Service Line Marketing: How to Fill Schedules Not Waitlists with Christus Health

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: What’s going on, Igniters? Man, this is going to be a blast. I am joined. We are only one time zone apart. We’re going to have so much fun. I’m joined by Alvaro Fernandez. Como estas, amigo?

Alvaro Fernandez: Hey, man. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Alex: Yes, absolutely. Tell them, where do you hail from? Where do you work? What do you do? All the fun stuff.

Alvaro: We are coming live to you from Irving, Texas, which is right outside of Dallas, 10, 15 minutes away off Dallas, from the corporate headquarters of CHRISTUS Health, which is where I work.

Alex: I love it. What work do you do there? Obviously, I know, but for the listeners to give context, what are you doing there?

Alvaro: I am the service line marketing director for cardiology, orthopedics, surgery, and a few other service lines for our health system.

Alex: I love it. That’s got to feel good because you’re really helping people. I had a heart surgery last year. I’ve been through the whole great cardiologist game and all of that stuff. I know how important it is to find care at the right time, because it all started with the watches telling me I have AFib. I go to my phone to find a cardiologist near me, go to the wrong doctor, bad marketing, go to the right doctor, better marketing here in Atlanta, and ended up getting really good care. What you’re doing really matters. It’s very fun. Were you always in healthcare? I see about six years on your LinkedIn. How did you get into this crazy, fun, rewarding space we’re in?

Alvaro: No, coming up on seven years now, actually. I had an entire career before healthcare. I worked in CPG for many years. I was very retail-heavy. I started my career as a product marketer and I grew in that space, in retail, very focused on growing my product lines and my SKUs and volumes and seasonality and things like that. I ended up handling the big key accounts for our company.

Then I moved to Mexico City and to Latin America with this company. I left many, many, many years later as the VP of sales and marketing for one of the companies that makes Krazy Glue in Latin America, which was really, really cool. From then, I took a little hiatus. I was a little burned out. When I came back to Texas, one thing led to another and a friend of mine who was working at the place where I used to work before, which is a fairly well-known academic medical center, reached out and said, “Alvaro, there’s this job. I know that you don’t do healthcare, but I know that marketing VP, I’ve known you for many years, and I think you’d be perfect for it.”

This friend is not a marketer. He’s an MDHC, a very well-known researcher, just a really good close personal friend. Honestly, I met with this person, I read the job description and I fell in love with everything about it. It was things that I knew how to do, things that I felt comfortable in doing. I got the job and it has been the most amazing ride ever since. I don’t work at UT Southwestern anymore, I do not work for CHRISTUS Health, but the ride has been incredible. I can’t thank my friend enough for recommending me for the job and pointing me in that direction so many years ago.

Alex: It’s fun to get to use our marketing superpowers for good. You can sleep well at night.

Alvaro: It was really interesting because I found that a lot of the competencies that I had developed throughout my career were very green or very new in healthcare. CPG is very data-heavy. Walmart came up with retail link and I worked a lot with Home Depot, which was a macro strategy organization, and to me, having access to the number of products that you were selling per store per day of the week, per hour, and your volumes and your refill rates, your minimum on hand quantity, all of these things were the way in which I grew up in the business.

It was second nature to me to understand the cause and effect of marketing and promotions and grassroots marketing and to see how that would affect your point of sale. Bringing some of those competencies in order to really take a data-centric approach to marketing in healthcare, I think was a real moment for me and for the organization. It has been one of the driving principles behind my career in healthcare.

Alex: Yes. It’s crazy. All of the fun stuff that we did in previous lives, healthcare is like, “Wow, that is so innovative.” Now, yes, you’re like, “Cool. Yes. I’m smart, I guess.” That’s fun. By the way, Krazy Glue. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the LEGO movie, they call it the Kragle.

Alvaro: Of course.

Alex: Okay. Yes. That’s all I could think of. When I saw Krazy Glue, I was like, “Dude–“

Alvaro: I’ve been calling it the Kragle around the house for 10 years with the kids. [laughs]

Alex: Okay. I got it. Service line directors, we got to grow some of these very important service lines. What do you focus? It’s the beginning of the year, so it’s perfect time. You go into the new year, a lot is changing, AI, [unintelligible 00:04:40] Bam. Digital front door. Where did you decide to focus and explain in the context of, “Chris, this is good at this,” or “We needed to advance in this, and that’s why the focus is that”?

Alvaro: No. Strategically, it begins and ends with access. It begins and ends with understanding what your access is, what your access points are for any given service line, what the access constraints are, and then marrying those realities with the constraints of access, with the constraints of your appointment, lag time, physician availability, with all our availability, with lag time to surgery, depending on the service that you may be working on, and then packaging it in a way that remains true to your customer from beginning to end so that you’re not selling false expectations.

That the expectation that you’re setting from the beginning remains true to the encounters that they’re going to have throughout the different touch points from intention to appointment. I think that that’s the beginning of any strategy, of understanding what our access is, what the prevalence of disease is, what the actual need for marketing is so that we can then marry the three. We have seen many times this desire to do marketing because a given department needs marketing. Then when you start digging into the data and you start digging into the details, it so happens that, oh yes, they need marketing, but they have a six month appointment lag time. The idea and the conception of what marketing may be for that specific department changes, you’re not going to market the same, a department that has a six-month waiting list in order for you to get an appointment, that a department that is really looking to grow those patient volumes and those appointment volumes and same day or next day or next week availability, completely different approaches, completely different strategies.

Alex: Tell us a little bit. I want to pack both of things, because you talked about capacity and finding propensity to disease. Let’s start with capacity. How are you getting fed that? You have so much going on, multiple service lines, 600 centers. I think, CHRISTUS. That’s incredible. How are you getting fed that? How often are you looking at that and modifying advertising campaigns and focus and stuff?

Alvaro: What a great question and package of questions. Let’s unpack it. How are we getting that through the diet leadership models that are prevalent now in healthcare? The big, more mature service lines have a diet leadership that has a clinical component and administrative component. There’s a business head and there’s a clinical head for these service lines and together they drive the model for employment, for resources, for utilization, profitability, all of these things. With them, then a bunch of departments like mine, like marketing partner up in order to help them meet their specific goals.

With cardiology, for example, we work with the cardiology leadership in the Heart and Vascular Institute at CHRISTUS throughout the different regions, which at CHRISTUS are called ministries. We identify the challenges and opportunities that they have for specific clinics or for specific providers. We address those at a very grassroots level.

There’s also a system-wide marketing campaign that stays true to our brand with the ethos of our brand, and where the big brand promise to our customers is made. We marry the two. We come up with a big system strategy that really defines our value proposition for the specific service lines. Then we move that strategy throughout the funnel from your big ticket items like radio and TV and digital radio and all the way down to the stuff that you were talking about, the last mile or the last minute searches, either through Google ads, or depending.

Alex: I love it. Okay. Very smart leadership. That’s looking at capacity, clinical wait times, all that fun stuff and feeding it back to you guys. As marketers, we have to be getting fed the right information at the right time and then be smart enough to digest it. Alvaro, listen to what he’s saying, guys, we are not just being handed go do marketing, we are looking at capacity constraints and access constraints. We’re saying, “Hey, listen, we should only apply this much here and there.” As marketers, you got to put your business tap on and not just do marketing for the sake of marketing.

Real quick, Alvaro, before we get into SEO, Google Maps, PPC, and all that fun stuff, we talked about propensity for disease. Is there any stuff like tools you guys are using that map out, “Hey, listen, I know you have a cardio center here, but there’s really not much AFib happening.” What do you use to map that out of– Because I’m sure that goes into advertising of, “Hey, listen, there’s this much targeted [unintelligible 00:08:56]

Alvaro: It does. Absolutely, because I started in academic medicine, this idea of research was ingrained into how I think as a healthcare marketer. I’ll give you an example, I’m working on a campaign for orthopedics right now, and we sliced the service line into four seasonalities or four different buckets. The first one is going to be joint replacement, the second one is adult sports, the third one is youth sports, and then the fourth one or the fourth bucket is a catch-all that allows us to talk about everything else.

In the case of total joint, we find and we address propensity of disease through research. I went in and I took a deep dive on PubMed and I started reading a bunch of articles and I realized that arthritis is incredibly prevalent in the US. Research revealed that almost a quarter of those adults over 65 that have arthritis have osteoarthritis. A quarter of those, when they reach the age of 75 or over, are going to be candidates for a joint replacement. The prevalence is huge. If you think about it, a quarter of 65 million, and then a quarter of those are eventually going to need joint replacement, that’s how we looked at the propensity or the prevalence of disease.

Then, because of my data background, I went into our own EHR and I pulled a model. If the research was telling me who was the candidate for a joint replacement surgery, then I went into our own EHR to corroborate. I took a dive and I looked, “Okay, so who’s coming for knee replacement? Who’s coming for hip replacement? Who are they? How old are they? What’s wrong with them? Where do they live?” et cetera, and that exercise corroborated, no surprises, what the research was saying, and that’s how we drew a persona of the potential patient for a joint replacement surgery. That is the audience that we’re addressing right now.

Alex: That’s brilliant. Use your own first-party data, everybody. Go do your own research and act as a research. Go back to our science classes in eighth grade and form a hypothesis and then go look at your own first-party data and see if it matches up. By the way, highly true, because I have osteoarthritis in my knee from the ACL tear I had seven years ago and it feels like it’s bone on bone. I will be in Irving getting a joint knee replacement.

Alvaro: On point, my friend, you’re going to need a joint replacement. It is going to happen sooner or later.

Alex: I already feel it. I signed up to play basketball in two weeks in a league and I’m like–

Alvaro: Dude, I might make it one game.

Alex: -because it hurts walking around. It hurts walking around picking on the kids. Anyways. Okay, we’ve identified we have capacity in the ortho service line and there’s a propensity around here by looking at our first-party data and we’ve got the model. Now we need to advertise. Tell us a little bit about what are your favorite advertising techniques and then how are you tracking effectiveness in such a big convoluted health system?

Alvaro: It’s such a golden era for advertising right now. With all the convergence of the different media, it is a great time. I am like any of us that grew up in this industry, I love Mad Men and I saw Mad Men many times.

Alex: Don Draper, baby.

Alvaro: [crosstalk] always, and I’m reminded of how they were in the beginning doing little articles on the little snippets of the newspaper and ads like that and how far we’ve come. My favorite ones, I am a product marketer. I grew up in CPG. I am not a tremendous philosophical brand marketer. I understand the nature of the product, the nature of the audience that may need that product. I marry the two of them together in a way that creates value for both sides. That to me is the core definition of marketer, and it is what I do.

When it comes to channels, I love the big brand channels because of the reach that they have, but you’ll never hear me talk in terms of awareness. Awareness is probably one of the metrics that I despise the most as a product marketer because I like conversions, I like the tangibles. I like the things that you can count that affect your P&L and that affect your lag time and your appointment availability and all of those things that we were talking about. I love, of course, radio and TV, but I love complementing radio and TV and moving them through the funnel with variations of those radios and TVs as you move into the digital space.

For example, one of our TV commercials will be very broad and encompassing and very focused on that emotional connection between brand and potential patient or brand and customer. Then as you start moving through the funnel, you change that commercial. Maybe you change the voiceover or you change the end cards or you change the language a little bit so that it’s now reaching to those that are closer to your hospitals within a certain proximity. You push those through a programatic approach within a specific radius of your hospital, in your primary service area or in your secondary service area.

Then at that point, because digital is so incredible, you can marry it with native, with digital ads, with SEO, with social and move your prospects through the funnel that way. You do create awareness, in a sense, through the big ticket items like radio and TV, but then the magic happens when you start moving those numbers from awareness into consideration and conversion through the funnel. That’s what I really like. That’s the part that I enjoy the most, I think.

Alex: Yes, me too. Full funnel advertising. It’s cool that it’s finally hitting healthcare because we’ve been predominantly a PPC shop for 16 years and now it’s not good enough. It’s not enough. You hit the diminishing returns pretty quickly with demand capture alone. It’s really fun. Now we are having to be more Don Draper-ish. By the way, the Jaguar episode was my favorite ever.

Alvaro: Dude, it’s pretty good.

Alex: You’re having to be more full funnel, and the messaging matters as much. Then you have to cater it to whatever channel you’re on. To sum up, Alvaro, a little bit, starting with linear and radio, they matter and they create awareness for the CHRISTUS brand. Then you start getting closer to the hospitals and service-line-centric, and then you move the messaging along. Alvaro, are you creating messaging along? Are you changing the overall brand thing and then service line gets its own per platform? Are you changing messaging and creative per platform or taking the linear TV commercials and then modifying somewhat for the out of the connected TV type stuff? How nuanced do you get there?

Alvaro: That’s a great question. It really depends on the scope and size of the campaign and project, the duration of the campaign, and the reach that we’re trying to attain. Are we creating local messaging? Yes, because CHRISTUS is huge. We have health systems in Central Texas, in South Texas, in the Bay Area of Texas, in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico. There is no one size fits all.

There are brand type of commercials for over the air and radio, of course, that speak to, again, that emotional connection between brand and patient for the specific service line, for sure, but as we move into the individual regions or ministries, as we call them, then yes, of course, you change your messaging to talk about, in the case of ortho, your joint commission certifications, or in the case of cardiology, you talk about your partnerships with the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association and how your programs are certified.

If you are in the case of a heart program, a program that is with the ALA, get with the guidelines or a stroke program, yes, of course, you have to redefine that messaging as you get closer to your target audience so that it becomes more and more and more relevant so that in the end, you have this huge emotional connection and recognition from the beginning, which is what big brand does, moving through the funnel to where it then becomes relatable and it becomes personal and it becomes appropriate to me as a patient to what I’m looking [unintelligible 00:16:11]

Alex: Do you change the service line? I get that messaging, yes, you got to get closer in the service line stuff. By the way, I liked how you said the accreditations, it’s outcome focused messaging. That’s good. Then do you change the creative by platform too? Hey, connected TV only a little bit different than linear meta ads, a little bit like you’re splicing it in different– taking it on-

Alvaro: Yes. Okay. All right. [unintelligible 00:16:31] we change as we move through platforms and as we move through the phone, [unintelligible 00:16:35] our budgets and manpower. You can’t. If it were up to me, I would be like [unintelligible 00:16:41] individual ad unit placements in Meta at four o’clock in the morning for all of the few, but not, at some point you, you’ve got to finance or whatever.

Alex: I love it. I wish, yes. Budgets from every internet we can do native messaging creative for every platform.

Alvaro: You do SEO, right? I’m sure you’ve seen this. There’s two schools of thought. One of them is still out, especially now with the way Google automates how the ads are served. One of them is still out every headline possibility and every description possibility, H1, H2, H3, and give it all the variations and let Google do its thing. That’s one.

My take is different, and this is, this is a good point of discussion with our agencies and with our internal SEM and SEO teams here, because of my background, more a fan of controlling the message. I would rather have two, three or four H1, H2, H3 variations on a Google ad, and then just one or two descriptions that really stick to that local value proposition to what is important for that last mile customer looking at that specific ad for care than take a generic, a big brand, machine generated structured snippet or description, and then let Google do its thing. This is always one of the things that we talk about and one of the things that negotiate with our [unintelligible 00:17:57]

Alex: It’s the beauty of marketing, the enigma never stops. We can never get up all night and think about how to do a better list. We have a few minutes left, so we’ll get to how do we track KPIs. First, let’s talk about what are the main KPI. You like the actual commercial points that matter. What is CHRISTUS tracking? Then we’ll talk about technology to track it all. I’d love to get into that. I know you have some thoughts on how Epic’s trying to get into a little bit of marketing, but that notwithstanding, what are you guys tracking? What matters to you?

Alvaro: Check preference. We have a consumer research department that tracks preference through NCR data. There is always preference for your service lines and for your hospitals. That’s always in the horizon. It is not marketing, but we report in the same structure. It’s one of our sister departments and it’s super useful, because for each of my service lines, I get these huge reports that are 40 or 50 pages long with really, really, really cool data that give insights into how people are choosing care, what are their drivers, how long have they been in market?

Yes, of course, the average household income, blah, blah, blah, but really insightful stuff, so that when you take insurance acceptance and professional recommendation out of the equation of how a potential patient is choosing care, you get some really useful insights. How much do awards play into that decision-making process? There’s quantitative data that tells you, hey, is it worth dumping a bunch of money into your, and I’m not going to mention any names, but X, Y, or Z rankings or not. We have data that proves that, and it’s really useful. It begins with consumer data.

Then we also, as a department, but also as a leader, I look at performance data. I am performance-driven. I will look at everything from performance of the SEM campaigns. I’m a huge Google freak. I love ads and YouTube. I love it. I understand it well. It’s a space that I grew up in and I’m comfortable in it. We look at conversions. For conversions, we look at phone calls. We look at how many phone calls are being generated by each individual campaign, by each individual tactic.

Then ultimately patient volumes through our partnerships that go up through the diet leadership, we look at how many patient appointments are these campaigns generating, which is always, in health care, a little hard to track because the attribution chain is always going to have some gaps. The catch, I think, is going to make is going to be to make those gaps as small or as short as possible.

Alex: Is that through the research that the patient preference stuff you’re saying, “Hey, listen, we don’t know exactly how effective these things in market, but we’re seeing that people prefer our ortho service”?

Alvaro: It is to a certain extent, but also the EHR gives you some interesting information. You can separate your existing patients from your new patients. New patients is an important KPI that we look at and you can look at new patients to the system or new patients to the clinics or new patients to the service line. You may be a GI patient that you had your colonoscopy done, and then you are a new cardiology patient that counts as a new to service line or new to clinic patient, which there’s some attribution there. There’s some attributable data there, for sure.

Then we also have a CRM platform, one of the known ones that was [unintelligible 00:21:05] that was then something else, that was then something else. I think now it’s called– it was bought by WebMD and maybe they were bought by someone else. There is a CRM platform that we use that ties some of these things together.

Alex: Somewhat. Would you agree or disagree that at some point there’s still a lack of visibility into exactly what is causing what, and you have to look at the whole bucket of advertising as a whole and say, how many patients did we drive? Net new patients overall for the service line against the 100k we spent, or are you looking every Monday and saying, “Hey, listen, MedEd drove this many.” How do you– Well, there’s a big debate right now in healthcare advertising and everybody’s saying, “I want to know exactly what’s driving what,” and I’m saying, “Good luck.” I don’t know how.

Alvaro: There’s a huge debate and I think it’s a both and answer, to be honest with you. That’s where the value of things like consumer research comes into play because we look at preference. When you package your entire campaign and your entire strategy for a six-month period or a year period, which is two flights of a big campaign like cardiology, for example, that we’re about to finish our second flight right now before the end of our fiscal year, then we’ll very closely look at preference there. How was preference a year ago for the individual hospitals.

Then what happened with that preference, and we will correlate that with the spend, or at least with the flight plans and with the tactics that were in market of those specific months and see if it moved the needle. What I learned, Alex, and I would imagine that you’ve seen the same thing too, there is no one KPI that tells the entire story. There is no one table in Epic or one report or one single piece of data that tells the entire story. It’s how you put it together with the different groups that you work, with your partners, with your stakeholders, and the pieces of that data that you’re able to include in your reporting what tells the entire story of what happened as a result of your spend and your effort.

Alex: I love it, guys. Alvaro, to sum up a little bit, if I got it, some of our marketing just takes time and has a huge lag effect. You’re going to do lots of brand advertising. We have to be comfortable going to CEO, CMO, and saying, “Well, guys, listen, it’s not a tit for tat. You spend X in January and you got Y surgeries in February. Some things are going to take a while.” If we’re not comfortable with that story, then you should not be investing in a brand advertising running his thing up or funnel, but it does matter and it does help.

Obviously, a lot of our listeners are in low acuity dental, derm, [unintelligible 00:23:26] and some of that stuff matters less than the lag time needs to be shorter. They’re not going to invest as much, but guys, with the higher acuity service lines, it absolutely has a lag effect and it’s important.

The final thing that I love Alvaro said that was the most important to me was, it’s all part of the story and it’s up to us as marketers to create the story. That takes business acumen, finance acumen, and a little bit of ingenuity and critical thinking to tie this story together to roll it out to people who don’t understand marketing as well. You’re going to have several numbers that matter and several numbers that lead into other numbers that matter.

Alvaro: That’s right. The one that I would add to your recipe is product knowledge. Maybe it’s because I am a product marketer, maybe it is because I just like information and I just like consuming information. One thing that I do tell our specialists and our managers is that you have to market from a point of subject matter expertise. If you don’t understand what it is that you’re marketing, then it becomes exponentially harder to craft a value proposition that will work from a marketing standpoint to meet the goals that you’re trying to meet.

Alex: What do they do? They go sit in the cardio unit for a couple of days?

Alvaro: Yes, correct, they ask, what is AFib? You were mentioning AFib earlier. What is it? Is it common? Is it for old people? Is it for new people? Is it deadly? Do you feel it? Do you not feel it? Is there medication for it? Et cetera. You have to. Let’s start with what the specialists and the junior managers do. If you’re creating a point-of-care collateral package for patients with AFib, you have to understand what it is.

Alex: And why it’s important, because it is the lead into the cardio surgery that you want. That was a [unintelligible 00:24:58]

Alvaro: Correct, because it’s an entry point into the system, it’s an entry point into the service line, for sure. If you don’t understand the basics of what that specific thing that you’re working on is, then it becomes so much harder when a couple of really good placed questions at the right time can be of tremendous help for you.

Alex: Go sit in with the clinics, guys. Go sit in with the clinics. Talk to the front office. Why do people book appointments? Why do they dip out of their appointments? What are the concerns they have around payer partnerships and reimbursement, all that fun stuff. Talk to the providers. What is the entry point? What is the end point? What’s the most lucrative? Guys, we are in a business, no profit. No, what do they call it? No margin, no emissions. What is the most profitable thing? What is the lead into that service line?

Alvaro, you heard it throughout this thing he loves research and he loves getting to the root because of things and he thinks like a product marketer. That’s why I know at Cardinal, a lot of our best marketers come from e-comm and stuff like that because they’re transaction focused. At the end of the day, we are trying to drive transaction. The beauty of it is that the transactions we create are really helpful to the world. We hope so. It’s very cool.

Alvaro: Agree.

Alex: Alvaro, I’m over time, but I got to ask you one more thing.

Alvaro: We have time for a question or two. Yes, don’t fool the audience, this is pre-recorded and we should be fine with another question or so. Let’s [unintelligible 00:26:10]

Alex: Guys, he’s been at Cardinal heaps to save. I’m trying not to keep up.

Alvaro: If you knew the stack of things that I have to write and that I have to work on today before I leave, you would cry with me. If we wouldn’t be drinking coffee, we would be drinking off a little flask or something.

Alex: No telling what’s in this.

Alvaro: I can’t wait. I also can’t wait for Friday, where we’re going to go to the mountains and do weird stuff.

Alex: Okay, so 2025, what is the number one thing? Everyone wants to say AI. I know you have some thoughts about AI and the searcher. Tell us a little bit of what you’re thinking there and why it matters. Does it matter?

Alvaro: You’re an SEM expert, right? You’re a Google guy. Your agency grew that way. You’ve done tremendous work in that space. I’m sure that you remember when things like the knowledge panel came into play and when all the craze was generating these results automatically. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to own them? The same thing with snippets in ads when you were paying for them, and then that migrated into, okay, let’s see how we can use Google My Business, as it was called back then, in order to gain some of that screen real estate and start thinking outside of the box and make GMP listings for things that are not physical spaces, but maybe people or resources or things like that. We both did it and it was great. I’m still a fan of that.

Alex: I love that stuff.

Alvaro: As we move now into the space with the AI-generated answers for search queries, I think we remain faithful to the starting point, which is being able to provide the right content for the right patient at the right time. That’s where things like SEO come into play. That’s where your content marketing strategy becomes fundamental so that you are clearly communicating your local value proposition throughout the different channels that you’re using for your strategy.

In native ads and programatic ads and in blogs and in your organic email and your first-party data, email lists, et cetera, so that when you create that continuity of message across your channels, then these automated AI answers become less worrisome, because in the end, you know that your patients are going to find the right information regardless of what stage of the funnel they may find themselves into. If you did your job correctly, they’re going to be able to convert regardless of what stage of the funnel they came into your continuum of care. That’s the key, though. You have to think about the entire picture regardless of what stage of the funnel you’re working on.

Alex: I got asked the question last week at a conference, what do I do differently because of the AI overviews? I was like, nothing, they’re really just pulling from blog articles, condition treatment service. They’ll find you anyways, pulling from some of the top results anyway. Just do more of that. At the end of the day, guys, whether Google, at the end of the day, cannot just serve one answer, nor can chat GPT, because you would overwhelm one system.

You’re not just going to get one answer over time, but also keep in mind that advertising is paid and that’s how these platforms stay in business. That will always be their focus. It can’t just be an SEO-only thing, it’s SEO plus PPC equals ROI, in my opinion. I think Alvaro’s exactly right.

Alvaro: A good one. We need to make T-shirts.

Alex: I had T-shirts back in the day. Yes. 16 years ago. This is [unintelligible 00:29:12] I’m betting we can–

Alvaro: [unintelligible 00:29:15] This is huge. That [unintelligible 00:29:18] Cardinal [unintelligible 00:29:20]

Alex: It’s not even clean. I just put coffee in it. Alvaro-

Alvaro: Coffee makes the world go round.

Alex: Alvaro, we had a great time [unintelligible 00:29:28] guys. If you want to find out, where can they find you? LinkedIn? Where can they find you, Alvaro, [unintelligible 00:29:33] questions?

Alvaro: For LinkedIn, I’m Alvaro Fernandez on LinkedIn for CHRISTUS health. Hit me up. Let’s connect. Let’s exchange ideas. One of the things that I do enjoy about healthcare, and this is something that my boss mentions all the times, is that we’re very collaborative industry. We talk amongst ourselves. We don’t see other health systems as competitors. We serve different needs for different patients in different geographies. You’re really not competing. The beauty of healthcare is that you are providing care for those who need it and you’re helping people find that care.

To me, it’s not about you, are you going to get more patients than X, Y, or Z? It’s not like that. In the end, the testimony of a job well done is if you were able to find care for that thing that and you were looking to take care of.

Alex: That’s right. America getting healthier. That’s what we’re all in this to do. Guys, that’s why the [unintelligible 00:30:19] Yes. Cardinal has our own scaling up for healthcare marketers. That’s why this thing is fun, because we are not really competitive, even if in the same market, the end goal is the patient connecting with care. Let’s not forget it. Alvaro, thank you for everything.

Alvaro: Good. Man, thank you so much for making a little time in your busy schedule and for having some coffee with me remotely for the forum and the opportunity, and of course, for connecting. It was a pleasure. Let’s do it again soon.

Alex: Thanks, buddy.

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