How Banner Health Uses Technology In Its Marketing Strategy

Chief marketing officer, Alexandra Morehouse, shares how the health system utilizes technology in its at-scale, consumer-first marketing strategy.

Consumers know what they want. And if you listen, they will tell you.

Alexandra Morehouse, who has served as chief marketing officer of Banner Health since 2015, uses this philosophy in the organization's marketing strategy along with a strong utilization of technology.

The health system, which has hospitals, urgent care and emergency care locations, home care and telehealth programs, and imaging practices across Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, and Wyoming, operates with a mission that Morehouse created: making healthcare easier, so life can be better.

In a recent interview with HealthLeaders, Morehouse shares how Banner Health utilizes technology and active listening to successfully cater to the organization's consumers and to make healthcare easier.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: How would you describe the marketing division's role at Banner Health?

Alexandra Morehouse: The role of marketing at Banner is to be the leader for putting the customer at the center of everything we do. You'll notice that I use the word customer, not patient, and that is deliberate because with the rise of high deductible health plans, where most of us are paying for a lot of our healthcare out of pocket. We act and think like consumers, and we want to be treated with a level of customer service and our expectations are being set by Amazon and Netflix.

Marketing at Banner is quite different than marketing at other health systems. I am the executive leader for our digital transformation work, which we embarked on five years ago, and that has been called our digital front door. That was a five-year, and a tens of millions of dollar investment in that technology platform so that we could integrate all the things that most health systems have fragmented.

Most health systems grow by acquisition, and Banner's no different. We acquired our imaging entity, we acquired all of our 50 urgent cares, we acquired our rehab and physical therapy. When you acquire other entities like that, they typically have their own back-end computer systems. That means there has to be a lot of integration of the technology to make sure that no matter where consumers show up at Banner, they get a consistent experience, we know who they are, and more importantly, we give them a personalized experience.

HL: How does consumer and patient experience play a role in Banner Health's marketing strategy and the overall system strategy?

Morehouse: When I joined Banner, I worked with the board and rewrote our mission statement and then we created a consumer persona. We call her Sophia. She's a busy mom, who's married and has two kids, and four sets of parents and in-laws that she's looking after as well. She's chronically short on time, always short on money, and we use that persona at the center of every strategy slide that we have.

We frame all our strategic work around the customer. And so that has become part of the language of how we work at Banner and how we set strategy.

HL: How are you utilizing fresh and innovative ways to make it easier for consumers and patients to interact with your health system?

Morehouse: As part of our digital front door, we have a symptom checker. At the height of COVID when nobody could get through to their doctor, or nobody wanted to come in person, you could go through a symptom checker online and at the end it will tell you: you need to go to urgent care, or you need to schedule an appointment, or it could say please go to the ER right now.

We also have a health risk assessment that's a digital survey that allows you to check your likelihood for health risks. And that in turn would hand you off to make an appointment.

Our most important piece of technology is a CRM tool that allows a 360 view of all of our customers. It doesn't matter where you show up at Banner, they're going to know who are, your other family members, who's your primary care doctor, who are your other doctors, what was the last visit you had with Banner, have you had your flu shot, have you had your COVID vaccine? It stores all of your history.  And just as importantly, it stores your preferences. That's the heartbeat of the entire digital front door, this CRM system that allows you to manage personal relationships at scale.

We know from an Accenture study that was released [in January] that what patients want the most from a health system is personalized communication, because healthcare feels sort of impersonal, they want that personal touch. Our CRM system is what allows us to do that and it does it in various sophisticated ways.

We also handle 50,000 calls a week. We have natural language programming, which is a kind of machine learning that recognizes certain words, that allows us to analyze all 50,000 calls every week and see what the topics that people are most concerned about, so that we can have scripts ready for the reps. We can also push out information on our website and our blog.

HL: Banner Health has a large footprint. How do you meet individual community needs while also having a consistent digital experience for your consumers?

Morehouse: We have a very deliberate strategy and I invented a name for it, it's our "Glocal" strategy. So, it's a global strategy, and because we're trying to basically grow at scale, all of these tools allow you to operate at scale, and that allows you to reach more people and be more efficient. We have global strategies that cover about 80% of the strategy.

Then the local is the 20% where we have people on the ground working with local media outlets, for example, especially in some of our rural communities. Their personal relationships with media outlets [are important]. We do local events, like the rodeo in some of our western states.

We take a global approach for cost efficiencies and then a hyperlocal approach on the ground.

Digital transformation is about scaling, and for virtually every health system, it is putting Humpty Dumpty together, which is the challenge because we all grow through acquisition.

When I started this digital transformation, we had nine different physician directories and none of them talked to each other. We had to consolidate all of those position directories together.

We had 400 phone queues, and seven different telephony platforms, all of them on prem, meaning they weren't in the cloud. We had to consolidate all of those phone queues. When I get calls from other health systems, that's what they're most interested in. How did you consolidate and transform your calls? Because they're expensive, they're central to the customer experience, and most people struggle to get it right.

Getting your physician directory in good digital order and getting your phones in good digital order is absolutely pivotal to any digital transformation.

HL: What steps should health organizations take to keep up with consumer demands and expectations, and to overall have a better marketing strategy?

Morehouse: That is an easy one-word answer: listen. Listen in many places and then adapt.

We set up these 20 listening posts when we put our natural language programming in place because the good news about customers is you never have to guess. They are telling you every single day what they want, what they like, what they don't like.

We have a rapid listen and respond system set up, so depending on the circumstances, it will either be once a week or once a day. In normal times, our more usual cadence is once a week. Based on what we're hearing, we bring metrics, and based on what we're hearing from the prior week, we instantly change what our messaging strategy is going to be for the coming week.

Your ultimate report card is Google My Business and that is something we wouldn't normally hear about. When you do a search, and then the top three show up and they're sort of highlighted, that's where you want to be. Before our digital transformation, we were at 3 million Google My Business views a year. We closed last year with 180 million. This is a measure of how relevant you are to the public.

Our stated mission is healthcare made easier so life can be better. We got the digital IQ award for ease of use, and that was again from listening to the customers all the time. 85% of all healthcare searches start online. If you get the digital transformation right, make it give the information they want, and then make it easy to transact, people show up.

Doing marketing and doing marketing at scale are two different things. To do marketing at scale, you have to leverage technology. This is the ultimate success metric when you have a successful digital transformation in place.

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