Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. We are about to start episode 2 of our interview with Amy Garner from West Tennessee Health care. So that being said, besides surviving and managing and doing well for your job during a global pandemic, what are some other things that you are proud of and accomplishments in your role as compliance and communications officer?
Well, I mentioned my team earlier. I have an incredible team of graphic designers, videographers, web people. Lori Smith is my director of marketing, and I definitely could not do my job without her because I love the public relations side of things. I love dealing with the media, as strange as that may sound to some people. But Lori is a true expert when it comes to marketing and strategy. And so I just rely on her every day to do that. And so she works with one of our agencies, our external marketing agency, and they’ve been able to… You may have seen some of our commercials, Emmy Award-winning commercials that we’ve had over the past few years. And so that’s been since I’ve taken on this role. Of course, I have nothing to do with any of that, so I can’t take any credit, but my team just does an incredible job, and they are so so talented and so gifted. And so I have to give all the credit to them. I’m very proud of all the work they’ve done over the last few years. It’s hard when you’re trying to market for a system as large as ours because we have over 90 locations.
I can’t even tell you how many service lines we have. And so there’s just not enough marketing dollars to go around. And it’s incumbent upon us to try to prioritize those things that we need to get out in the public, but also stick with a budget, because we are the largest nonprofit healthcare organization in the region, the largest nonprofit organization in the region. And so marketing dollars are important, but we don’t have all the money in the world to spend on that. So they do a great job balancing all of that.
Yeah. So when you are approaching that, how do you end up prioritizing and come up with a plan for such a big organization?
Well, lots of feedback from our service line leaders, from our executive team, the board. We meet with the board on a regular basis and have a meeting to talk about what our marketing activities are, what they think will be important in the next few months or year. We know sometimes when things are coming up, but then sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we have to just pivot on the fly, and we might have a new provider that comes to the community, for example, that specializes in something new that we haven’t done before. And so we have to be able to pivot really quickly and try to figure out how to get that word out. So it’s lots of conversations with our executive team, with service line leaders. Lori meets with a lot of our larger service lines on a regular basis to talk about what’s coming up, what’s a priority for them, any new technologies that we might be using in the near future. We also have a monthly strategy meeting with our Director of Business Development, with our Vice President, and she keeps us on task as far as what she knows might be coming up strategically that we need to be planning ahead for. So that’s helpful.
Yeah, that’s a lot to manage. Now, in the communications of a medical environment, what are specific challenges that bring that to the table? There’s probably some regulatory stuff, maybe some compliance stuff that is a little bit different than a lot of organizations have to deal with.
That’s probably true. And when I took this role, at first I thought, I’m going to have some conflict between being the compliance officer and the communications officer. But actually, it served us pretty well because, for example, there are specific rules about financial benefit that we can provide to a physician. I can’t just go out there and market for a physician who is not part of our organization. And so those questions have come up in the past as far as what those rules are. Also, when it comes to privacy, that’s an area where my compliance team is really involved with dealing with making sure all of those policies and procedures are in place, and we deal with complaints from time to time. But we can’t just go out there and get a patient and say, Hey, would you film a testimonial for us? I mean, we’ve got to have forms signed, and we’ve got to make sure they know where this information is going. We can’t just talk about Kevin Adelsberger’s care at West Tennessee HealthCare without you being involved in that. Those things have been… It’s been an advantage for me to be in both roles.
Maybe speeds up the process a little bit. Because we’ve worked with some groups where they have compliance departments, and it just slows the process down. Because it’s a third party, because they’re not involved in the process. But I guess having you involved with the process probably gets answers faster, I would bet.
Yeah, it’s worked really well for us. When I’m dealing with media relations, too, if the local media ask me a question, well, I’m familiar with the Sunshine Laws and Open Records Act, and the privacy rules, and all of those things. And so it’s easy for me to make a decision about whether I can talk about a specific topic or how they can request information from us to comply with all of that. So it’s worked really well. I haven’t had any conflict, and we’ve talked multiple multiple times about how beneficial it’s been for me to be in both roles. So for us, it works. I’m not sure that it could work for every health care organization. Sure. But for us, it seems to work well, in my opinion.
And then for you, Particularly, what are some challenges that you faced, and then how have you worked to overcome those? Is it adding skills or dealing with people or having to learn a whole new field? What have been some issues that you’ve had to deal with?
Well, I think an advantage for me is that I’ve been in the organization for so long, and I’ve been a part of operations. And so I understand the terminology a lot better than you could if you were strictly a marketing professional that didn’t work with health care clients. Some of the terminology… We use a lot of acronyms. Some of the terminology is not intuitive. Some of the technology that we use or some of the procedure names, for example, can be a little confusing if you don’t live in that world. But I’m thankful that I had a lot of that knowledge. When I do have a problem, the people around me are very happy to help educate me. My husband says that I’m pseudo-clinical.
Because your husband works in the medical side of right.
He does. He’s a clinician with an X-ray radiology background. We joke that I’m pseudo clinical because I can speak the language, but I can’t do any of that work.
You’re not putting gloves on.
That’s exactly right. You do not want me taking care of patients, ever.
So you’ve been in this role for seven years now. How have you seen communications changing since you started, and how do you see that continuing to evolve?
Well, I think social media, for sure, has really changed our world. When I first got into this role, we barely had any followers on Facebook. I don’t think that we even had a Twitter account or Instagram or any of that. We didn’t have our podcast then, and now here I am on your podcast, and we have our own podcast. So we’ve done a lot of things in the last seven years that the market was just driving us to do, right? So I think that making sure that we are keeping up with all of that technology and all of these platforms is really important. And I wish that I could foresee what coming in the future, but it changes so quickly. And digital marketing for us was something that we really did not do as much as we do now. Traditional marketing, billboards and television and radio and print, were pretty much all we did before. But now, probably more than half of our marketing budget is focused on digital marketing and social media boosting and search engine optimization and all of those things, which I knew absolutely nothing about before. But I can see that all of that is just going to continue to be more important as we go forward.
Well, Amy, thank you so much for joining us on this episode. If someone wants to stay up to date with you or with West Tennessee Health care, where would you direct them to go check that out?
Absolutely. Check out our website at www.wth.org, or you can go to any of those social media platforms that I mentioned, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. We’re out there.
Okay. Well, thank you so much, Amy.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Thank you for listening to our interview with Amy Garner from West Tennessee Health care. If you find this episode interesting, please share it with a friend. We’ll see you on future episodes of the Content Machine podcast.
