagement tools within healthcare systems. The host, Jenny Bristow of Hedy & Hopp, introduces the company's new Director of Epic Services, Brandon Hallman, to discuss the intersection of marketing strategy and IT infrastructure.

Episode Notes:

The Epic Ecosystem Shift: Leveraging Epic’s functionality for marketing is a relatively new development. Historically, patient engagement was fragmented across various third-party tools, but Epic is increasingly providing a unified platform—acting as a "single source of truth"—to help organizations manage patient experiences.

The Evolution of Cheers: Cheers has moved beyond simple patient communication to become a more comprehensive client relationship platform that includes CRM and CallHub functionality. While some in the industry have questioned the tool's sophistication, it is maturing into a powerful solution that integrates with other tools like Hello World.

Consolidating Tech Stacks: Many health systems are moving away from third-party vendors like Salesforce and WebMD Ignite toward a strictly "Epic-first" mentality. This transition aims to reduce costs and complexity, allowing for more autonomous, synergistic communication between marketing and IT.

Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and IT: Bringing marketing and IT to the table together during the planning phase to align on goals, security, and compliance is key to combatting the siloed nature of these departments. Hedy & Hopp facilitates workshops to help these teams prioritize campaigns, align on measurement strategies, and define roles.

Strategy and Services: The agency approaches this space through three primary lenses: audit, strategy, and implementation. They also highlight the "UTM Connect" tool, which helps bridge the gap between digital marketing efforts and patient records in Epic to enable ROI reporting.

Some advice for marketers struggling to navigate the Epic landscape: communicate early and often with IT, and treat the relationship as a translation process between technical requirements and marketing goals.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Brandon:

Email: brandon.hallman@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-hallman-03074742/
If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Jenny Bristow, CEO & Founder of Hedy & Hopp, is joined by Miranda Ochsner, Director of Paid Media to discuss the significant impact of the 2026 midterm elections on healthcare marketing. Political ad spend is expected to exceed $10 billion ahead of this year’s midterms, presenting significant challenges for marketers, particularly when it comes to traditional channels, like TV and radio. They discuss these challenges and offer strategic advice for navigating the volatility of marketing during a political season.

Episode Notes

Since political campaigns typically have first-right access to advertising inventory across local TV and radio stations, other advertisers risk being “bumped.” No matter how far in advance you planned and purchased placements, getting bumped means your spots may be moved to less effective times of the day, like overnights, or removed entirely. This forces marketers to pivot quickly to deal with credits and reallocate budget.

The following strategies can help marketers plan ahead, as the political season is scaling up quickly:

Have a Plan B: Even the best laid plans need contingencies during political seasons, as inventory and political noise is largely out of your control. Think about scaling back or pausing tactics during the busiest weeks to ensure your message isn’t getting lost.

Capitalize on Alternative Placements: Be flexible and consider adjusting daypart mixes. Shifting from highly competitive times to alternative slots can maintain reach even during a busy season.

Diversify Media Channels: Beyond traditional local TV and radio placements, digital channels like online video and Connected TV offer additional control. Just be aware that additional control comes with additional costs, which are projected to increase by 20-50% in competitive markets.

Prioritize High-Intent Tactics: Channels like paid search remain stable and effective drivers of qualified traffic, even despite potential increases in bid costs.

Since political seasons are guaranteed to be unpredictable, focus on early, proactive planning to ensure a consistent, high quality presence.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Miranda:

Email: miranda.ochsner@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandamochsner/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.

Jenny Bristow, CEO & Founder of Hedy & Hopp, is joined by Miranda Ochsner, Director of Paid Media to discuss the evolving landscape of YouTube as a critical platform for healthcare paid media. They highlight YouTube’s significant reach and unique advantages compared to other streaming and social platforms. With over 75% of the US population consuming YouTube content, it is the most-watched streaming platform on TV (surpassing even Netflix!) — making it a powerful platform for healthcare marketers.

Episode Notes

Strategic Advantages for Healthcare Marketers

Patient Education & Discovery: Patients often use YouTube to research symptoms and self-diagnose before consulting a professional. Video content helps simplify complex medical topics and introduces expertise earlier in the patient journey.

Targeting and Measurement: The platform combines the broad reach of traditional TV with the granular targeting and measurement capabilities of digital media.

Content Versatility: YouTube can effectively host various video formats, including repurposed Facebook ads or traditional 30-second TV spots.

Retargeting Capabilities: YouTube allows for "in-platform" retargeting that enables healthcare marketers to deliver content, such as a multi-part educational series, to the target audience.

Paid and Organic Synergy: Paid media on YouTube can expand an organization's reach to new audiences, while organic content builds long-term engagement.

Connect with Jenny:

Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/

Connect with Miranda:

Email: miranda.ochsner@hedyandhopp.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandamochsner/

If you enjoyed this episode, we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.