Aligning Marketing and Operations for Sustainable Healthcare Growth | EP 11

I think it's really easy for marketing to think sometimes we can just push this product out and you're sort of working, you can sort of feel like you're in a silo because we're not doing the actual clinic work. So the key is to talk with the clinic. Most people in your organization just want to be heard, listen to them, listen to what their pain points are, and marketing is wonderful at looking at the big picture, you get out of your silo, and then look at how it's affecting operations, clinic, manufacturing, and what the capacity is going forward. Welcome to Health Care Marketing Edge, where we share stories and strategies to grow your practice. I'm Tim Bouchard from Lewis, a health care marketing agency specializing in helping practices acquire patients and grow their practice. Today we're tackling something crucial but often overlooked, and that is aligning your marketing with your clinic's actual capacity and capabilities. Our guest is Michelle Hart, Director of Marketing Communications at Boston site who's going to share some hard earned wisdom about honest marketing, managing expectations, and why all the marketing in the world can't fix a poor product or service. So stay tuned if you run a detention between your marketing goals and operational reality. This episode will hit home for you. Michelle, welcome to the pod. I don't you introduce yourself and tell everyone a little about what you do at Boston site. Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me. I'm Michelle Hart. I've been with Boston site about five years, a little over five years now. As the Director of Marketing and Communications, I'm responsible for ensuring our products and services are visible and known, helping to bring in customers. I manage all of our communications from public relations to website, to digital media. We have a social media manager, but overall we're of small operation, only about 50 people. We have multiple products and services and work worldwide. I didn't realize the worldwide aspect. That's cool. So do you also, I believe you also have independent providers who also use some of the technology side stuff to, I saw clinical trials, things are associated with Boston site as well. Yeah, yeah. We're a really interesting organization. So we started as a foundation and provided something called pro-streatment, which stands for prosthetic replacement of the ocular surface ecosystem. And that is for folks who have the most severe coronal diseases. And it requires not only a special contact lens, it's called a scleral lens, which vaults over your cornea and has a reservoir where fluids sits in there, so your eye is hydrated all day. But that works in conjunction with a pros-trained optometrist and an ophthalmologist. That is available only at Arclinic in Nita, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston and at a number of tertiary medical centers across the country and in India. We wanted to be able to provide scleral lenses to more people, because that model is very labor-intensive. It requires a lot of infrastructure. That's why it's at tertiary medical centers. You need to have insurance, billing the optometry, the ophthalmology to gather our hand in hand. So we developed Boston site scleral, which is a commercially available scleral lens. And it's used for folks who have less severe coronal diseases, but can be used for folks with more severe issues depending on the training of the optometrist using it. Doesn't require an ophthalmologist on board to provide that. So we have hundreds and hundreds of optometrists in the US, Canada, Latin America, England, Middle East, India who use Boston site scleral to treat patients. So that is very wide-reaching and it has both a provider side of the equation and a patient side of the equation. How does that kind of shape how you tackle this from a marketing approach standpoint? There's a lot to consider there. There's a lot to consider. From the pros side, a patient really needs a referral from a corneal specialist. So on that side, we market to corneal specialists. Those are folks who are MDs that have been treating a patient that maybe they might need, for instance, a corneal transplant. Sometimes pros treatment can prevent the need for a corneal transplant, which is wonderful. On the Boston site scleral side, we can do both B2B and B2B2C. So we have a lot of folks that will end up going to their optometrist and asking, do you have Boston site scleral? Because we do do some direct patient, or, like I said, B2B2C outreach, but we also market directly to optometrists. So you have a little bit of a referral network that you're going through to you. How do you balance what you're doing from a messaging standpoint to make sure that people know that the majority of this is referral based and you need some sort of specialist involvement? But also, there's probably a high level of education you're doing along the way too, right? There's a lot of education. We really do have separate marketing plans for the pros treatment and Boston site scleral. This has to be. And the pros treatment, like I said, is because it's not available everywhere, we really market around either those tertiary medical centers, so, you know, with some geolocation. What our advertising is very specific to folks with severe corneal disease. And when I say severe corneal disease, I'm talking about folks who have often rare diseases, something like showgren syndrome or ocular graft versus host disease. So we're reaching out to those very specific markets. For the Boston site scleral side, a lot of our patients who use that lens, like I said, they could have ocular graft versus host disease or something more severe, depending on the training of their particular optometrist. But for the most part, it's for folks who have keratoconus, which is where the cornea is kind of bulges out into a cone shape. It's a genetic disease or, post-laseic ectasia or other corneal diseases that might not require the ophthalmology side of the treatment. So these are very intense products and services that you have specifically, a lot of technology built up, R&D, I'm sure, involved in that too. And you've been around long enough so you might be able to answer this question really well. How did you know the product was ready to go out to the market or how did you make sure the right messaging was attached to it before it went out into the market and you put dollars behind it or content effort or things like that? The product, so the Boston site scleral product was launched before I came on board, and the reason Boston site decided to launch that commercial product was simply for reach and access. The model for pros treatment, which is, again, very resource-heavy, is not scalable. It's necessary, but it's not scalable to reach everybody that we want to reach. And our mission is to ensure that folks have access to a scleral lens anywhere. So that's why they decided to launch Boston site scleral. What's interesting is they launched a large diameter lens. So scleral lenses can be as large as the size of a quarter, up to about 24 millimeter. A typical soft contact lens is maybe around, I think, 13 millimeters, so thinking about the size there. And we believed that at that time, that bigger was better, and in many cases it is, right? It's covering more of the ocular surface, so it's protecting more of the eye, hydrating more of the eye, the optical properties, et cetera. Then we realized that, well, we have the market share in the 18 to 19 millimeter, which is our larger lens. The majority of optometrists are fitting competitor lenses because they're smaller. And we needed to really look at how we were going to gain more market share. And that's by offering a bigger variety. So market research was key. We actually hired an agency to talk to all of our customers, non-customers, I think it's important to have a third party that's not invested in our outcomes, do that research. And we learned that the majority of folks felt more comfortable at least getting started with a smaller diameter. And so then we launched a 16 to 17. The third party point is such a big deal, too, especially with how involved it is to come up with a healthcare product like that, and you attach all of this reasoning to it throughout the R&D process and then forget that sometimes you need to pull in the outside perspective to make sure that it's meeting the market the right way, too. And there's a lot that goes into all that technology and knowledge that you just think it's going to work when you go out, which it will. But sometimes how you communicate that to the market has to get a little bit of outside perspective to match the two so you can manage expectations, right? Absolutely. It was one of the best things we had done was to hire this outside agency to conduct that market research for us because we surveyed and talked with our own customers plenty. But I think you really need that third party to get down to the nitty gritty and get the true feedback that will help you make the changes that you need to. Yeah, then that gives you a little bit more knowledge also on what points to hit with those audiences, too, so that you can really meet them from their perspective versus just kind of talking to them or at them. You can actually talk with them about the products. You'd mention there's a ton of education that goes on with these. And they're for very specialized and advanced situations. So that makes it more comfortable to bring people in. And you're also managing their expectations, too, on how to get involved with the process and what can be their potential outcome if they were a part of that. How do you manage not over promising because it sounds so intense and such good outcomes going through these processes? You're bouncing what the product can do with what the market wants and trying to marry those things, too, together. How do you keep the messaging on point and not over promising or maybe even like under promising and missing the point here or there? With our pro-streatment, we, and that's all we do at our need and clinic, by the way, as we only do the pro-streatment, we don't actually fit Boston site scleral there. And we are very honest with patients. They'll come in for a consultation first and our doctors will evaluate them and say this is not going to be the right treatment for you. It's important to set those expectations. I know that there are places out there that promise that the guarantee or this is going to be the solution. I'll say we work as hard as possible to find a solution that will work for this patient. And it might not be us who are committed to ensuring that they don't have any eye pain, that they can see again as much as we can do. And I think patients really appreciate that. We actually surveyed all of our pros patients, or 2,000 pros patients in 2024. And out of the respondents, I mean, 96% said the treatment had changed their life and 95% said their vision and eye health improved. We had over 200 folks in that survey, just right, testimonials for us, sort of unprompted about how wonderful it was. And some of them don't even come to see us anymore. They don't use the pros treatment anymore, or it didn't work for them anymore. And they just have nothing but wonderful things to say. And I really, truly believe that's because we've been nothing but honest with them from the start. Yeah, you've leaned really heavily into that too. You have a number of really good patient story videos and cases up on the site too. And I think what's nice about that is you can really give the positive outcome feeling to the audience, but you're tying very real scenarios and real results to it in a way where people can see themselves in the story too. Was it hard to get that success story program up and running? Can you tell us a little bit about the effort that you've put into building that library of success stories? Yeah, it wasn't hard for us at all, actually. I reached out to, I think, patients from the last two years. I wanted something current. And I used a form on our website, so I sent them all a very nice email, but I said, if you're interested in sharing your story, fill out this form, and it was a simple form, I allowed them to give a few details of their story in the form if they wanted to. And then everybody that responded, I just had a conversation with them. Some of them have turned into videos, videos and stories. They're very willing to share, especially because a lot of our patients on the pro side, they've been dealing with eye pain and vision problems for years, and it takes them a long time to find our treatment. And that's one of the big marketing pushes we're trying so hard to overcome is that folks can find pro-streatment or sclerolenses much earlier in their eye care journey. We've seen that even on the orthopedic side too, someone will deal with a nagging or slowly building issue over years, and then it sort of starts to hit ahead and they have to look for somewhere that they trust to take care of it. And it's hard to understand what the options are and what the outcomes can be. And when you put, especially a video like that in front of someone, they can really relate to it. It just boosts the motivation to find out more so much better than just like reading an informational page on a website or reading about a procedure in a scientific way versus like an experience kind of way. So it really is a big deal. That's a big point. I liked how you mentioned the current aspect of it too. There's two aspects of that. When you do this for the first time, you want to have the current stories. It makes sense, a lot of times, or I would say it's worth revisiting that so that you can also have more current ones over time and keep it, keep that whole initiative moving. Don't just sit on the three years ago for videos that you did and bring in current patients and keep those stories coming over time too. The other thing that's been wonderful about making these connections on the marketing side with our patients is we now host patient information webinars. So we will have myself moderating. We have a patient representative on the webinar. We have our MD and our clinic director. So we cover all different parts of the pros treatment process, right, from not only the patient, but the clinic director talks about what do you expect when you come into the clinic and how long the process is going to take. The doctor will talk about exactly what the treatment is and the efficacy and the expectations. And then we partner with groups, like the dry eye foundation or the shogrin's foundation. And we ask them to share our webinar with their list so that we can get those people to come learn more about pros treatment. And those have been really good. It sounds like a very simple thing and you're probably thinking, why haven't you been doing webinars before? But we just started this sort of multifaceted webinar program in this past year. And it's been very successful as far as getting the information out there. We really just want people to be aware of options. Yeah, I have a personal feeling that the ease of what digital marketing did to marketing as a whole in the last 10 or 15 years has made some people forget that there are still some very grassroots ways to reach your audience in a meaningful way. Webinars being one of them, local events, community alignment, things like that. You mentioned one thing about the webinars, I think, was super important. It has multiple different representatives on the webinar, including a patient, which is huge. You know, it's all about bridging to the patients. And sometimes, if you just even just moderate two providers and a moderator, it still feels very talking to and not talking with. And the idea of bringing in a patient on the webinar is huge. I just wanted to emphasize that because you brought it up. Yeah, the patients, again, I had no problem getting patients to work with us on that. They are so happy to share their story. And I think, again, that's because I took them so long to find the solution for themselves and they just want to shout it from the rooftops. So it's interesting that you said that there's some grassroots marketing. And I actually believe that we're going to be kind of shifting back to that a little bit. And with AI and the constant, I mean, even SEO, that's sort of dead right now with the AI generative descriptions and such. But I think we're going to be going backwards a little bit. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think developing that honesty, that truth, those relationships, you know, marketing is important. It is about selling. You have to have revenue to have a business, of course. But it's your reputation, right? And you cannot destroy your reputation. And I had mentioned to you earlier that all the marketing in the world can't fix a bad product that includes, can't fix bad service either. You know, marketing will get pushed to, you know, get a product out there, keep pushing it, keep pushing it. That will not work if your product or service is lousy. And there's so many places to get online reviews now. I mean, it's good and bad, right? Patients know before they even walk in your door what they can expect based on Google reviews. Yep. Yeah. You mentioned another thing about this too. We've talked a lot about the sunny side of marketing, but you also have to do the realistic side of marketing to you on the education front. And like any other medical procedure or medication or treatment, there are also limitations on who qualifies or what it can accomplish. Are you also tackling that so that you can set some real expectations before someone reaches out? Me too. I think that because it's such a case-by-case basis, it's hard to have a sort of a blanket statement about what the limitations might be. But one of the things about sclerolenses is that there is a learning curve to learning to put them in your eye and take them out. I mean, when I was a teen, I have soft contact lenses. When I was a teen, even learning to put in soft contacts was hard and I thought, I'm never going to be able to put this in my eye every day. And of course, it takes a second now. Me too. And we've been doing it for years. Years, years. And sclerolenses. I mean, they're big. I wish I had one to show you. You know, it's like a little bowl and you have to put solution in it and you have to overfill it and put it in your eye and make sure there's no bubbles in there. It takes a little time. It can be for many people, it can be a little scary at first. So we're up front about that. We have videos. We have lots of training. We have educational material on that. And at our clinic, we have technicians that sit with the patient and they basically do not let you leave. I don't mean for the day. Like, you'll keep coming back until you know how to put that lens in your eye and take it out. And if you talk to patients who've been using sclerolenses, I mean, I had one patient said, "Oh, if somebody else is driving, I can just do it in the car and, you know, five seconds." So yes, everybody can learn, but it's, it may not be easy at first. That, I think this might be a good thing to sort of get close to wrapping up on is what you're talking about on the educational side and get even the webinar side is getting the team involved, the clinical team, the operations team, and having them be a part of educational document generation, educational videos, educational events. How is it getting them aligned with what the marketing efforts are doing and getting their buy-in to be a part of that? Because it's a big deal. You need their connection with the patients before they even get into the system. I'm really lucky at Boston site. We are not a matrixed organization. We have a very flat hierarchy. Every single employee knows how critical they are to the success of the organization and to our patients. And we talk all the time with the clinic staff. So I am only in the office a couple days a week and then I work from home, but every time I'm in the office, I'm visiting with the front desk staff and visiting with the clinic staff. Really just listen and ask questions. But what problems are you seeing our patients complaining about anything? I'll notice if the clinic staff is asking me to continue to update something, a document or piece material, I'll stop and set up a meeting with them and say, "What's happening? Where is the disconnect here? What are we trying to accomplish?" Because we have so much great education around, like for instance, applying and removing the lenses, I worked with the clinic staff to develop not only the videos that they have, but we created an 11 by 17 glossy coated piece that folds up into a little document that you could just put into your vanity drawer. And then we actually use that with our Boston site scleral network providers. We send that out with every single patient starter kit now, and that is a huge, huge help. There's a lot of patients in other optometry offices, and this is no knock on optometrist. They are very busy and don't have the time to train like we do. They don't have the educational materials to provide to their patients. So if we can provide that to them so that they can pass it on to their patients, we're just helping everybody out. Yeah, that makes you strong in your referral network too. I mean, it's never a bad idea to help everyone that's involved with your partner process too. It's a good patient experience, but it's also a good provider experience too. Absolutely. If there's one piece of advice you could give to everyone to take away from this, thinking about the whole spectrum of the conversation we had from how to go to market, how to communicate the message, and how to educate around that message, how to get the buy-in from the clinical staff. If it's not quite as easy as the awesome flat organization that Boston site has, how to bring the clinical staff and the leadership provider partners on board to buying into this idea of understanding the outside perspective and being a part of that communication to the audience. Well, I think it's really easy for marketing to think sometimes we can just push this product out and you're sort of working, you can sort of feel like you're in a silo because we're not doing the actual clinic work. So the key is to talk with the clinic and then have a stakeholder from each area. For instance, we actually manufacture the lenses right down the hall from our clinic as well. We have to know if we have capacity in our lab to create all these lenses, right? So it's not only just getting, you know, being sure that our doctors can manage the patients coming in. We have to make sure the lab has the capacity to put the lenses on the lathe and get those created in time for the patient. To me, it sounds so simple, but listen. Most people in your organization just want to be heard, listen to them, listen to what their pain points are and marketing is wonderful at looking at the big picture. You really, you really can look at the big picture, get out of your silo and then look at how it's affecting operations, clinic, manufacturing and what the capacity is going forward. Yeah, I think from a capacity standpoint to, you know, when we run into that, that's also an opportunity where if you're at capacity and you're worried about over-promising availability or getting someone to think about it from a small practice standpoint too, you can pull back from lead gen or patient funnel work and go into educational work and you can kind of sway back and forth where your budget and your initiatives go to make sure that you aren't just bringing in too many leads and having to turn people away. That's not a great experience for someone looking for, for healthcare, but building up the strength of what you're doing for your existing patient pool while you don't have that capacity and then just sort of like swinging back and forth. Everyone thinks marketing is so rigid, like we have to always be running our patient pipeline. We always, we have to come up with so much educational stuff. We don't have money for, there's a lot of flexibility there and if you listen to the patients and you listen to the providers, you can figure out where your priority is at any given moment and just flex a little bit. And I think that's important, like you said, it's a simple thing. A lot of people have forgotten about simple things in recent years and I like the idea of talking about those simple things. Good, yes, it's, you know, you don't want your patients sitting in a waiting room waiting for hours. You want to keep those personal touches, you want to get to know them. You know, when I said, listen to your clinic staff, I mean, patients want to be heard too. They are struggling and the clinic staff doesn't have the time to do that, right? So if they can share their story with the marketing person, I want to, I can tell you that the patients will just, they'll tell me everything because they, again, people want to be heard. And for what it's worth, marketing is fun when you're in these positions and you can make those connections. It kind of gives a little bit of purpose to what we do, too. It's not just about making money for a practitioner and organization and driving revenue. Sometimes it really is about connecting people to things and improving livelihoods. Sounds corny, but like, that's good. That should make us feel good about what we do. That's very true. Healthcare is all about helping people. So if you are, you know, not having, hearing these good stories, there's, there's something wrong. Yeah. Well, let's all go for those great stories. Let's align operations with marketing. Let's make sure we have the right promises out in the market and listening to people. This has been great. It was very awesome conversation. Why don't you tell people where they can find out more about Boston site or make a connection with you if they want? Yeah, absolutely. So Boston site, you can find us online at www.BostonSite.org. We have a lot of information there. And you can find me on LinkedIn or on my website at michellespillbergheart.com. Awesome. Well, listeners, if you want to get started on aligning your practices services with the patient-centric marketing approach, that's what we do. Check out our patient pipeline blueprint session offer. It's a workshop to uncover how you can attract new patients, convert more inquiries into appointments for your practice. And you can learn more at luminousagency.com/blueprint. And don't forget to subscribe to Healthcare Marketing Edge on Spotify, Apple and YouTube. I'll see you on the next episode. And Michelle, thank you for joining me on this one. Thanks, Tim.