The power of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way businesses run. It’s also allowing medical practices to run more efficiently from onboarding new hires to website and content management to eliminating wasted time at the front desk.

In this episode of DrMarketingTips podcast, Jennifer and Corey come to you live from Content Marketing World 2019, in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the world’s largest content marketing conferences, which attracted more than 3,700 attendees from over 50 countries.

Tune in to discover:

• How artificial intelligence can help you run your medical practice (and save you a ton of time)
• Why you shouldn’t be afraid of AI and the ways you may be using it already
• How AI is allowing practices to efficiently onboard new employees and train them
• The ways in which AI can help you produce amazing, targeted content with high ROI

Transcript Notes

Speaker 1: Dr. Marketing Tips. Paging Dr. Marketing Tips. Dr. Marketing Tips, you’re needed in the marketing department.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast, your prescription to the answers you seek to grow your medical practice easier, better, and faster. This show is all about connecting practice administrators, and medical marketing professionals, with peers working in practices, learning from experiences, making mistakes and sharing successes. Let’s get started.

Jennifer: Hey guys, welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. This is Jennifer.

Corey: I’m Corey.

Jennifer: And today we are coming to you from Cleveland, Ohio, where Corey and I are attending the Content Marketing World 2019 conference. We’re very lucky because we are here in Cleveland while all of our family and friends are dealing with a very slow moving hurricane. So hopefully everything works out like it should work out after we get back to sunny Florida and Dorian has left the building.

Corey: Hopefully.

Jennifer: Yeah. So, we’re going to take the next few minutes here to talk about kind of some of the takeaways that we each had in the sessions we attended today at Content Marketing World, and how these sessions actually can be interpreted and implemented at your practice, for food for thought for your practice and those of you running practices. So, let’s get right down at it. Corey, what session did you attend?

Corey: My session today was all about the power of AI and how it’s changing the way that content marketing works, but also to a larger extent the way that businesses run. Just for example, because AI, it sounds like this big abstract like scary kind of topic, and you start to think of Terminator with Skynet and those kinds of things, and it’s not anywhere near that yet. But it does have an impact, I think, all the way down to practice management and even some of the lower level employees within the practice. For example, one thing that we talked about was if you can identify tasks that are really big time sucks and then use basic automation or AI to free up time. We know that as practice managers you are short on time. There’s not enough hours in the day. But if you repeat a task, there’s probably a way to automate it.

Corey: In our session, we went through a couple of ways to do that. Then, I started to think how we use AI within our business. The first thing I thought of, and it was actually mentioned in the session, was REV for transcripts. So every time-

Jennifer: They mentioned REV?

Corey: They did.

Jennifer: Oh, okay.

Corey: Yeah. And a competitor, which we’ll talk about. Every time we do a podcast, we get transcriptions from it. Or every time we do a video, we want to make sure that we get captions for the videos. And we use a service called REV, R-E-V, and I think it’s a dollar a minute or two dollars a minute. It’s something like that. And it’ll automatically put up captions because if you’re using social media, and you’re putting up videos, and you don’t have captions, then you’re missing probably 60 to 70% of your audience. So, it just makes sense to throw up the captions.

Corey: Previously, if you ever wanted captions of anything, you would have to like manually transcribe them. So, this is a super cheap service. It makes it really easy. It’s something that we do, how many times a week would you say, Jen, a dozen?

Jennifer: Yes. A dozen.

Corey: As we’re creating content. So a big time saver for us. Another thing that we just developed for a client of ours is when they have a new hire, they add them to a form. We just created one simple form and they input the new hires information in their department, and we’ve automated that process using AI, so that they actually get dropped into an email campaign that helps to onboard that employee to the practice. And it also adds them to a learner management software through our sister company, Insight Training Solutions.

Corey: Those are just like easy things that we do. They gave the example in the session of a tool called Alfred, which is if you use a Mac, you can sign up for this tool. It’s a couple bucks to get started. And you can actually write little programs that say, for example, if every morning you know that you have to come in and you have to open up the same six websites, and this sounds silly, but you can automate a program where you just press a button and it’ll open up your browser, open up the six websites, and log you in. And it’s just a couple of minutes. But time is time. So if you can start to find tasks like that… He basically walked us through how to change small things that you do everyday that result in a ton of time savings at the end of the week.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I mean we use things like this all the time. We use [inaudible 00:04:48] all the time and we have a report for one of the podcasts that we run for one of our clients, and he wants to know how many listeners he gets each week. We have a automation set up, Corey, that you set up that takes that information from the website, and that as soon as those numbers become available, it sends it over and puts it into a spreadsheet. He can then check that spreadsheet, in real time, at any given time. Granted, it only takes 10 minutes to pull that up, but if you can save 10 different times, or six times 10 minutes a piece, then you’ve got an hour a day that you’re saving that you can become more efficient. I think what happens then is as you are looking for ways to automate, you have this kind of cloud overhead that is, are you automating people out of jobs? And that always becomes a thing that people go back to is, is my job secure or are they going to automate me out of it?

Corey: Yeah, we talked about that for a couple of minutes too. We talked about how, and I like the way that he phrased this, he said, “AI actually takes tasks away, not jobs.” And a job can be classified as a collection of tasks and AI may take away pieces of those jobs. So for example, if you have six people in your practice right now, there’s a chance that eventually AI will make it so you only need two of those people. So the way that the machine learning works is that they can do the work as long as they’re trained. So one way to make sure that you’re safe in your job is to be the one that’s doing the training. And I thought that was a really interesting way to look at it.

Corey: Hey guys, Corey here, co host of the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. And I wanted to interrupt this episode just for a minute to tell you about Insight Training Solutions. So Insight Training Solutions is an ongoing employee engagement and training platform for your medical practice. Meaning employees can log on and take these medical practice specific trainings whenever and wherever they are. And each training is meant to increase employee engagement, improve practice reputation, and develop some patient service mindsets. If we’re being honest, something that we all know some of the employees may lack, not calling anybody out by name, but one of the cool things about Insight Training Solutions is they’re always developing new content. And they just released 10 steps to a Phenomenal Patient Experience where you’ll learn how to create a phenomenal patient experience, strengthen job security, and discover customer service secrets for your entire team.

Corey: So this course is in addition to the other ones they already have, which include Communication Across Generations, and How to Understand Today’s Multi-generational Workforce, and How to Develop Overall Patient Experience. This is another course, the new approach to customer service. We’ve also got Eight Ways To Wow Patients and you can sign up for a free trial to see what everything is about at insighttrainingsolutions.io. That’s insighttrainingsolutions.io or just Google Insight Training Solutions. You’ll be glad you did.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I think some ways that we’re seeing AI work right now within practices, I mean, let’s just take social media and website bots right now. So on social media, on Facebook, you can have a chatbot that is driven by AI that, common questions that come in and that bot can answer those questions on your behalf for your practice. We’re not necessarily using it, at this point, with our clients just because we haven’t had a chance to dive in there and really figure out how it works necessarily, but also because of HIPAA compliance. So we don’t want to start that conversation and go down the wrong path. But that is one area that you might be, that in the future we may be looking at more deeply. And then also chatbots on your website. I mean, AI is driving the gist of those conversations up to the point that they need to talk to somebody.

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. And I think one thing that’s probably, if you’re not using it already, it’s around the corner, is using AI or some type of automation to run reports. I can’t tell you how often we hear from clients when we’re asking for certain data that, “Oh, Oh my goodness, I have to run the report. That’s going to take forever.” Well, a lot of, and I think a lot of the HR systems have to kind of catch up in this regard, but they’re getting there, to where you can automate reports and then you can just create a custom report, select the information that you want, have it dropped into your inbox every week, or every two weeks, whenever you need that. So I think that’s something that’s on the horizon. And that’s going to save a lot of people, a lot of times, a lot of time rather as we move forward in this AI future first crazy world we’re about to live in.

Jennifer: Yeah. And just for our audience, AI is artificial intelligence and that it’s really just machine learning to simplify some tasks that you’re already doing. And so I’m not sure truly what the implications are from a day to day operations standpoint for the practices we work with. But we’re starting to put our toe in the water as it relates to some of the marketing tasks that we’re doing. So I think there’s, I think that AI is going to be a big conversation for the conference this week because I saw that there’s multiple sessions talking about artificial intelligence.

Corey: Well, just from a content standpoint, I mean there’s so many, they’re called SAS, it’s software as a service companies. That they’re here and they have a huge, basically this is their opportunity to get in front of thousands upon thousands of marketers that will then use their service. So obviously there’s a big opportunity for them, but ultimately for the practice manager, know that if you’re using some sort of outside vendor for something, they’re using AI to help power the decisions and the data that they’re giving back to you. So even if you don’t think that you’re using AI directly, you’re a part of it indirectly, just by the associations that you have.

Jennifer: Absolutely. Yeah. Anything else that came out of that session?

Corey: There was something that we talked about I just wanted to touch on real quick. We talked about, it was called a trans media content framework. It sounds super fancy, but it was actually just something that you and I talk about constantly. Where you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on your content. So basically saying a video can also be audio, and a podcast, and a text transcript, and still photos, and social posts, and you can just sort of repurpose it for all these things. And then he was giving us all of the AI tools to make that happen without taking hours and hours of your day to get your content out there.

Jennifer: So you mean at a practice they could have someone in house get a video and then use tools to create the rest of that content? Or would it still require a person to go in there and to oversee it and figure out voice and things like that?

Corey: Yeah. So you would still have to have some manual oversight just to kind of check everything, but you could automate everything from, once you had the video content, then you could basically put it in one spot and then automate everything through the email newsletter, the website, the social, the ebook.

Jennifer: Would it write it all?

Corey: There are services that will write everything and then you just need to be the last set of eyes.

Jennifer: You know what I find interesting, I’ve used a couple of services like that, is that they tout themselves as an artificial intelligence AI service, but the fact is they’ve got people behind the scenes pulling all the triggers and pushing all the buttons.

Corey: Yeah. Just to make sure. Because we’re not there yet, but it’s coming.

Jennifer: Yeah. It is coming. And then there’s also, correct me if I’m wrong, but there are services out there where if you are a practice, let’s say you’re a gastroenterologist and you want to come up with a content plan, there are services out there that use AI that they could do the keyword research for you and actually produce what that list is. And then you could go, then you go to your person and say, “This is what I want you to write.” Or you could even like use it to verify that, “Yeah, I think I want to focus on colon cancer in March, but I’m going to use this service to see if I’m actually correct in my thought process.”

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. And some of those services are kind of pricey right now just because they’re so new. But it’s like anything, as they sort of proliferate, they will get cheaper. But basically, yeah, it’ll take any sort of keyword or phrase, and it’ll identify automatically where there’s content holes, and then where it may make sense to write content. And then it can also do some research and tell you how successful that content is going to be.

Corey: And that sort of allows you as a practice manager to work backwards and say, “Okay, so I know that the doctors want to talk about X, Y, Z, but it really only makes sense to talk about X. And then we can put all of our resources there, because we know it’s going to perform and we’re going to get a higher ROI that way.” So there’s still a human element there because you have to actually analyze the data and then not be afraid of what it’s telling you. And then be able to verbalize that and get everybody on the same page. But it does a lot of the leg work for you and that’s something that’s available right now. It’s just kind of pricey.

Jennifer: I think another area that it’s available is in AdWords and Google Ads, or whatever it is that they’re called at this point.

Corey: Yeah.

Jennifer: AI is driving that because they’re taking the data that you’ve got. It’s being interpreted by a machine and then it’s basically proposing what it thinks that you should be doing from an ad standpoint.

Corey: Right. And Facebook and Instagram, they are doing that as well. So as humans we don’t scale as well as the machines do when it comes to crunching all of those numbers. So there’s actually, there’s some check marks you can put in Google, and Facebook, and just say, “Yeah, I want to spend this much money, kind of focus on these things, you all figure it out.” And it’ll just sort of run. And the results on that again, right now they’re mixed, but I would say within two to three years they’re probably going to be pretty damn good.

Jennifer: All right. So a lot of stuff going on with artificial intelligence. All right, so any big takeaways from, that you want to leave our listeners with as it relates to artificial intelligence?

Corey: I think the biggest one is don’t be afraid of it. And don’t think that it’s over your head. Because it’s not. Like I said, you’re probably indirectly using AI already. So if you actually embrace it and you look for ways that it can improve your day to day and give you more time, you’re going to find that it’s, you don’t need to be afraid of it. It’s super simple. There’s tools where you don’t need any coding and you just kind of tell it what you want it to do. And it does the rest.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I’m going to say if you’re interested in artificial intelligence, and just AI in general, for your medical practice, stay tuned for some future episodes because Corey is probably going to be deep diving into AI and really becoming an expert on this as we move forward. Because we’re going to grow together as it relates to artificial intelligence and our medical practices.

Corey: The machines are here.

Jennifer: So with that I’m Jennifer.

Corey: I’m Corey.

Jennifer: We’ll see you next time on the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast.

Corey: Thanks guys.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the drmarketingtips.com podcast. If there’s anything from today’s show you want to learn more about, check out drmarketingtips.com for our podcast resource center with all the notes, links, and goodies we mentioned during the show. If you’re not already a subscriber to our show, please consider pressing the subscribe button on your podcast player so you never miss one of our future episodes. And if you haven’t given us a rating or review yet on iTunes, please find a spare minute, and help us reach, and educate even more of our medical practice peers. Thanks again for listening and we’ll catch you next time. Doctor’s orders.

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