How CRM Software Can Improve Patient Outcomes with Red Spot Interactive

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Alex Membrillo: You are in for a treat today. You guys are always asking me for the best in the business of technology, and I’ve got one of the best today, Jason Tushman, welcome to Ignite.

Jason Tushman: Thank you, Alex. I appreciate it.

Alex: I can’t wait to dive in. RSI. Tell us about RSI. This is going to be fun because we always get questions, “Hey, what’s the RSI going to go with re-engagement, acquisition software stuff?” You’ve got a niche in healthcare. Tell everybody about Red Spot Interactive. What do you guys do?

Jason: Alex, for the last 5 years, and we started the company 15 years ago, but for the last 5 years, we’ve been focused on providing end-to-end software for medical practices that gives them everything they need under one roof to communicate, acquire, and retain patients profitably and with scale while increasing patient outcomes, improving patient outcomes, but also being able to understand how everything occurs at a financial level. What’s the financial impact of the front end? What’s the financial impact of scheduling?

What’s the financial impact of their conversion rates? All of that tied together so that they have very robust reporting at an objective level.

Alex: I love that. Tying it to financial, so important. As we enter more into a recession, our marketers are getting pushed more on, “Hey, what was the return of all those campaigns?” RSI enables you to do that. How? Is it because you guys have the online scheduler and the CRM and the engagement software? It’s all your software, so it’s easier to track back rather than tying a bunch together.

Jason: The way that we really create it, the value proposition is that we’re integrating those challenging sets of data that you and I, as lifelong marketers, have never been able to pull together for a client into one situation. That’s what we do. We’re taking all of your front end marketing data from Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook. We’re pushing that into a centralized data warehouse that we control. Then we actually tie into our client’s communication system. We tie into RingCentral, we tie into Vonage, Five9, we tie into their VoIP systems. We bring that data into the centralized data warehouse.

Then the third thing that we do is we integrate all of their practice management data into that same data warehouse. When you’re able to tie the source of the inquiry or phone call or text through the voice over internet protocol, through the VoIP system, then attach to that all the practice management data, the appointment date, the schedule date, the provider, et cetera, into one system, you can actually tie through the entire patient acquisition process. By doing that, that’s how we’re able to provide the data. Then once we have the data, we’re able to provide better automation than the tools that are out there because we’re actually optimizing the tools off of objective data.

Alex: Yes. You’re getting the PMS data. You have the actual revenue data in there and tracking it to campaign. Give us a for instance, so what will a marketer, this is a podcast, so we can’t do a dashboard walkthrough, but what does a dashboard look like? Spend, add campaign types, revenue generated from those patients. Can you get that granular? Hey, we brought in 10 patients from that 10K that you spent, those 10 patients, billed those much?

Jason: We can literally give you a line by line per advertising campaign. If you were running 20 different Google AdWords campaigns across five different markets for vein and bariatric group, for example, and you have five different ad groups and you’re spending 15,000 to $20,000 per ad group across different geographic markets. We’re going to be able to pull that data in from Google AdWords. We’re going to dump it into our centralized data warehouse. Then we’re tying into your phone system. Any of the phone calls that are coming in, we know where those calls are coming in from.

We’re tying that into the centralized data warehouse. Then when those people schedule, we’re going to show you that they scheduled because we’ve tied into your practice management system. Upfront, right away by ad group, we can show phone call, form lead, whether it’s scheduled or not. Then over time, as the data matures, we’re able to show who attended their appointments, and who purchased how much they purchased for. Even all the way down to the insurance reimbursement. We can actually verify insurance performance per category as well.

Alex: It all sounds phenomenal. A lot of our clients are trying to patch things together. Hey, we’re going to get Salesforce, use it in a HIPAA compliant way, make spend, we’re going to have fresh spend. We’re going to tie all these things together. I guess RSI enables you to have it all there centralized. What makes for an ideal client? What do they need to do on there that makes them really successful with you guys?

Jason: I think the important thing for the client is they’ve got to understand that they have to make business decisions objectively and not subjectively. The biggest value that they’re going to get from our system is being able to make objective decisions in regards to performance, not just at a marketing level, but remember, we’re tying everything across all the way through to outcome. Do you have a marketing issue? Maybe you have a great marketing system and a great marketing team, but your phone team, your contact center is overburdened and they’re missing 20% of the calls.

If you’re only looking at the marketing data and you’re seeing low conversion rates and you’re not taking into account the contact center, which we fully tie into with our system, then you’re only seeing a small piece of the story. Then if you want to take that a step further, let’s say you’re looking at the marketing data and you’re seeing that the calls are being answered, but what’s happening at your schedules? What’s the capacity that providers have to actually take in certain appointment types? What’s happening at a location level?

Are doctors on too many vacations causing appointments to be booked out further in the future, which means you’re going to have a lower attendance rate. Unless you’re looking at all of this data centralized in one system, you’re going to have opportunity costs in your decision-making.

Alex: That’s incredible that you’re able to look at that. As marketers, we’re like, “How many leads did we drive?” Then we often get blamed out. The leads weren’t good enough or there wasn’t enough, but the upside is just as important. The call center, the conversion rate, doctor, provider availability, patient experience, once they get in there.

Jason: Yes. You’ve got to even take it down to the user level. If you look at a lot of the multi-location, multi-provider facilities, you’ve got a lot of people touching that patient throughout the process. You can have, again, marketing system working really well. You can have the majority of your contact center working well, but maybe your users in the contact center aren’t following the workflow. Okay. We also have a very robust CRM, which helps the contact centers manage the workflow very much like a Salesforce would do.

We build that into the system so that you can tell down to the user, are they following your workflow. Are the number of contacts they’re making to a patient making sense and following the practices that you have set up? Is one user contacting people five times and another user contacting the person five times, but one user converts at 40% and the other one converts at 20%?

You have to be able to take it to that level to truly understand what’s happening. That can only happen when you have everything under one roof and you’re looking at that data from that perspective.

Alex: Yes. That’s incredible. The amount of data it would provide. It is so hard to get accurate and relevant data in healthcare marketing and tie it to actual outcomes. The best client, if I’m hearing you right, is someone that’s very objective, that loves data and will let that speak instead of being like, “I feel like this campaign worked really well.” Now we talk about more elaborate patient journeys where mama’s not just going to search and typing in dermatologist near me. She saw a YouTube ad, she’s on Meta, Facebook, whatever, TikTok. The patient journeys are evolving. Does RSI enable you to look at any attribution or is it ad group last plate? This is the way that they ended up coming.

Jason: We’re providing full attribution down to a UTM level when you look at things like Google ads and stuff like that. We take it to UTM level, but when I think patient journey, Alex, and I think about an economy that’s becoming more challenging as we were talking about before we got started, you’ve got consumers, they’re losing money in their wallet. They’re hitting credit thresholds. When I think about the challenges that we’re all going to face as businesses over the next 12 to 18 months, especially medical providers. When I think patient journey, I think, how do you keep patients coming back?

You set them up for a protocol. They’re supposed to come see you for six main visits over a six-month period. You’re getting them in for the first appointment and then what’s happening after that? It’s one thing if you have that attribution back to the original Google AdWords campaign and you understand that you had the schedule capacity, you converted them appropriately. You got them in. What are you doing to bring them back? What ad groups have the largest lifetime value? Because there’s a distinct difference in the source of these patients and where they’re coming in from and what their lifetime value is.

You’ve got to understand lifetime value, but then you also have to facilitate that. We spend a lot of time with our patient recall system as well, where we will take all of the endpoints of patient data within the practice management system. We can link it to a patient journey setup that providers or locations may have. If you think about that multi-location clinical dermatology practice and they’ve got, 5 Mohs surgeons, they’ve got 20 dermatologists, but each of them want their patients to go through a certain path.

You can source the patients in, they can have a good experience. How do they keep coming back and how are they coming back based on the exact protocol that those providers have? You got to leverage data and that’s what we do. We’re leveraging the data out of the practice management system. We’re connecting the patient to the provider, age, the protocol that they want, and also leveraging all this data to drive very specific one-to-one patient messaging to keep those patients coming back.

What does that do? It helps the patient have a better outcome because they’ve come back and they complete the treatment. It’s going to help the marketing system look as good as it possibly can because it’s going to raise the lifetime value of that customer. Then ultimately the practice is going to scale because of the automation as well.

Alex: All marketing should be based on lifetime value. That’s something I’m trying to train in so many people right now. Stop looking at the first visit value. What is the lifetime value? You know what answer I always get? We’re not sure. We’re not sure. How are you basing what your lead or your appointment or your first new patient should cost from a marketing [unintelligible 00:09:57] How do you know that patient could be worth $5,000? Every gene general derm patient probably worth $5,000 over the next 10 years. You’re not willing to spend $1,000 to get them in the door, just $100. That’s all you want.

Jason: When you think about your team, starting with a new client with a system like ours, we’ll tell the client right away what the patient lifetime value is without marketing even being in place, just so they have a start. Because we connect into that PM system with the robust analytics that we have, we can actually pull a 5-year, 10-year data set, report back, and say, look, starting today, before you get into marketing, before you get into automating your patient journey, here’s your baseline patient lifetime value per provider, per location, per procedure.

All you can do is go up from here, at least you can establish a baseline to start from. Then you start to really get practices getting involved.

Alex: I need you to do that for every one of our clients. Would it help? Honestly, it would help them take more market share. They would spend more on advertising. I know that’s self-serving, but they would spend more on advertising to get their first new patient. What I would tell them is, listen, generally Cardinal or otherwise, I think Cardinal’s better at this than anyone, but net new patients should cost roughly the same if you’re pretty sharp about it. Good creative messaging, tracking the whole thing. You really make your money on reactivation and recall.

You’ve got to bring them more back in more often. That’s like the secret to unlocking better lifetime value and being able to take market share because you can spend more on the initial advertising. Y’all’s automation system, what is it? Email, SMS? Is that the general recall system?

Jason: It’s full email, SMS. It’s completely customizable. By provider, by location, by procedure type, you can create one-to-one journeys. What we’re doing is really just taking the data out of the practice management system, allowing literally folder by folder by age, gender, procedure, dollar spent, insurance company. You can pull all of that together and link it together to what you and I used to call drip marketing campaigns and essentially automate that. We can automate it based on whether the next appointment has been scheduled or not.

We can automate it based on dollars spent. We can automate it based on the insurance company. We can automate it based on the age of the consumer. When you talk about the ability to improve the patient journey, it has a great impact to the marketing dollars, but it also has a really important impact to the patient outcomes and patient experience.

When you can start to share improvements in patient outcomes and patient experience data with not just the doctors and management, but the administrators, the people that are responsible for followups, the people that are responsible for check-ins, you’re going to just have a compounding improvement to the patient experience process because the team members are starting to understand the impact that they’re actually having on the patient. They take that position with a much, much different perspective when they have that data and they understand the impact that they’re making.

Alex: Yes. It enables a marketer to say, “Hey, listen, we’re not just generating you revenue and profit from a marketing perspective. Outcomes are better because patients are following their plan of care.”

Jason: Exactly. Yes. It’s really straightforward business. It’s really straightforward business applications and processes that happen at all other types of industries.

Alex: What is the ideal client? Does it need to be a higher acuity, like the lifetime value is higher because there’s a surgery component or does it matter for you guys? Is there a location amount that is the qualifier, what’s the qualifier to make a good client for RSI?

Jason: The qualifier from our perspective is a business acumen, an interest in a business or process acumen to improve the patient outcome. Typically we’re working with most of our clients have 10 providers or more. The reason for that is they’ve got a business team on board. Typically a single doctor practice is trying to run the business themselves. They may have a spouse in the office manager position that’s there part-time. They’ve got administrators that have four different hats that they’re wearing and it’s very difficult for them to stay focused on maintaining a consistent process.

When you get into the larger groups, you typically have a true general manager. You may have a marketing person actually involved that’s working with the agency specifically and the providers can focus on being the doctor and the business people can focus on getting the patients in for them and making sure they have the best experience. That’s when we start to really have the best outcomes because they’re leveraging the data. They’re leveraging the automation.

Alex: You really focus on outcomes. You see the software as a vehicle to improve outcomes. That’s really RSI’s sweet spot. Yes.

Jason: Today our value creation comes around scaling practices. If you think about a lot of the rollups that are occurring out in the marketplace, they have 20 practices that they own, they’re going to go by 10 practices over the next 12 to 18 months. Five of those practices, let’s say our next tech, three are ModMed, two are Athena, one’s Allscripts. Then they’ve got three on RingCentral, two on Five9, and four on Vonage. For us, we can plug all of that without having to change PMs, without having to change phone systems.

That can all plug into our system and our playbook can be run against those fragmented business systems. Everybody can run the same playbook across all the locations and they can run those businesses as effectively as possible.

Alex: Yes. I’m a date for House of Brands.

Jason: Yes. House of Brands, it all can run the same. That’s when you can really start to take advantage of creating efficiency in the process in those large organizations. In the long run, our value really will come from the more we refine the data and we can start to share it with the providers when they can actually take the time to understand what’s happening at an outcome level against the procedure type, against the source of that patient, against the speed at which they came in. They can really start to improve the outcomes. That’s when it gets exciting.

It also ultimately reduce their costs. When they can improve outcomes, they can actually improve the insurance relationships that they have. They can ensure that they have better outcomes there as well. That becomes a really important part for everybody.

Alex: Huge profit driver. It seems like the technology is a huge profit driver. You can reduce the call center people that are not converting well or whatever might be going on. Reduce ad spend that’s not generating anything. Personally, guys, I can say as a personal testimonial, we work on, I think, the largest plastic surgery group in the country. I think RSI is at this point. We work on it together and they’ve done a phenomenal job. It enables us to do our job better because we can show outcomes that happen from the advertising.

We’ve seen the proof is in the pudding. This stuff actually works. Jason, this is the truth. More people should know about you guys. You’re like a little best-kept CRM, patient acquisition, you’re [unintelligible 00:16:20] It’s too good of a secret, Jason. We’ve got to tell everybody.

Jason: Yes, I know. It’s funny you say that. We have intentionally had ourself internally focused since COVID on the product, building the platform out to where we want it to be. Honestly, starting next quarter is when we’re really going to start to push our go-to-market strategy more. We’re excited about where we are. We knew what we wanted to do pre-COVID. COVID hit, obviously, it created a whirlwind and we said, do you know what? This gives us the chance to create the ultimate product that we want. The market is here for it. It demands it. We knew we had a few things that we needed to tweak and we’re there now and we’re excited to get out in the market much more aggressively.

Alex: Hopefully this is the entry point. You’ll have at least three listeners that will know about Redspot Interactive after this.

Jason: There’s two of them right here. We’re good.

Alex: That’s good. I’ll let my wife know to listen in. We hit the third. Is there any gotchas? Technology is pretty all-encompassing and I’m thinking if I’m a healthcare marketer, do I have to do it all? Do I have to have the automation, the CRM, and plug in everything? What are the gotchas? Hey, you need this core element and these other things can wait or we can plug in? What do you want people to know?

Jason: Yes, I think from my perspective, the gotchas are one is you really want to look at your tech stack that you’re using today. One of the challenges that we face today is these multi-location facilities, even single-provider, single-location facilities, they’ve got three or four different software systems that they’re using in order to engage with patients. It could be Podium, Solutionreach, some other tertiary ad, or recall marketing system. The gotchas are you may have one user in your business that really likes one feature about a particular system.

They think that particular independent person on your team can’t do their job without that particular feature. When you look at working with a team like ours and when you look at truly trying to expand your practice from a scale perspective, from improving every patient outcome, you’ve got to take a fresh look at your technology stack and you’ve got to understand what’s going to help drive that. To me, that’s the got you. Don’t let the independent feature one system prevent you from overhauling your entire practice in order to create a better patient experience and better practice scale.

Alex: I can tell a couple of haters along the way have really gotten under your skin. The one person that blocks the deal at the last minute because they [crosstalk] anything. Yes, we do. I’ve got a stupid question. PMS is synonymous with the HR. It’s slightly different, right?

Jason: Practice management system. Yes. To me, I use them interchangeably.

Alex: Okay. See, I’m learning. I wear the T-shirt, but I don’t actually know the acronym. [crosstalk]

Jason: No, we’re really working predominantly with the business management piece of the practice management system.

Alex: Yes. Not the medical entry code.

Jason: Not the actual HR records, things like that. Not today. Again, that goes back to as we continue to evolve the data sets, when we start to work with more of the actual HR data, that’s where you can start to really drive improved outcomes in the future with analysis.

Alex: Out of my own curiosity, who’s your target client within the client? Is it a marketer? Is it always a marketer? Is it CEO?

Jason: General manager, chief operating officer.

Alex: CEO.

Jason: Yes, general manager, chief operating officer because they’re tired of the discussions we’re talking about. Tell me how my marketing’s doing. I’ve got a lot of clicks. I’ve got a lot of leads. Then they say, well, we need to talk to the call center because they say they’re overstaffed or understaffed. The call center says, well, I’m understaffed. How? How do you’re understaffed? Then it’s the provider saying, “Hey, I haven’t gotten enough appointments.” You come in and look at our utilization reporting. You’ve gotten just as many or more appointments than you had a year ago.

You know what? This is an actual case. We had a client tell us this a few weeks ago. Three of the doctors had taken 30% more vacation schedule in the first quarter than they had the prior year. Therefore, how are you going to have more appointments if you’re around 30% less? The appointments were there. They had to get pushed out of the second quarter because the providers weren’t there. When you start to look at things holistically from an entire patient acquisition process across your data, and by the way, do it on one sheet that everybody uses, all team members are using. It really, really starts to expose opportunities.

Alex: Yes. One throw to choke. Yes, because those providers got their practice bought out and they’re rich and they don’t want to work as hard anymore. Yes, it’s good. It’s for the [unintelligible 00:20:32] you’re like, “No, bro. Stop taking vacations.” I love it. Jason, this is cool. I’m glad y’all aren’t going to be the best-kept secret. We can start promoting you guys. [unintelligible 00:20:41] technology works really well. It is really cool for us marketers and a big bomb just dropped last– It’s almost like a corrective bomb.

I don’t know what you would call that because you can’t correct a bomb, but anyways, we got the lawsuit overturned and we’ve got all of that fun HIPAA compliance stuff happening. My message to everybody out there is you will still need healthcare-specific, HIPAA-compliant partners. I can sign BAAs forever and ever. Even if this law goes that way or that way, like healthcare is only going to increase in privacy. It always has. As marketers, let’s be diligent. Let’s use partners that are specialized in our space. Be very careful, avoid lawsuits, and have like Jason that can give us benchmarks and tell us how a practice should run.

That’s one of the benefits of working with you guys is you have benchmarks on lifetime value. You know how a practice should run, how frequently they should be picking up the phone, the conversion rates there, scheduling how far out. I love it. I love healthcare specific partners. Jason, any final words for anybody?

Jason: Yes, look, thanks for having us on, Alex. We’re excited to be working with Cardinal and we’re excited about healthcare and the future of it. We just want to help make practices smarter, faster, stronger, and we think we can do that with our platform.

Alex: Me too. If every one of our clients had RSI, we’d be spending a lot more in advertising and they’d be growing a lot faster. It’s the ambiguity that catches everybody. We’re not sure what it did last month. [unintelligible 00:21:57]

Jason: That’s right.

Alex: Talk to Jason. Thanks for joining us on Ignite.

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