Episode 311 / Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez / Geisinger / Chief Marketing and Communications Officer

Working with AI helps save time and process vast amounts of data quickly for healthcare marketers. But it's also a sensitive area, where Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez cautions about a number of perils.

Hernando is the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Geisinger - one of the largest health systems in the US state of Pennsylvania (the equivalent of over ten hospitals and 7 million annual patient visits). His shiny new object is the responsible use of AI in healthcare marketing , cautioning about the way that letting AI make content decisions can backfire.

We discuss how, at Automated Creative, we have a history of working with healthcare clients, producing hundreds and thousands of ads where we've put safeguards in place to make sure that all the right messaging is sent out, supporting the brands but also respecting consumers' data and medical conditions. Of course, when human intervention is used, AI can be regulated to give us the scale benefits without compromising on the quality or appropriateness of the ads.

Hernando agrees and sees AI being used incrementally, starting small, with pilots and agents. Where it makes a difference is engagement:
"AI is going to help us really have that engagement and that trust coming from our patients, and that's why the responsible use of it is critical, because if we lose that trust, we would not be able to do it."

Tune in to the podcast to also learn about the value of going back to basics, how marketing books in the 1950s already valued data, and more on AI in healthcare marketing.

The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 0:00
You really need to understand the basics. It's more of a problem that we think that people are relying a lot on the technology and not really knowing what lies behind that technology.

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Tom Ollerton 0:48
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, and this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders about their vision for the future of data driven marketing. And this week is no different. I'm on a call with Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez, who is Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Geisinger. So Hernando, for anyone who doesn't know you, can you give us a bit of background and tell us what you got, what you do.

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 1:22
Hi, Tom, thanks for having me on your podcast. I'm Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez, I'm the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Geisinger Health. Geisinger, it's one of the largest health systems in the state of Pennsylvania. Just to put it in context, if Pennsylvania where a country in terms of GDP, would be one of the top 20 countries in the world. So we are a pretty large health system with over 10 hospitals, over 7 million patient visits a year. And also, what makes us also interesting is that we are in the more rural and industrial areas of the of the state. So we're kind of solving health care. We're looking at, how do we provide the best health care to those populations? You know, when most of the focus is most in urban and suburban areas? So, you know, great organisation, doing great work. My background for context, I started in CP actually, I started in advertising. So I guess we all have a dark past. They moved to CPG with Pepsi and Diageo for many years. That's where I got my traditional academic background. Became an entrepreneur on the digital front. After that, a publisher for a while, and then I joined healthcare about 10 years ago on the insurance side of the business, then moved to to the provider side with New York Presbyterian, and then now with Geisinger Health with, you know, in the role of Chief Marketing and Communications Officer.

Tom Ollerton 1:23
Fantastic. And you you're not in the US at the minute, though, are you?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 1:23
No, no, I'm actually right now in Spain. So I'm working from home, from my mom's home, to be honest.

Tom Ollerton 1:23
And what's it like working from your mom's house?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 2:48
It's very nice. I mean, it's always great to come back to the home where you grew up. It gives you a very different energy. So it's, I love doing it once in a while, this time of year his birthday, so we tried to come back and be with her. And I think we were talking about it, it's it gives a different meaning to having time off when you are in between meetings and calls, but it's great to come back here and get a different view of the world, so to speak.

Tom Ollerton 2:49
Does she understand what you do for a living?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 3:42
I don't think so, to be honest, but let's not tell her that.

Tom Ollerton 3:47
I have this theory, though, that if you can explain to your parents what you do for a living, then you're probably not making lots of money. Maybe that's I haven't stress tested that anyway, I hope you have a fantastic birthday with your mom, or birthday. Sorry, so are you a marketing book worm, or do you sort of learn on the job?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 4:08
I do both. I like to, you know, I'm actually a professor of marketing, you know, on at City College of New York, once a quarter, once a year, over a semester, I teach a class on on marketing, basically, on what doesn't marketing department do for the for one of the Master's programmes. So I like the academic side of marketing a lot, but at the same time, I think that you learn by doing, and that's, that's, that's a lot of my focus.

Tom Ollerton 4:36
Do you have a particular marketing book that you find yourself going back to or recommending?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 4:40
When I go back to I like the classics. One of the first books that really got me into marketing and actually into advertising was Confessions of an advertising man by Ogilvy. It's basically his autobiography. It's a fascinating book, and it actually makes you think about how. How all this started to get qualified, and how this people were actually looking at data and understanding what was the things that worked and didn't work in advertising. So that's, for me, that's a fascinating book.

Tom Ollerton 5:14
What's the main takeout like? If you're gonna put that in someone's hand and say, Look, you have to read this book. What's the kind of main lesson that you stayed with you.

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 5:22
I haven't read it in a while, but I think that, back to your point is, what stayed with me was this idea that there's a science behind everything we do in marketing, that even in the 40s and 50s, they were looking at, how do we create more precise advertising that has better response rates. And they were looking at type, you know, type phones. They were looking at amount of words in a page. They were looking at what type of photographs to use, which is not different from what we've been doing when we do AB testing. So it's, it's, it's, for me, the the big takeaway is that you really need to go back and understand where things are coming from, to really know where you're going.

Tom Ollerton 6:09
So do you have a practical piece of advice for data driven marketers on how to be better? Is there something you find sharing in an academic scenario or a live working scenario most often?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 6:22
This is one that I am truly passionate about it, and I try to instil it in my teams and in my students, is that you really need to understand the basics. And we think we do, and sometimes we don't. Let me give you an example when, when I talk about the funnel, the marketing funnel, in class five years ago, probably do you understand what it is? Probably half the class would raise the hand. Half the class wouldn't today, it's more like 90. But then I do an exercise where I go through the funnel, and then I give them a test, and I take them, you know, I give them, you know, it's like you have so much budget you're going to buy at this CPM. This is your margin. What is the ROI? Take me through the math. Take me through the logic. Take me what have you done? And then I asked them, you know, so you need to improve that ROI. What would you do? Because the ROI first is negative. So what would you do in terms of of, you know, through the funnel, what are the type of things you can do on how would that affect your ROI? And you'll be surprised that a lot of people don't know how to do that. They actually, they understand the funnel because they see it at work, and they work with it, and they come out, it's automated, and they they can see it, but when they really have to understand that, you know, a click is somewhere actually going and clicking, and then that actually opens up a landing page. And then landing page, you have all these elements, and you need to work with them, going through that logic and really, knowing that really helps you be a much better you know. And it gets more complicated as you do other things, you know, but a much better marketer. And just to finish on the point I've been interviewing, not now, but in the past. Job interviewing marketing directors, digital marketing directors, that when I went through that level of detail, they couldn't give me answers. So it's, it's, I think it's a, it's a more of a problem that we think that people are relying a lot on the technology and not really knowing what lies behind that technology.

Tom Ollerton 8:22
So we're gonna move on now to your shiny new object, which is the responsible use of AI in healthcare marketing. So that's a fairly self explanatory one. Sometimes they're a bit vague for that one's right on the money. So why have you chosen that and help the audience understand exactly what you mean?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 8:40
When you work... again, let me go back when I talk to my CPG friends and we talk about the sophistication of marketing in CPG versus healthcare. People always think of CPG as the, you know, the gold standard, and healthcare has always been behind. But when you go deep into it, the amount of data that we have on our patients and on our clients and our customers, it's huge. And the problem, not the problem is. The issue is that this is very personal data, and this is something that requires a lot of privacy, and it's not hard to do things that can go wrong. An example, I mean sending a list of celebrating, you know, births to a couple that cannot have kids, and you know, they're going through an infertility programme or sending a congratulatory message to someone who has just died. Those are kind of like simple ones, but things can actually go wrong if you don't use data the right way. So the challenge that we have is tonnes amounts of data. How do we actually use it in a way that can really help our customers? How can we use them to use predictive analytic tools to try to get you into the right journeys towards better health, and at the same time, do it in a way that it doesn't affect your privacy. You don't feel that you're being invaded and it we're not giving data to other people that you don't want people to see or to know about.

Tom Ollerton 10:37
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Tom Ollerton 11:14
So I love that intention. So you're sort of pulled in two directions there, aren't you? You, you want. You've got a load of data and owned data, and also good data, right? It's there. You're not trying to sell someone a product they don't want or need. You're trying to improve their health, right? So you've got a tonne of data, tonne of levers to pull in order to deliver about a health outcome, which is fantastic. Then on the flip side of that, you've got the excitement and the innovative possibilities with artificial intelligence, but in a world of hallucinating, of artificial intelligence, that must be terrifying, and the two examples you gave are awful, and I'm sure they've happened and feels bad for the people that are on the receiving end of it. I'm sure there was no ill intent. So how do you manage that huge chasm between your want and need to do the right thing, and the ability to do it with the reality that AIs make stuff up.

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 12:09
That's why we are very, very careful on how we move. And we need to put guardrails on AI. We all want to run with it. We know what it can do. Part of the problem, to your point, is, not only that it hallucinates is yes, that it has to do with the data that you have. If you have data that is biassed, AI is going to take that bias data and, you know, algorithmically, take it to another level. An example could be, you know, who do you give a new medicine? And you know you have data that this medicine works better on white male kids. But it may be, have to do, the fact that your population that has been taking this before is, yes, that type of population. So it's, it's hard to really, really make the systems and the algorithms work in a way that really takes into account all the measures and all the all the parameters that we needed to take. And it's right now, it's working progress. So that's why you see that in healthcare, there's certain parts where we're moving very fast, fast with it, which is more on the medical side of it, on the marketing side, we need to be careful.

Tom Ollerton 13:30
And what are those steps that you are putting in place to be careful. So automated creative has always worked with healthcare clients to different degrees in different markets for different parts of healthcare. And obviously it's an incredibly regulated space, and we produce hundreds and 1000s of ads in different campaigns in different languages all over the world. And so we have to put safeguards in place to make sure that all of the right messaging that supports the ad goes in the right ad, and all the different sizes and all the different places. And it's been and it's been work, and we've got that fine art down, but that is when it's it's specified, right? But in an AI world, when you've got AI making decisions, what kind of safeguards do you put in place? Is it, do you use different AIs to police other AIs? Or is it, do you like a human layer? How's that working?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 14:19
I think what what we're looking at is, how do we limit the role of the AI to various specific things? It's more going on the route of agents than full fledged AI. I think that's where the solution might lender might end up. We are. We're doing pilots. One of the key things is start small, and so if you make mistakes, the mistakes are small, and you can control them. So we are working on on pilots. The other key thing, I believe, is it all starts with your data. The quality of the data needs to be excellent, because that's where, also where things can go can go wrong. You know, I think one of the key things is it's start small and pilot things. Control the errors. As I was saying, we're probably going to go more the route of agents. So it's very controlled. AIs, it's not full fledged AI, trying to do everything with a black box in the back end. So the more we can control it and say, Okay, we want it just to do this type of thing. That's where we believe that the use of AI can be very, very effective. An example, for example, something we're going to be testing is pulling lists for for campaigns, email campaigns. Right now, it takes someone hours to go in and look at different databases, clean the list. I mean, it's very manual stuff. If we can get AI to take care of all of that and actually do some of the data, the quality assurance of it, that'll be fantastic. So that's, I think, where we may end up going at the beginning, as we get a better handle of what AI can do for us and where things could go wrong, and we can control that.

Tom Ollerton 16:06
So this is a point that I'm really struggling with when it comes to AI in marketing. So the example you gave, and I'm sure there's lots of others, and I appreciate you sharing a live example with me, which is, instead of someone pulling an Excel spreadsheet and finding all the people in New York state who have this and then pulling together a list and then dumping that into an email service provider, the AI, can do that in what seconds, right? Or even less. So what's happened there is that you've saved time, right? And so therefore, if it's a freelance cost, then you say, also save money, right? So my argument is, is that you can do that, and that's brilliant, but then so can all of your competitors, right? So, and everyone should be this stuff's not expensive. So what, what everyone has the ability is to save that, that hour long task. But as in, as an industry, as a vertical, everyone's still in the same place. Everyone's just saved an hour. So assuming everyone's going to do all of the obvious things, what's the extra stuff that brands can do when it comes to healthcare marketing? Where's the new frontier that AI is opening up?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 17:16
It's going to be on engagement. That's where I think, because, to your point is, one thing I would like to point out healthcare is that we are we're kind of frenemies. It's great if the health system next door does well with its patients, we're all better off. So we are very competitive, but at the same time, we collaborate a lot. So I'm not that worried about, you know, the competitive advantage this could give us. For me, it's more about how do we better engage with our patients to have the behaviours that we need, healthy behaviours, getting them to actually come and do the screenings they need to do. An example I can give you something. We're working on lung cancer, there are other cancers. There are very specific screenings. Colon cancer. You do colonoscopies, mammographies, lung cancer is much harder because there's not any specific screening that you do. So using AI, we could actually you know how to use those predictive analytics to find those that have the higher propensity, and how do we take them through the right journey and automate those things in order to get them quicker in front of the right doctor and the right treatment to prevent them to, you know, actually having the cancer, if possible? So for me, that's the way that AI it's going to help us really having that engagement and that trust coming from our patients, and that's why the responsible use of it is critical, because if we lose that trust, we would not be able to do it.

Tom Ollerton 18:48
And so what's marketing's role in that? That's an amazing thought and a lovely ambition, that you would be able to crunch data quickly and encourage people to go into testing, maybe before they were thinking about it, and increase the quality and length of people's lives, but how did and understand how your own data might deliver that? But that feels like a an operations function, as opposed to a marketing one or am I missing the point?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 19:14
It's a marketing function in the sense of what we do in marketing is finding who is your who is the right customer for the right service, and that's exactly what we can accelerate. I can actually now use data to get in front of the right cardiologist, the right patient. I can actually and that, at the same time, results into revenue for the system and growth. So the way we see a role, it's it's, it's as a business, it's as a growth engine. You know, we're, we're business partners that are trying to do exactly that is, how do we, you know, create that relationship with our customers, you know, our patients. I like to call them customers, because I think they're, they're more than just a patient. And how do we build. That trust. So we are, you know, we get them on journeys that actually improve their health.

Tom Ollerton 20:04
So unfortunately, we've come to the end of the podcast, and there's just so much more knowledge in your head that I would have to get out, but we've run out of time. So if someone wants to carry on this conversation with you, where is a good place to do that and what makes a message that you'll actually respond to?

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 20:20
Probably the easiest way is through LinkedIn, Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez Geisinger Health, and you'll find me. The best way to do it is make it personal in the sense of, hey, I listened to the podcast. I have a question about x. That's easier than when I get, you know, you probably get them too. Is we share tonnes of people in common and interest. I would love to connect to you. So So, yes, tell me, you know, give us a little bit of context, and I'll be more than happy to connect.

Tom Ollerton 20:51
That's a lovely bit of advice. Thank you so much for your time.

Hernando Ruiz-Jimenez 20:54
No, thank you Tom. It was fun.

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