Opening the Digital Front Door with Banner's Chief Marketing Officer

Alexandra Morehouse shares insights into the evolution of data and marketing in healthcare and digital transformation strategies.

Editor's note: This conversation is a transcript from an episode of the HealthLeaders Podcast. Audio of the full interview can be found here and below.

Alexandra Morehouse joined Banner Health, a nonprofit health system headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, as chief marketing officer in 2015.

Since then, she has not only secured a half-billion-dollar digital transformation investment from the Banner Health board of directors, she implemented Banner's first AI and machine learning platforms.

During a recent HealthLeaders podcast episode, Morehouse gives insights into the evolution of data and marketing in healthcare, shares digital transformation strategies, and offers advice for aspiring leaders.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

HealthLeaders: What has your marketing career journey looked like? How did you end up in the healthcare sector?

Alexandra Morehouse: I wanted to be in marketing because it was a creative field and I've always enjoyed that element. I started in marketing at American Express. I spent the first half of my career [there], and because they own so many subsidiaries, they got very good at collecting data across all of their different divisions, environments, funds, insurance, IDS, [and] financial planning, and they used that data to create great customer experiences.

They spun off a subsidiary that did that for other companies on a consulting basis. I got into marketing, and then inadvertently got into the data side, because you needed to really know data and digital platforms in order to be able to do state of the art marketing.

When I left American Express, I went to Charles Schwab and some other financial services, and then went into healthcare because that is another industry that uses federally regulated data for marketing to customers. It has the same set of privacy concerns on the financial data side as it is on the healthcare data side. It was an easy leap for me [to go] from one industry to the other.

HL: During your career in digital and healthcare marketing, how has marketing and the way we use technology evolved?

Morehouse: It has changed dramatically, simply because there are so many different sources of data. If you think of the internet as the ultimate source of data, we have much more data to sort through. You have social data, you have real time data, and you have data that comes in different formats. In the pre-social media era, when you were just dealing with your internal data, that data was clean cut; you knew what it was and in what format. And then it turned into the wild west and kept changing every day; your sources of data and how to interpret it changed quite a bit.

There's a substantial difference in the complexity of it, and as the government is staying on top of the regulations of these new kinds of data, the entire industry is having to keep up with the changing regulatory environment as well.

HL: What marketing and digital initiatives are you currently leading for Banner that you're passionate about?

Morehouse: Our most important initiative is what we call our digital front door. Whether you show up at our website, or our mobile app, or on your phone, most people aren't showing up first at the clinic, they're showing up in front of a screen. So, making sure we have an integrated experience for when people show up is a multi-millions of dollars and multi-year journey.

HL: What was the process for innovating Banner's digital front door?

Morehouse: I had to ask for the equivalent of dollars it would take to build a hospital. In order to get my board of directors and to get our CFO to approve that, we had to do the ROI that laid out in detail what you would get for the tens of millions of dollars that you put in. We had to be able to show both incremental revenue (getting new customers in the door, more interactions, and more revenue from existing customers), and then more loyalty and longevity from patients, then the financial upside to each of those.

I mapped all of that out. I had done this before in financial services, so I used the same formula, mapped out the ROI, brought it to the board and got it approved, because there's a very robust return on investment.

The challenge is that all health systems are used to investing in hard assets. When you buy a hospital or build a hospital, or when you buy an MRI machine, you have an asset and that gives most health systems a sense of comfort, because you have an asset to sell if you need cash. Now, when you're asking for something like a digital transformation investment, you're buying code, and that's not something you can see or touch. So it's important that you map out the ROI. The financial calculations were incredibly important, and every board meeting I have to go back and show them what returns we've seen on it so far. I spend more time on math than I do on [being] creative in my job. That has been a significant body of work that will continue to happen.

HL: What advice do you have for women and others in healthcare who aspire to be leaders?

Morehouse: Cast your skills net broadly, because it takes the integration of an entire portfolio of skills in order to be effective.

Leadership is something that is earned; it doesn't come with a title, it doesn't come with a promotion, you have to earn your respect and credibility. That means that we have to add a whole lot of different kinds of skills. You have to add media relations skills, content management skills, digital skills, branding skills, social skills, [and] analytics skills. The more skills that you can add and synthesize, to the more you can be effective and to drive results for your company. Ultimately, leadership comes from driving results and the credibility that follows when you drive results.

Keep your eye on metrics. In a creative field it's very easy to say 'Alright, well, that's not quantitative.'  Everything that we do now is measurable, so don't start any marketing campaign until you set up the metrics and make sure you hold yourself accountable to the results. Be completely comfortable with campaigns that are failures, because that's a piece of information. Always bring your campaigns back to what the results are, to the bottom line. That is really how leaders get noticed, is by making changes to the bottom line. So how is it that you grow the business of your enterprise, as well as managing the costs so that your margin improves.