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just having your name on a booth, that's not enough, you have to be able to clearly and succinctly state, here's the problem we're solving, this is a great action statement for us And   My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of This Week Health. where we are dedicated to transforming healthcare, one connection at a time. Newstay discusses the breaking news in healthcare with industry experts and 📍 we want to give a big thanks to our Newstay partners, ClearSense, HealthLink Advisors, Order, SureTest, and TauCite.

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(Main)   Alright, we're actually recording a news day at 5, but this is airing the weekend, so it's the first day of him. It's very confusing. It is a little bit confusing, Directions to Ford, all things security, privacy, and risk. Samuel Hill, marketing super genius. Okay, can we change your title? Head of Marketing for ThisWeekHealth. Marketing's super genius, sounds like. I've been called a lot of things. genius. But not super genius. And obviously Bill Russell here. here's what we're gonna do. Because if we talk about the news, it's gonna be old news.

We could talk about change healthcare, but You know, hopefully, for the love, hopefully this has been taken care of by HEMS. right now, what I'm hearing is the change stuff will be back up within 48 hours of when we're talking right now, which is Wednesday of 5 week. And, man, that's going to be so welcome.

All these CIOs, they're just stepping out of the meetings. For sure. Getting pulled out, pulled into calls, doing updates,

getting updates. There's a lot of sort of back channel conversations around how and what they should be doing to make that reconnection a reality. And different organizations, from a risk perspective, different organizations are in different places and some are going to connect earlier than others.

We're going to bring this into Samuel's world. Yeah. One of the things I want to talk to you about is communication. So, if you are A CIO who's been hacked, or your change healthcare who's been hacked. Transparency is obviously important within Reason, right? You want to share it to the right community.

That's one of the areas that people get in big trouble is they're like Oh man, let's not tell people because we don't know. You almost start communicating early and often. It's we don't know, but everything we know you're going to know.

So talk a little bit about that. And Sam, I want you to add some color to this. Yeah, I think what you saw

with The Change Healthcare Breach was that on

the site,

every couple of hours, there was an update. And it may have been exactly the same update that was published two hours ago, but you could always go and look and see if there was new information.

So just like health systems have downtime. And part of that is usually some kind of a war room call that goes on with lots of different people, often including the operations folks, clinical research, business operations folks, who can come onto the line and you just say, every 30 minutes or every hour, we're going to do an update and tell you where we're at.

That's different than sort of the public conversation, but it's the same kind of experience. It's the same kind of like practice that you would do if you had a

public breach. How would you do it to the public?

It's obviously two different communities. You have to worry about here, right? You have your dependent partners that are working with you that are a part of your business model.

You communicate with them. Like Drex was saying, frequently give them regular updates. And you're showing the details.

But don't you know, it's going to get out. So we're all at a conference and I started reading things like a named source from a health system said they had a meeting today and this is what they said.

So you know that's going to get out.

And I think with the public side, unfortunately we've all seen this play out way too many times now. Companies that are having to make public statement after public statement because of a cyber security incident. And I'm a big fan of share as many details as possible.

So you honestly treat the public. You're not giving the full nitty gritty like you would to your partners, but you gotta give them a lot of detail because honestly, Half time as a consumer, as the public, when I read a story about this and I see some of those statements You write it off and you say

whatever.

I think one of the things the public doesn't understand is, it's a crime scene. And so sometimes it's essentially the FBI is telling you, no.

Don't say these things. Then lawyers get involved. Like immediately. There's liability. Of course there are going to be lawsuits. There undoubtedly will be class action lawsuits.

Every breach now, it's like they light up nearly immediately. So there's lawyers involved and they want a scripted response. That's why if you're going to do something in writing, you do it on the website. It goes probably through some kind of a review process and then it goes up. When it's your internal customers, you can be, much more open and complete and take questions and not probably have the same fear that it's going to be copied and sent somewhere else.

Yeah. So

if it was possible AI was overshadowed at VIVE security. Security and risk a primary conversation. In fact, we're right next to the main stage, so I don't know if people are hearing all this stuff. But I heard him mention the word AI. And I'm curious. I'm going to be more open ended with this question.

I'm going to come back to AI. What was the most interesting conversation you've had at VIVE? And again, we're talking on Wednesday morning, so most of the conversations are done. This is a fairly dead quarter by the last day.

Man, one of the most interesting conversations that I probably had was reality that folks are coming up to us, tapping us on the shoulder, and telling us stuff about

how their products work.

And The way that they're talking about their products here, at least, feels a little different because we had this conversation yesterday on Newsday, but folks are talking to us about it sort of in the construct of here's how we're working with our clinical business or research partners to do things with them and not to them.

The, feels like the sales pitch is evolving for a lot of these companies and maybe it's because There's a lot of early stage companies here and a lot of startup companies, a lot of founders who kind of were in those trenches and so they come at it from a different way but it's been refreshing and interesting to kind of hear some of these stories.

Samuel? And I think it's

fascinating like a lot of the topics that have been slideware and like topics for strategic direction are, we're now starting to see the back end work that actually needs to happen to achieve that. So we talk about, how long are we talking about cloud? How long are we talking about this different AI stuff?

These things that are a lot harder to do in reality, instead of just putting them on a slide and saying, Oh, this is where we're going to go, this is what we want to achieve. The grunt work, the labor, the blocking and tackling to achieve some of those goals. I've seen a lot of companies that are really tackling, digging in to tackle that alongside of their

health system partners, and to me that's fascinating.

I'm going to play off of that a little bit, because I think people have gotten the message, which is hey, slideware doesn't cut it. And, I'm going from booth to booth, and there used to be this AI washing, people would just say AI. Now there's a screen and they actually log in and say, okay, look, here's what generative AI, here's how we've approached generative AI.

I was just in the Dr. First booth and I was talking to them about it and they have a demo of their MedRack. And their MedRack is using GenAI and some of the large language models and it's taking all this information that comes in from the pharmacies and what used to happen is essentially you would click on that box, one tablet.

This many, this time of, this amount of every, take it every ten days, and applied transdermal, whatever it happens to be and now with generative AI, it takes that record, it auto populates that box, and it's that auto pilot kind of thing where it's not replacing the clinician, it's taking a bunch of work out of it.

And hands it off to the clinician and

says, can you double check that work? Yeah, what do you think? And they go, yep, that's right. I was talking to Stacey Johnson, she happened to be there. Baptist Jacksonville. And they just did their epic implementation. She goes, Hey, 7 months, this has been live for us.

It has saved 7 million clicks. Wow. a real world application. Yeah. Where I think the clinicians may not know that's actually what's happening in the background, but they're feeling it. Yeah, and more hours. I mean,

burnout is a serious

hardcore problem for not just clinicians, but all the operations folks, too.

And so anything that can be created to make their life easier and ultimately for the clinicians to get more time with patients and families is going to be a good thing.

It's a good example, right? It's something that they've talked about strategically. Most health systems all have a plan or some ideas in their vision of, we want to make it better for our providers.

We want to make their work life easier. We want to do all these things, like quadruple AIM stuff. Now this is the hard work of getting into the daily tasks that they have to do. The blocking and tackling of making their life actually easier.

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 This question I'm going to start with you. From a marketing perspective, we've walked around this, and we'll walk around HIMSS and I'm sure we'll do another show when we're down at HIMSS.

What makes a good booth? Like, when you think of the booths that you've seen, what makes a good booth? What makes it effective? What makes people want to stop in and have a conversation? It all comes

down to how you communicate. We were walking with one of our colleagues on the floor the other day, and she asked, Hey, can you tell what they do just by looking at their booth?

I said, no, depends on how they communicate, what is their message, just having your name on a booth, that's not enough, you have to be able to clearly and succinctly state, here's the problem we're solving, this is a great action statement for us. And so, to me, that's what I look for in a booth, is can it clearly communicate to someone,

gimmicky kind of stuff, so, Actually, one of our partners has cookies.

I ate my fair

share of them.

fairly frequented booth because They were like, bring them in. They were warm. They were, I mean, they were good. I mean, does that stuff work? You get a lot

of But through the conversations that you actually get to have,

you get the flybys, I want a cookie, I want a warm cookie

in an afternoon.

Oh cool,

can I scan your batch? Yeah. As part of that. Absolutely. That person may or may not be somebody who actually

is a potential customer. Don't you want leads at the top of the funnel that are leads? I mean, we might walk by. I don't know about you, but I still get those emails like, Hey Bill, are you looking for medication reconciliation?

I'm like, Do you have any idea what I do now? It's I've been scanned at a number of booths, and eventually I'll get those emails.

Yeah.

This show's a numbers game. All these big shows like this, there are how many people can we put in the top of our funnel? And so you just Hopefully eventually you get down into

the place where you So you have to have a good process once you get that top of funnel to, to get to a sales qualified lead versus And

those that are doing it are going to be able to scrub out Folks like myself, I am not a target customer or prospect for any of these companies that are out here on the floor.

So scrub me out. You don't have to email me. But you want to find the one or two people that came by that, you can start messaging and communicating with the nuclear

lab. But that sorting takes a lot of time, right? I mean, it is a needle in a haystack

that you're kind of looking at.

What I'd rather see is them demonstrate their product and create interest.

And there's a booth here, Is it Andor? Yeah, Andor, yeah. And they have a nurse standing on the corner, and it's sort of blocked off from the rest of the booth, and she's just standing there in front of a camera and that kind of stuff, and you want to talk to her because she's standing there at the corner by herself.

Dressed up, and you're just like, What's your job? What are you doing? And then she gets to say actually, I'm doing virtual nursing, and on the other side, you can see virtual nursing, whatever. And, so, you're not stopping in for a cookie. You're stopping in to say, Okay, I want to see what this virtual nursing looks like, and you go around the corner.

That feels to me like, getting as many leads, but you're getting more qualified leads.

You're communicating what it is that you're tackling. And with that demonstration. That was a virtual provider interaction. Clear, understandable. It's hard to do that with a SaaS platform or something a little bit more nebulous on a technology stack perspective.

That's big, blocky cameras and people. You can show that off clearly. We're, yeah, a nice

looking booth. Important. Good branding. Very important.

But, is what you're saying in your booth, is the message you can

walk by, and

you have about three seconds to understand it, is that correct? Yeah, Donald Miller's thing is the grunt test, right?

You should be able to point at a booth and say, they do that's what they do. Just point at it. Seriously, it should be that simple. And a website should be the same thing. And you'd be surprised how many websites you look at and you go, I don't have to keep scrolling down to figure out what the heck should I do.

I will tell you one of the things that was effective. One of those small booths, and there was a lot of small booths here this week. And, I don't know, they're like four grand a booth, and they're pretty small. They're like desks. They're desks, exactly. But one of them, I thought, did a really smart thing, and they had these little signs about this big, it's we're interested in talking to you, we're getting ready to do our series round, and there was a third one, I forget what the third one was, but it was really clear when you walked up, it's like, Are you a customer?

Are you an investor? Are you whatever?

Yeah. I thought that was really effective.

I agree with you on the demonstration side of it too. Being able to really easily show off what you're doing. Very important. Not making people jump through a lot of hoops. To see how you're tackling the problem that you're

trying to solve.

The elevator pitch is really hard. For a lot of these companies, the elevator pitch is really hard because they have complicated solutions, or they have solutions that have multiple things on the platform, and so what in ten words, how do you describe the company?

They need help with

that kind of stuff. Yeah, but I had to do that. Walking into the show floor, I had to be able to quickly say, because people want to know, hey, what do you do? Hi, my name is Samuel. I lead marketing for this email for a media and events business. I focus on the healthcare technology executive.

Okay,

hopefully that's clear. I like it. Who do you send to an event like this?

So, I think because of the QIIME connection, I'm probably sending CIOs.

Right. If this is a good match for them. I'm probably sending directors and in this one, maybe more of the innovation team

I used to do. So the QIIME connection, I'm coming. Yeah. And plus I want to see you. Yeah. I'm going to connect with my peer.

Right. I would also bring A bunch of people that I was mentoring for training to be the next generation because I could walk this floor and mentor them at the same time. I can introduce them to players and so they get to meet some really good players. I mean there's a whole bunch of mentoring things that are just, can easily happen here.

Plus we could divide and conquer and do a bunch of research.

Yeah, generally speaking in these shows, I would come and I would do the things that I needed to do. Top ten vendors, top ten partners, have meetings with them. I would bring my number two, number three, number four, my apps person, my infrastructure person, whatever.

Give them particular assignments. We have this problem. Go walk the floor and find places where that's the case. And in some of those top ten meetings, I would bring them in too. And it gives them the opportunity to kind of learn how you interact with these senior, other senior executives

at companies and that kind of stuff.

I am going to come back to you. here. We used to go to D1 Yeah. It was attached to CHIME. Right. And we would see everybody.

And we could go from booth to booth and see the executives, even their product development teams, whatever, because they just had to go to one event. Okay, so now Gartner's happening on the same week as Vive. Vive is happening. Tim's is two weeks later. Scottsdale Institute is within 30 days of this as well.

And I think there's another big one that is there as well. Maybe not as big because it's not top of mind And we're seeing the CIOs split up. But one of the big values was, we were all in the same place. We're definitely losing something. I don't know what the question is, it's I'd like for there to be a place where we're all, there's enough value that we're all coming back together in that one

place.

Yeah, think it's tough.

Ours is just caught.

People are making decisions about where they go and where they don't go. I mean, that's the other important part of this. The decision process that you're going to go through to say, I'm actively deciding not to go to that, and I'm not going to have FOMO about it, because I know I'm going to get more value going to this thing, is a really important process, I think, for health system executives to sort of figure that out.

And ultimately that comes down to, what are you looking for? Are you looking for peer to peer connection? Are you looking for peer to particular vendor connections at that vendor partner? Is there somebody from that company that you want to make sure is there, or there? Maybe I'll go to him's because Judy from Epic is going to be there, and she's not at this.

I don't know if that's the case or not. But that kind of thing is all part of

that decision process. you're going to get the last word here. We're going to talk about two things. One is, what are you saying? to this. And the second question I'm going to come back with is how hard is this now for the vendor partners that we have all these choices?

Because we get to go essentially for free as CIOs. But every one of these, they have to choose are we going to spend 40, 000 and send five people and get the hotel and get try to find our clients and, we can't bring our clients together so are we going to partner with this company or how are we Who do you send to the meeting?

Let's start with that.

There's a lot of different people from a partner that have to come to an event like this. You have just like people that are actually executing the booth and all the stuff that's there.

They just have to be there. They just have to be there.

So you have your event people, you have your field marketing people, you have your marketing leaders.

Then you need to have folks that can handle executive mobile conversations, that have the wherewithal to be able to communicate effectively, and also, depending on the size of your booth, so it doesn't feel like You gotta have people that can navigate and get around the show floor and be at other events.

The investment in the ShowFlare space is just a fraction of what the actual investment is for a conference like this. And all the things that happen off campus, if your sales team is doing it right, they're getting clients out for dinner, for drinks, for after hours events,

things like that.

Do I have to, because I've heard people do this, and I've heard it being very effective, but you have to have a really good team. Essentially And I'm not advocating for this, so don't send me an email, alright? But I know where you're going on this. You don't have to get the floor space, you buy a badge, you send your top people, they know people, they connect with them, they take them out for drinks, whatever, and you still have a fairly good set of conversations.

Is that a viable strategy?

I think it depends

on your company's size. Because, yeah, you can absolutely just send people to walk around. It's going to be a little bit more hit

or miss. Right, so if you're VMware, and everybody's your client, you know everybody, you're just coming in and making connections.

But if you're that little booth in the corner Yeah,

it'd be hard to do. Extremely hard to do. Because, I mean, if you're going to take that booth money and

throw a nice party But it's also only four grand for that. Right, right. You gotta, but you have to get visibility. Yeah. So it's different places.

Yeah. hard is this for them from a budget standpoint and what not? I mean, they have to make these decisions and, yeah. I don't know. I mean, average expenditure, I'm looking at a fairly decent sized booth, and number of people demand that is probably at least five or six.

Hotels in LA and that kind of stuff. Okay, you multiply that times here in Orlando. Potentially another conference. We've now just blown through 150, 000 in the first three months of our year. I mean, that's pretty hard. The

hope is you get

one good contact that leads to one project that leads to something that's profitable for both sides of the

equation.

But the size of the sale does matter. It does. Yep.

It

sure does. So every marketing team is going to have to look at it and evaluate. What is my average deal size? What's the math between number of top of funnel down into the actual revenue side of the business? What do we have to do to convert those? And what's that process look like?

Timeline, time horizon. And then, how do we control costs? Because the other thing that happens at these shows, you'll get in for a booth, and you're like, Okay, then we've got to design the booth. And all of a sudden, it's like in for a penny, in for a pound. You decide to spend the money, and you're like

we might as well do

this as well.

It's like sub costs. It's not just the booth. Square footage. It's also there's a lot that

goes into making these things. That could be the worst reason to go to a show. It's we have a booth. We should go. Yeah, right. Hey, stay tuned because Unhack the podcast is going to be coming in Absolutely.

We did the first show with Greg Garcia Health Sector Coordinating Council. We started, it was great because we were able to sort of broadcast a little pre game.

Before the announcement about the five year plan here on the cyber security stage. I saw him last night He was you know, he's gotten a lot of feedback really happy about how everything came out So yeah, we're gonna do unhack the podcast and it'll we're gonna have more conversations about this It's gonna it's gonna be really launching on a regular

drumbeat soon That's awesome.

And then you're gonna start a podcast, I hope so, with marketing and these guys to be named and a date to be named a brand, I think about branding. And then we're also gonna be launching a. live show, which will be interesting, probably won't do that until May or June, probably June, is when we'll start that.

We're doing a lot of new things over here with the 229 Project, City Tours, and other things. But it is great to be with you guys, thank you very much. Samuel, Drex,   Thanks for listening to Newstay. There's a lot happening in our industry and while Newstay covers interesting stuff, another way to stay informed is by subscribing to our daily insights email, which delivers Expertly curated health IT news straight to your inbox. Sign up at thisweekealth. com slash news.

📍 Big thanks to our Newsday sponsors and partners, ClearSense, HealthLink Advisors, Order, Shortest, and TauCite. You can learn more about these great partners at thisweekealth. com slash partners. Thanks for listening. That's all for now