And now I would like to introduce our speaker to begin today's presentation. Ben Dillon is the Chief Strategy Officer at Geonetric, a healthcare digital agency that works with health systems, hospitals, and clinics around the country. A sought after speaker, writer, and blogger, Ben is an influential voice in healthcare marketing, helping organizations embrace online strategies to engage health consumers. He serves on the editorial advisory board of eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, and is a past president of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development. Thank you for being here with us this morning, Ben, and we invite you to go ahead and get us started. Thanks so much, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. As mentioned, I'm Ben Dillon, I'm the Chief Strategy Officer at Geonetric. Geonetric is a digital marketing and digital experience agency working exclusively with healthcare organizations. We work with organizations all around the country and you, of course, can learn all about us and the things that we do at geonetric.com. We're going to be talking a lot about data today. We've done this survey more or less annually for about 15 years now, and the stuff I'm going to talk about is going to cover a lot of the ground that we cover within the survey, but there's just not enough time to cover everything. So we do have, I guess you can think of it as a companion piece, but it's a full report from the survey. You can get that by going out to geonetric.com forward slash G-H-A, and I think the G-H-A has to be all lowercase. We can get that absolutely free out there. All right, let's dive into some data. A couple of things that we do maybe a little bit differently from other surveys in this space that you may see. One of the things that we do differently is that we get responses both from medical provider organizations, and it's mostly hospital health system kinds of organizations, but we also do survey the agencies, vendors, consultants that work in digital along with a lot of those healthcare organizations. A little different set of questions is pared down, but while we find lots of interesting tidbits within just the responses from the hospitals and the health systems out there, sometimes the perspective of the people that are helping them and supporting them or maybe aren't within the walls but work instead with a number of different healthcare organizations can be really interesting as well, and so sometimes we get some great ahas from that side of things. The other thing that we do a little bit differently is we break out the responses that we get by where they self-report that they are relative to other people in the field, right? So we look at digital leaders, organizations that are kind of ahead of the curve. We look at the organizations that are keeping up. We call those the average group, and then the organizations that fall behind, the laggards. And again, this is not our judgment call on what they're doing. From a digital perspective, we actually have a whole series of questions. There's 22 questions this year, and we score out their responses to those questions. The question itself is, how are you doing in each of these areas relative to your competitors? And then they can say, we're significantly ahead and we score this as a plus two or keeping up or behind or significantly behind. We score this as a minus two. So we end up with a score range, hypothetically that's minus 44 to plus 44. And this is sort of the distribution that we got. This is the distribution that we got in with the 2021 survey. And then we break it out into the different groupings and we just sort of select to break them out to pretty similarly sized groups here. So why am I telling you all this? Well, if you download the report, the way that we encourage folks to work with that report is to go and start right off the bat, go through those questions, score yourself, your own organization, and read the rest of the report with that in mind. So if you're a digital leader, you may be looking at where other digital leaders are going in order to remain competitive at that level. If you're a laggard and you wanna up your game, and sometimes it's really interesting to see what does an average organization look like and how is that different from a laggard, so on and so forth. So that is often the way that we find people working with this. And I'm gonna reference these three groups a lot as we go through the report as well. So the actual question behind this gives us some insight into where healthcare organizations feel like they're doing well, where healthcare organizations feel like they're doing poorly. And again, this is the question we use to put folks in the group. So you see in the first three columns here that laggard, average, and leader. So that's those scores as we scored this out, minus two to plus two for those three groups. And of course, leader's higher than average, average is higher than laggard. It'd be weird if they weren't, since this is the question that we're scoring them and putting those groupings for. The fourth column here is the overall. So across everyone who responded to the survey, all the provider organizations, at least who responded to the survey, what is the overall score for that? And then we've got this last column on the end, that's the leader, lag, or delta. One of the things that we look at is not just, what do leaders feel like they're doing best? Or what does everyone feel like they're doing best? But sometimes, where are the biggest differences between what digital leaders are doing out there and what everyone else is doing out there? And this is the score that gives us that. We're basically taking the leader score, we're subtracting the laggard score, and it gives us some ideas on where are the places that leaders outperform everyone else to the largest degree. So let's kind of look at how this plays out when we sort of look at the numbers. When we look at that overall, health systems across the board feel really good about their performance in social media, they feel good about hosting, they feel good about web design, digital advertising, and business listing management. And business listing management's an interesting one because honestly, this is one that a lot of healthcare systems have struggled with. We've certainly seen that in past survey results. Last year, this year, it seems like that number's come up a lot. So I think some of that has been stabilizing in some of the platforms, Google particularly in the way that they're doing some of that stuff. I think a lot more organizations have gone and either licensed tools to do some of this work or are working with some outside firms to do that. But this is the one that's really come up in terms of how organizations feel about it. It was a real point of struggle for many, many years. Now, when we look at the different groupings, where they particularly excel may look a little bit different than that overall picture. So leaders feel particularly good about digital advertising performance, and that's jumped to the top this year. It was in the top kind of grouping, but things like content development and content marketing, things like that, had been above that. This year, digital advertising has kind of jumped to the forefront. Groups in that, or organizations that average group, scored web design capabilities on par with social media performances, their top items. And then laggards felt really good about web hosting and then social media. And I should say that across the board, healthcare organizations feel really good about their social media in general. So then we like to look at where are the areas that leaders are outperforming. And you can see from these arrows that's not those top handful of items. It is things that is a little further down the list. Content marketing and content development have been high on this list for the last couple of years. And there's a few things that you'll see kind of emerge as themes. Content marketing and content development still appears kind of as a theme this year, but over the last several years, it's been a huge theme. Leaders are really good at content. And when you think about not just sort of the core kind of web things that we do, but we talked about email marketing and marketing automation and personalization. And a lot of the places that they're going, having a great content development engine either within your organization or through partners is really key to being able to execute on a lot of those things. So maybe not a surprise that that's been a big area for them. This year, digital strategy really popped up and you'll see that pop up throughout the survey is something that's been a real focus across the board, but particularly amongst digital leaders. Digital advertising, which as we mentioned, is high on their list. And analytics is an area where they excel as well. We also asked, where do you feel like healthcare is furthest behind other industries? Right, so the low numbers, you know, number one, number two, number three, those are areas that they felt we were most behind other industries. Stuff down at the bottom is where we're on par with other industries or maybe even doing better than a lot of other industries out there. So we use that same list of functional areas. And here's an example of where we're looking at providers and we're looking at vendors. And the mishmash of lines is trying to map between them just so you can kind of see where the perspectives of the two groups differed most. So providers feel like healthcare is most behind in the areas of personalization. User experience and CRM. Vendors, similar, but there's some differences there. Digital strategy was at the top of their list, much lower down on the list from the provider perspective, followed by user experience and personalization, which were both in those top couple on the provider side. So as we look at the arrows in the mapping, we can see where some of those differences of opinion are between the two groups. Providers feel like healthcare is more behind in the areas of CRM, mobile app development, marketing automation, web design, and digital advertising. Vendors see healthcare as being more behind in digital strategy and user research, content marketing, video production, social media, interestingly enough, and web hosting. Not sure why web hosting is that different between industries, but that was what they responded. All right, let's shift our focus now to staffing. We'll look at team size, what areas are getting the most staffing attention, where we're doing more and less outsourcing of capabilities and where predicted growth is in the coming year. And the coming year at this point is 2022, so it's now. So this is overall team sizes. This was one that we were looking at quite a bit. And in 2020, obviously there was a lot of crazy going on, but we saw furloughs and we saw some downsizing in some organizations. And honestly, we saw a fair amount of attrition in some places as well. And we were wondering if we would see that play out with the teams through 2020 and 2021. We haven't seen a huge movement last year. I think we saw a little bit of a step down this year. But team sizes are pretty close to what we saw in 2020. So overall average team sizes are 13.8 FTEs, leaders not surprisingly being a little bigger than that, 21 and a half, average being a little bit more than 11 FTEs and the laggards are a little more than eight FTEs. Now, the way we get to that number is we actually ask how much staff time, what portion of an FTE do you have focused on each of these capabilities? And we add it all up. So we can see where the distribution of time and energy is within these as well. So we're seeing a little more specialization this year from what we've seen in years past. Last year, general website management was the number one item. So we saw that come down a bit this year to actually less than one FTE from the overall perspective. Here's that we saw some big growth right at the top there, content development, again, a theme we continue to see throughout this. Project management, which was a little bit of an anomaly, not something we're seeing a lot of mentioned throughout, but certainly an area that seems to be getting more time and attention. And analytics is one that's jumped to the top again, thematically something that we're seeing a lot more interest in this year. When we look at leaders, they now have more than two FTEs in content development. Content development, again, has been a huge focus of leaders overall. And that interest continues to grow, this investment internally and externally that continues to grow quite a bit. Laggard's most staff area is content marketing followed by project management. And then content marketing is also a big staff focus for average respondents just below content development. So again, we're seeing more interest from everyone along some of those lines, but amongst leaders, it is a big staff commitment there. We also then look at where there's more and less outsourcings. So the higher the number, the more outsourcing, and the range on this is zero to four. So you see down at the bottom, we have things like web development and web hosting, digital advertising and design. Those are areas that are getting the most overall outsourcing. Social media, project management, personalization, email, and marketing automation are areas that we're seeing the most focus in-house. Wanted to kind of point out here a couple of areas where we're seeing a particular focus from leaders that's maybe above and beyond what we're seeing from everyone else. The first one there is CRM. We're seeing a lot of outsourcing of CRM function by leaders in the space. We're seeing a lot within mobile app development, and analytics is another area where there's just a considerable amount more outsourcing by leaders than everyone else. Now, we wanted to dig into this a little bit more than we have in years past. We added a question here. We wanted to see what the general trend is, right? We talked to many, many healthcare organizations out there. We hear from some of them that they're doing a lot more leaning on outside partners than maybe they have in the past. We talked to other organizations where they're like, we're bringing it all in-house and we wanna basically build this capability in-house. We wanted to see if there was a trend there around that. And what we actually found here was a pretty balanced overall picture when we look at the things overall, right? We've got 58% that are keeping things about, from mixed perspective about where things were. We have 20% that are doing more in-house. We have 22% that are doing more through agency and vendor partners. We break it into our different groups though. We see things a little differently. Leaders in average, there's certainly a bias towards doing a little bit more in-house, although they're also keeping, more of them are keeping things as is. And the organizations in that laggard category are leaning much more heavily on agencies and partners than they have in the past. They're trying to take some steps forward. They're trying to be more competitive and we'll see some things in budget and other things down the road. They've got some more resources to play with than maybe they have in the past. And they're investing that in some outside expertise to help them maybe catch up with some other organizations they compete with. We also always like to look at where the interest in additional new staffing is. So we've got kind of the current picture, but then where, if you can add more staff, where would you add more staff is sort of how we asked it this year. We've asked it different ways in different points in time. And in this case, we said, pick your top three priorities. If you could add staff, what are your top three priority areas for adding staff? Digital strategy, not only was at the top, it was at the top by a really big margin, right? You can see it, it really stands out there. So again, thematically, this is something that's been emerging, but over the course of, from 2021, 2022 here, we're seeing a much bigger focus on digital strategy. And given the kinds of things that organizations are doing, kind of getting beyond the path we've been treading for a long time, getting into digital transformation, getting into a lot more technological investments, some other things, it makes sense that strategy is an area that's getting a lot more attention than maybe it has in the past. Just below that, we've got content development, digital advertising, online reputation management, and then video production. Again, all of those are pretty closely grouped together, but again, digital strategy was certainly the shine out this year. Now, we also looked to the agencies and vendors and partners out there and said, hey, what areas are your clients under-investing in? What are the areas where they're investing adequately? What are the areas where they're over-investing? And then we kind of score that up as well. Maybe not surprisingly, from the agency vendor perspective, and I feel like I can say this because that's the side of the fence I sit on, we didn't feel like our clients overall were over-investing in any area. Web development broke even, which was interesting, but there wasn't any areas where they felt like as an industry, healthcare is over-investing in these things. The areas where the largest, the most votes for under-investing though, personalization, user experience, video production, digital strategy, analytics. Again, a lot of those themes that we're seeing, there's a lot of interest there, but there's a lot of new investment there. There's a lot of interest there, but there's a lot of new investment there. And there's certainly a perception that the industry has been under-investing in some of these areas traditionally. All right. Let's talk dollars. We're going to look at this a couple of different ways. First, we'll look at how overall marketing budgets and digital marketing budgets are expected to change in the coming year. But given the weirdness of 2020, it seemed sort of inadequate to just stop there. So this year, we looked at how budgets are comparing to pre-pandemic numbers as well. Finally, we've seen in our numbers that there's been a shift from traditional to digital, and we wanted to get a sense of if that's going faster or slower than before. And again, there's a lot more data in all of these areas in the actual report, but I think this is a lot of the core of what people tell us they use most often. So again, 2020 was the largest budget cuts that we'd seen in the 15 years that we've run the survey. And so really no surprise that we're seeing a significant bounce back here in 2021. Now, the laggard group in 2020 were most likely to see cuts. They were most likely to have their budgets decrease. Leaders were least likely to see budgets decrease. Very few people saw their budgets really grow in 2020, but you see the bounce back is sort of reflective of maybe where those cuts were. There's a lot of growth going on here, both in overall marketing budgets and digital marketing budgets, but we're certainly seeing more organizations that in like the laggard group that really took a hit in 2020, seeing that bounce back happen in both of those situations. Now, despite the rebounds that we're seeing here, when we look particularly at digital marketing budgets, we're still seeing a number of organizations that are seeing decreases here for 2022. And so we're still not completely out of this. There's still a number of organizations that are struggling financially, but I think the picture overall is pretty rosy in terms of getting back some budget that maybe we saw disappear last year. So the real question though, is how are we doing relative to where we were before? And so the answers of course run the gamut, but roughly the same number of organizations are exceeding their pre-pandemic levels for overall marketing budgets, as we see kind of lower than the pandemic. So, we've got about 24% with a higher budget than before, about a 20% below, but very mixed bag, very wide range of what we're seeing out there overall. Now, interestingly, again, those laggards, the group that's traditionally had smaller budgets relative to their size, groups that saw the biggest hits to their budget before, they're also the most likely to be in a position now where they have higher budgets than they've had than they had pre-pandemic. So, I think there is a recognition overall of how marketing can kind of influence things, particularly coming out of the pandemic. I think there's a lot of focus on digital as competing around digital. And so, we're seeing budgets bounce back. The groups that were maybe had higher budgets and had made those cases in the past, didn't see their things get hit as much, didn't see as much bounce back, aren't necessarily seeing their budgets grow as likely to grow. Again, this is the number of organizations that are higher or lower, not how big that difference is, but laggards here are more likely to be seeing an overall marketing budget that's bigger than pandemic. And 42, almost 43% have a higher digital marketing budget than they had before the pandemic. Then we look to see, okay, we've seen this shift from traditional to digital. And some of it came from those charts that we saw a moment ago. We would look and say, okay, let's look if your overall marketing budget went up and down. Let's see if your digital marketing budget went up or down. And we'd say, well, we've got lots of people where the overall marketing budget is consistent, but the digital marketing budget is growing. This is telling us that dollars are shifting from traditional to digital. And I think we're still seeing that. We wanted to ask, hey, what's the pace of that change? Is it going faster than it went before? Or is it still kind of on the same path that we saw in the past? And about half of the organizations responding said, yeah, things are moving along, but it's about the same pace that they've been moving along. But about 42% said, you know what? The move from traditional marketing to digital marketing has sped up here over the course of the pandemic. Not a surprise, but it was good to put some numbers to that. Have a handful of organizations that see it moving more slowly as well, but the overall trend seems to be moving as fast or faster than what we've been doing in the past. Now, there's lots of different ways that we look at budget. One way that we've gotten the feedback over time that is most useful is to just understand what percent of the overall marketing budget is dedicated to digital. And it's ranging here from about 30% to about 38%. The average is about 34%. And so, not a huge range between the different kind of levels of organization, but certainly we do see a bit of variation within that. Interestingly though, this year we also kind of said, hey, my budget doesn't come from the marketing budget. The digital marketing budget, my organization doesn't come from the marketing budget. And we've seen that really grow quite a lot. So overall, it was almost one in five respondents saying digital marketing budget is actually separate and distinct from the marketing budget overall. And amongst leaders, the average was almost 30% of those organizations. So we're, I think, gonna have to reassess this question to see if it's still the right thing to be asking here in the future, just because so many organizations are moving to that kind of a structure. We also just ask like the numbers. We've tried in the past to ask for a specific number. People get a little bit jumpy when we ask for specific numbers. It seems like they're pretty happy to give us ranges though. So leaders, when we look at the overall number, are spending significantly more than the other cohorts. The average leader spend is about 1.7 million. We've got some oddities here because of a couple of large, large organizations within the laggard group that kind of throws some of these numbers off when we look at the overall marketing budget. So you see, while the laggard group, we have a huge amount that are spending less than 100,000, we actually have a pretty sizable group that are spending 5 million or more. And it's just such a number shift that it throws some of these things off a little bit here. So one of the ways that we control for this, and I know it's not the best way to assess the size of an organization, but it's the easiest number we have is we average that out by bed size. So we at least get some normalization around the number of beds. Interestingly, when we did that this year, leaders are spending a good amount, but the average cohort was actually spending a little bit more per bed than some of the other groups were. So again, it's just sort of some guidelines here. We're seeing anywhere from $1,600 a bed to almost $2,100 a bed as an average spend for organizations. The other way to look at this is to look at the median. And so if we draw a line on that top chart, it's why we kind of have that distribution up there. One of the reasons we have that distribution up there, you draw a line on that 50%, you get a sense for what portion of organizations are spending this much or less, what portion of organizations are spending this much or more. And so when we look at it that way, the laggards have a median budget that's 100,000 or less. So even though the total average is so big, it's for a lot of organizations, they're not spending very much overall. That average cohort is kind of solidly into that 100,000 to 500,000 range, fairly close to the middle of that range. The leaders, it falls in the 500,000 to 1 million range. So again, another way to kind of get a gut check to see kind of what size are investments. There are so many different factors that go into what organizations are actually spending, their size and a number of other things. It's a little bit difficult to benchmark this in a way as we've worked with folks, but this hopefully gives you some information that helps to maybe place what you're spending and how that looks relative to other organizations. All right, let's shift our gears here and talk a little bit about redesigns and replatforming. So every year we look at website redesign plans and assess what the life cycle of a website redesign looks like. Some years that's been as short as like three to four year cycle, that would be maybe a quarter to a third of respondents planning a redesign, then doing a redesign right now and recently having completed a redesign, that would give us maybe a three to four year cycle. Some years we've had it as long as seven years, right? 15% planning, 15% doing, 15% recently having done things like that. Last year the pandemic had a very distortive effect on this and we're still seeing it in the 2021 numbers. Only 14% had a redesign in progress last year, 20% had recently completed, I'm sorry, in 2020, 30% were in the planning stages, right? This year we're seeing a similar sort of thing with one extra caveat that I'll get to in a sec. So this year we see we only have 10%, 10 and a half percent in process with the redesign this year, but we still have a huge number in the planning stages. So the fact that some of these big ticket projects got shelved or got paused, things like that, doesn't mean that the need for them or the desire for them has gone away. So we have a lot of organizations that are planning just like we did last year, a relatively smaller number that at least, it sort of the latter part of 2021, we're actually in the process of doing this stuff. And then about 13 and a half percent said their redesign was recently completed, which makes sense in 2020, we said, 14% responded that they were in the process of doing a redesign, that makes sense, that syncs up for us. Now the curve ball this year is, we've been talking for a long time about the idea of iterative site redesign, right? Instead of blowing this thing up every couple of years, get into a continuous improvement process, be constantly working on it with the hope that you don't ever have to kind of say, we're gonna stop for the next six months and redo everything from scratch. And you see that a lot of big e-commerce sites, other sites and other spaces, they never really blow it up and recreate it. It's always constant small changes that evolve them from one place to another place. We wanted to get a sense of how many organizations were actually engaging in this. And we were really surprised to see that it was about one in seven. It was 15, well, a little more than 15% said that they were in an iterative redesign mode. And so that may have thrown off the numbers. I think a lot of those folks may have said that they were redesigning progress in years past or things like that. So we do have to look at this a little bit differently than maybe in some years past. And we also look at replatforming. Basically, we're ripping out our content management system, putting in a new content management system. This obviously happens a lot less often than redesigns happen. And the numbers here are pretty similar to what we saw in 2020. So there are, I think, some impacts here from continuing project delays and things like that. But we see about 4.8% of respondents saying that they've recently changed their CMS. We've got about 8% that say that change is in progress. We've got 17 and a half that say that they're planning or considering a CMS change. So when we cross-tab those two things, there's a couple of things that jump out, right? CMS changes are particularly rare if there's not a redesign in process as well. That makes sense. Going and taking a site as it exists today and moving it to a new platform sometimes doesn't even work, but certainly most organizations are taking the opportunity to do those two things together. For the organizations that are redesigning now, more than half are either changing or evaluating a change in platforms. And that's a huge number. That's much higher than we have typically seen. For those in the planning stages, more than half are considering a platform change and another 7% have committed to a platform change. So we are seeing a lot more consideration of platform changes as part of this process than what we've seen traditionally. All right, let's talk a little bit about Digital Front Door. And this is kind of a shift in the way that we are asking survey takers about capabilities of their digital platforms or their website with more of a focus on sort of where much of this is going with digital front door kinds of capabilities. We look at this in a couple of different ways. We ask about what's important. We ask about where current capabilities are for this. And then we look at the gap between those two things. There's a ton of data in this section and I'm gonna tease some of it at the end. So again, the e-book gets into all this in more detail here as well. So we just have a selection of this. One of the things that we wanted to make sure that we talked about a bit was kind of the care access areas, right? So this is telehealth, this is appointment scheduling, this is ER, urgent care, call ahead and put me on the list kinds of things, financial clearance online. And I wanna start on the left with virtual care. And I should say, so the lighter red is how organizations rated their current capabilities. The darker reddish brown there is the importance score that they gave. How important is this for your future digital marketing success? When we look at virtual care in particular, I think it's just a huge testament to the progress that we made during the pandemic that the average capability score here is higher than the perceived important score here, right? We accelerated in a lot of ways and I've got a little more data in a moment here that digs into that. So there's two things here. One, just how far we were able to come in such a short amount of time, but also a kind of recognition that while we're still doing a lot more telehealth than a couple of years ago, we would have imagined that we were doing at this point in time, we have stepped back pretty considerably from the heights of where this was in 2020. So I think it's an accurate representation of where things are today. And I think we've gone from like, this is an area that we're growing to we're kind of rationalizing this. We're moving to, you know, we may have had a smattering of different platforms or trying to bring it to one, or trying to build up the processes and the integrations around these things. But the actual telehealth components of things, I think have stabilized to a large degree. Now, aside from that virtual care piece, these are, you know, care access items, and particularly appointment scheduling, some of the highest important items, you know, highest rated items from an important standpoint, and also represents some of the big gaps here as well. So certainly a lot of work, particularly new patient scheduling, and there are big gaps in terms of urgent care queuing and financial clearance seems to be a challenge from a lot of perspectives as well. We did dig into telehealth a little bit. We did a lot of research and a lot of data presented around this. We wanted to look, really answer a question that we hadn't kind of seen some answers to. So, and we really looked at kind of what the expansion of this looked like. And, you know, did the organizations that have something in place at the start of this have an advantage really as they got into this? So we look at before the pandemic, and, you know, again, we're asking them after the fact, you know, before the pandemic, what did you have in place? Only 6% said they had robust virtual care capabilities. And about a little more than a third said they had something in place. But that left almost 60% of respondents saying we had really nothing in this space prior to the pandemic. So we look now two years later, only 1% said they had little or no virtual care in place. Almost everyone, you know, had expanded programs. And honestly, 40% said they'd expanded the virtual care program. I'm sorry. 56% said they'd expanded the virtual care program with a high degree of provider adoption. So that's a huge, huge, you know, jump forward, a ton of progress. I think it should make us all feel good. You know, I think there's been a lot of criticism of healthcare as an industry that's simply not capable of moving fast to implement new things and make changes. That's clearly not true. Now we may not have the incentives or the dollars or other things that allow us to move that fast, but we're certainly capable of moving that fast and changing in a very robust way. Now, when we cross those two things together, it gives us something of a picture of how much it helped to have had some care capabilities, virtual care capabilities in place to begin with. So in general, the organizations with at least a basic virtual care capabilities had greater success in gaining provider adoption, right? So that's really the first two columns. The third column, sadly, because we had so few organizations that had robust virtual care capabilities in place at the beginning, we have a very small end. It's very tough to draw many conclusions from that. But certainly within those first two columns, organizations that had some things in place, it did appear to help them quite a bit in terms of actually executing on this when everything was absolutely necessary there. Wanted to also talk a little bit about calls to action, conversion opportunities, self-service capabilities, however you wanna frame those things within your organization. This is one of the things that we see as a key pillar of digital front door experiences that organizations are out there creating. The highest important items here, things like online bill payment, patient forums, class event registration, like these have been mainstays of healthcare web experiences for a long time. And so we see pretty high capabilities within these areas or at least capabilities that are pretty in line with the importance that's given to them, as we ask about their importance going forward. There are a couple of areas where I think there's some real opportunities for growth. Online care navigation, as we have a growing number of different ways for people to receive care, you kind of have to become something of an expert in healthcare in order to figure out what to do and where to go. We see a much higher importance there than our capabilities there. Health assessments is another area that has a pretty decent gap as well. So again, we're not gonna go through all of these. This is the full picture though of areas that we asked about, when we were asking about these digital front door capabilities. Top items from an importance standpoint were appointmenting for new and current patients, the provider directory, ratings and reviews and online bill payment. At the bottom from an importance perspective were virtual assistants, health assessments, chatbots and mobile apps, which is an interesting one because mobile apps, we're seeing a lot of activity through the survey and actually anecdotally as we interact with organizations out there, we're seeing a lot of activity there. So it seems like there's a set of folks that feel really strongly about the importance of mobile apps. but we have sort of as an aggregate, not a lot of organizations that are really at a point where they're investing there particularly heavily. Now, when we look at the biggest gap areas, we've got personalization. Again, one we've seen over and over again, identity management, you know, this is a different list than what we've been using for some of those other questions. Identity management's a pretty big one. It's kind of single sign-on kind of stuff. Online chat and online care navigation were some of the areas with the largest gaps out there. So we wanted to dig into one of those areas in a little bit more detail. And we wanted to dig into personalization. And this is one that we've been looking at. There's, you know, if you go to the healthcare marketing conferences and things like that, there's a lot of discussion about personalization, not as much activity going on out there as it might be suggested from the amount of time and attention it gets at some of those conferences and things. So we are seeing growth here. And so we ask a couple of things around personalization, particularly looking at web personalization here. So we wanted to know what are the personalization methods being used? In the last couple of years, geography has kind of ruled the roost on this one. This year, using information from traffic sources and campaigns jumped ahead of that. Now, there's a couple of different, like kind of approaches that are used there. So some of this is organizations that are using this as kind of an efficiency thing. So you've got some personalization capability. You might be running a lot of different variations of creative and messaging for digital campaign. And so instead of creating a separate digital landing page for every one of those different variations, they're actually creating one and then swapping out messaging and creative using the personalization engine when you get to that landing page. So that's one approach to this. But we're also seeing some organizations out there that are using some of this stuff and particularly ad buys and things like that to channel people into different personas or different places within their journey and are using it a little bit more strategically, but maybe funneling people not to a dedicated landing page, but into the main experience and kind of informing their system about where people are with more robust information from that search experience. Geography is still a big one here. And then we're seeing user-provided preferences and behaviors as kind of the other two areas that are getting a decent amount of usage here. Now, even amongst the limited group that's really doing personalization, using CRM information or signed-on user information in order to personalize that experience, that's still pretty niche. That's still pretty small. Although I think we see a lot of opportunity there. The other, one of the other things that we've asked over the years around website personalization has been, if you can demonstrate that this is making your digital marketing better, right? Are you seeing the payoff? Are you seeing the value from this? And it's been a really interesting journey over the last couple of years in terms of how this is playing out. The first year that we asked this, we got a huge number of organizations that said they strongly disagreed that they can demonstrate that marketing, the website personalization was making them better. We obviously have, that anger has gone away. It felt angry when I was looking at the data anyway. We're now seeing more than half of organizations that are doing personalization saying that it's adding value, that it's making them better. Now, only 9% strongly agree, but more than half are in that agree category and more than a third then are neutral, very small set that says, you know, I'm really, this is not working. What we've kind of seen out of this is that this is a set of technologies that take some real time. You don't flip the switch and immediately you're a whole different organization and you're working at the next level. It's a tool, it enables some really cool things, but it takes some real time for these things to be built into your website, to test them, to experience them, and maybe to build the expertise around how this is gonna work within your market and your particular site. We also always ask what gets in the way here? And overwhelmingly, the answer that we got here was we need an easier way. It's funny, these tools for personalization, for a personalization demo really nicely. When you get into the real world, it is some real work to do this stuff. And frankly, respondents that we're seeing are just saying, I just wish executing on this stuff was easier. There's also some challenges in measuring success, some challenges in expertise and things like that. But really overwhelmingly, the need for an easier way to do this stuff was far and away the thing that concerned people the most. Let's move into some strategy. What goals are most important to healthcare organizations around their digital marketing? What are the barriers to accomplishing those things and reaching our potential? So we look at goals, similar to some other things, two ways, we look at the importance, and we look at organizations' ability to demonstrate that success in that area. So last year was really interesting. Last year in 2020 was really interesting. Through pandemic closures and reopenings and things like that, patient acquisition jumped to the top of the list and jumped to the top of the list by a really wide margin. And that made sense, right? We were suddenly in the business of filling schedules in a way that we'd never been in the business of filling schedules. Like it was the right thing at that moment. I will say that the patient acquisition numbers, just from the raw score perspective, haven't gone down, but a bunch of other things have gone up. So now we're seeing consumer experience, consumer engagement, patient satisfaction, consumer awareness, all kind of jumping to the head of the line above that patient acquisition line. And that's reflective of a number of things. For a lot of organizations, the backlog of stuff out there right now is so big that they've got really long wait times and other things, like getting schedules filled is not like the burning torch that they need to worry about. But also I think there's just a recognition that when you create great experiences and you engage consumers, that is maybe the place or one of the places that we're going to have to compete with other organizations in a significant way going forward. I think a lot of things have changed around competition, but that's a whole other webinar we can talk about another time. ROI is right behind that. And I guess we've seen kind of a return to a pattern that we've seen in the past to some extent, right? Over the years, we've traditionally seen all the consumer and patient related goals at the top. We've seen the financial goals next, although usually there's a big step down between those two. And that step down has mostly disappeared here. We've then seen a step down, we then see a step down and we see that here again to all the other audiences, right? Recruiting, physician engagement, fundraising, like they're not unimportant, but there's a definite step down in terms of the importance placed by these teams on those goals. Now, this year we added another one in, digital transformation. Every C-suite that I talked with in healthcare is talking at some level about digital transformation or their version of digital transformation they may have branded or something like that. And so we were curious, like, to what extent is that, like, where's that fall in the list of goals? And the answer is it falls relatively low, right? Below the consumer and patient goals, below the financial goals. Now, the things you might be trying to accomplish with digital transformation, right? You might be trying to create great experiences. You might be trying to create engagement. You might be trying to do a lot of conversions and improve patient acquisition. Like those things are really important, but digital transformation as a goal unto itself, not super high, and that's probably the right place for it to be. We then look, again, same list here at the ability to demonstrate. So some of these align with the important scores. There are, I think, some important exceptions here. Respondents have the greatest clarity on consumer and patient goals overall and have some real challenges in areas like population health and physician engagement, fundraising, and community relations. Now, the way I find most useful personally to look at this is by just charting these things out and looking at how big the gaps are. So this is ordering this out by the largest gap between the perceived importance and the ability to demonstrate. Now, again, traditionally, the financial goals have owned that left side of the chart. They've been the areas with the biggest gaps, the ability to measure the ROI coming in from this stuff or measure the revenue and the ROI. They're still pretty high, but patient satisfaction, consumer experience, again, goals that really leapt up this year in terms of importance, we haven't yet seen that ability to demonstrate catch up. And that's what we, I think, would expect. We have some new things that are most important. It's gonna take a while until our capabilities kind of match the increased importance of those areas. So those areas that see some big gaps, I think areas we'll see a lot of focus in the coming year. We look here also at where the barriers are to digital marketing success. And this one was a really big surprise to me. The last couple of years, we've seen this item, the inability to support online transactions with offline operations become a big issue, but only for leaders, right? The organizations that are paving new trails that are really trying to do a lot of things that you can't just have live within the website. It's something you have to have a lot of folks in the organization come along, maybe change the way they're working, things like that in order for those things to function, for those things to be successful. But that was only really happening with leaders. And the shift this year is it's now an issue that's being experienced by everyone, and top item by a pretty significant margin here. We're still seeing some challenges with measuring ROI with lack of internal buy and some other things, but it was really interesting to me that working with the operational folks has become the number one challenge to digital marketing success. And again, reflective, I think, of different kinds of things that we're trying to accomplish through the digital experiences we're creating. So one of those items was ROI. For the organizations that indicated that they were having challenges tracking ROI, we dig in at another level. I will say we had a lot less of those than we've had in years past. It is smaller. So take all this with a grain of salt because the numbers, the end here is pretty small, but we did wanna dig in a little bit and understand what's keeping organizations from tracking ROI. We've seen a lot of implementation, particularly of CRM platforms, and one of the big selling points, one of the big capabilities that they are touting there is a better way to track revenue and tie things together and stuff like that. But for the organizations that are struggling here, the lack of tools and infrastructure is still big, big, big on their list. The interesting one to me is, and just because it's a bigger number than we've seen at some points in the past, is that there's no formal justification required. No one is asking me to deliver ROI, so I am not measuring it. Again, hard to draw too many conclusions, but we've seen that one bouncing in that kind of, not the top items, but item two, item three for a couple of years. It continues to be fascinating to me that there are organizations out there where this is not considered to be a requirement. Although what I've experienced through organizations I talked to who are in that boat, by the time someone starts asking often, it is a little late to start gathering that data. So we do encourage organizations to be focusing on that, whether they're getting the question yet or not. All right, we're getting towards the end here. We added a new item this year, and this is one of the joys of doing your own big survey out there is you can gather some data to support, or to, I guess, understand some internal arguments that we've been having. So we wanted to understand what marketing channels were felt to be most important by digital marketers in our space and less important, and I'll get into kind of the thing that I wanted to try and answer through asking this question specifically. There were a number of things that we poked at here though, right? The top channels here were not a surprise, right? Your website, search, both organic and paid, Facebook, organic and paid. Maybe a bit of a surprise here, content marketing coming in at number three, most important. Yeah, we see a huge amount of great work. We see organizations that are doing this feeling incredibly positive about what they're able to accomplish through that strategy and through that channel. It was surprising to me still that it was above paid search, above organic Facebook, things like that. But certainly I think representative of organizations seeing a lot of really great results from that strategy. We did wanna look at the newer channels, things like TikTok and Snapchat. They came in really at the bottom of the list. We wanted to look at hyper-local social media platforms, like the next door kind of stuff. That came in really at the bottom of the list. We wanted to look at medically focused channels like Sermo and Doximity. That came in at the bottom of the list. Although I've had some conversations with some folks after presenting this data. And I think pieces of the organization may be using those channels more aggressively, just not your marketing people, right? And Sermo and Doximity, I think, are sort of structured not to be channels to market to doctors. And so that maybe makes some sense. Now, I'm taking some items from the left and reorganizing them here on the right. The thing that we were trying to, the internal argument we were trying to get some data to help us decide here was how important are the organic version of some of these platforms versus the paid version, right? We have seen Facebook being pretty openly say, everyone in the world is already using our platform. So our path to growth is to make all of you pay more money to reach them, right? That's been pretty open. They've closed the spigot in a very noticeable way a couple of times in terms of organic reach. And so that's when we've seen. Google for its part is doing the exact same thing. They're just doing it quietly and they're doing it suddenly. But if you track for instance, the number of no-click searches, right? Searches where someone goes, searches, gets their answer directly from Google that it's pulled from your site so they never have to go to your site where you can, I don't know, offer them an appointment. Has grown by leaps and bounds. They're doing exactly the same thing, although they're just much more subtle about it. So we wanted to look and see, okay, what's the perception now, right? Is pay to play at the same level as kind of organic use of these platforms? Is, are we at a point where the pay to play is more important than the organic use of these platforms? And I think the answers largely kind of aligned with how we were feeling here, right? So there is a gap, right? The organic version of these platforms today continues to be more important. However, for the organizations that are more sophisticated about this, that have really invested in these areas, right? The Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, like that gap has shrunk a lot, right? And with the leader group in particular, it's almost disappeared in some cases here. So we're seeing those things really, really shrink. It wouldn't surprise me if next time we ask this question, if we start to see at least one of those, maybe two of those move to the place where the, the paid version of reaching people through Facebook or Google is becoming more important than the organic version of reaching people through those channels. Now, at the same time, some of these channels are not as sophisticated in their advertising infrastructure. They're not as sophisticated with the way that they're kind of playing this game. So Twitter in particular has, I think, really had some challenges in figuring out its model. Its model is a little less ad centered. Like there's still a huge gap there. You know, Snapchat, TikTok, to the extent that folks are using those at all, you know, there's a pretty decent gap there as well. But for, I think the channels that we lean on most heavily, again, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, those gaps are getting very small. And I think the expectation is going to be that most of us are going to be spending or spending more in those channels going forward. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. If there are any questions, you can put them in now. I know that we're coming up on time here as well. And so you can send questions to the organization if they occur to you after this, or you can find me on Twitter pretty easily. It's BenatGeo, B-E-N-A-T-G-E-O, or just, you know, search for me. I'm pretty easy to find out there. And I'll remind you again, if you're interested in the full report, you can go out to geonetric.com forward slash G-H-A. And I do think those need to be lowercase G-H-A, and you can get that full report for free as well. Perfect. Thank you so much, Ben. Do not see any questions at this time. And as we are right at 1230, as Ben mentioned, if you do have any follow-up questions, or also if you'd like to go back and listen to the full recording and maybe have a little bit of time to digest information that was presented today, you can always submit any follow-up questions you have to education at gha.org. And we'll be happy to get those over to Ben and then the answer back to you as well. And thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you, of course, to Ben for your time and information that you presented. And we hope to have you again with us in the future. And we just had a comment. Thank you for this very insightful presentation. So wonderful. Thank you so much for that. And just as a quick reminder, you all should receive an email tomorrow morning again with the full link, with the link to the full recording of today's session, as well as a link again to the slides. And that information is in the chat for you as well. And again, if you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to send them to us at education at gha.org. And we'll be happy to help get that answer over to you. Thank you so much for joining us today. And again, thank you, Ben, for your information. And we hope to have you all again with us in the future. Have a wonderful afternoon.

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