How Healthcare Organizations Can Stay Ahead of Healthcare Compliance Changes with HubSpot

Paul Schmidt (00:10)
Welcome to today's episode. Today we're exploring how healthcare organizations can use HubSpot to improve their operations while navigating the complex world of healthcare. Digital engagement, telehealth, and the evolving patient expectations are all transforming healthcare. And today we're exploring practical ways that healthcare organizations can use marketing, sales automation, and customer service tools effectively. And so joining me today, have Casey Peddicord, our Senior Director of Channel Sales.

who's helped numerous healthcare organizations migrate to HubSpot. Fun fact, Casey came to SmartBug from HubSpot. So he has a really unique perspective on the partner and employee and the customer side of the whole ecosystem. Casey, welcome to the show.

Casey Peddicord (00:51)
Thanks, Paul. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Paul Schmidt (00:54)
Yeah, so today let's jump in, sort of thinking at a high level first and look at how HubSpot's entering this ecosystem of healthcare. You you've worked with hundreds of HubSpot customers over the last decade. Why is HubSpot now being considered as a CRM solution of choice for healthcare organizations?

Casey Peddicord (01:13)
Yeah, I think it's, it's, it's really interesting when we hear the word healthcare, I think a lot of times our minds typically go to first like patient provider, right? And, and in, in, in reality, healthcare is this really, really broad spectrum term, right? There's all kinds of different categories, subcategories. And so there's literally hundreds of thousands of probably different use cases in and around healthcare. But I think with HubSpot making some jumps.

with the software to be able to be HIPAA compliant as of last summer. Obviously there's a lot of buzz around it right now, but I think as we go through today, we'll be able to share some different examples. There's been folks that have been using HubSpot from a healthcare perspective for quite a long time. And while there were certain workarounds, today it makes a lot easier to do it inside of HubSpot.

Paul Schmidt (02:00)
So what gets more specific? you know, thinking about over the course, I know we talked about HIPAA compliant data storage launched in this, this quarter over the course of this last year. Think about like three, four years ago, what's different now compared to back then that it really enables healthcare organizations.

Casey Peddicord (02:16)
Yeah, I think the first thing is it really comes down to the HIPAA or PHI compliance tools. So prior to this past summer or yeah, this past summer HubSpot was not considered a HIPAA compliant CRM. So you wouldn't typically be able to store like PHI or personal health information in there. And so HubSpot did make a change. There's a lot of stuff that went behind that happened behind the scenes as far as how HubSpot is architected that the average

user of HubSpot wouldn't see on a day-to-day basis. What's awesome about HubSpot is the front end, so the UX and the UI of it, really hasn't changed. But lot of the things behind the scenes for healthcare organizations have been revamped. Things like HIPAA-compliant properties, be able to make forms HIPAA-compliant. And so again, there was a lot of buzz around it, I would say this past summer. And so from then on out, really a lot of healthcare organizations that were sort of on the fence of like, hey,

Should we use hubs? Could we use HubSpot or should we use HubSpot? And maybe they loved the interface of it and the ease of use and the customer support and all the fun things and great things about HubSpot, but we're really on the fence, maybe from a legal standpoint or their legal team was telling them, Hey, if it's not fully HIPAA compliant, we might not be able to make that jump yet. Once that, now that that hurdle is, is able to be jumped over or crossed, it opens up a whole new world for, pretty much anybody in the healthcare space.

Paul Schmidt (03:33)
Yeah, you know, I remember working with clients that are in the healthcare space and they're trying to think about, hey, can I store this field inside of HubSpot? And I've never so many times just saying, no, you can't do it yet one day. so, you know, based on your experience over the last year and bringing clients on, healthcare organizations on to HubSpot, you know, what specific features, you know, I think you mentioned forms, but is there other things that...

health organizations are able to take advantage of now that allows them to put more that data into HubSpot.

Casey Peddicord (04:06)
Yeah, I think from a, you know, they're really able to craft their own experience. So HubSpot over the past few years has kind of taken an approach of what we call crafted, not cobbled. So some of the other CRMs that are out there, they've basically had bolt on things that they've added. So they basically purchased other companies and added those things on. And so there's always some sort of little, maybe a small, but some sort of integration issue there.

HubSpots went the opposite route where they've said, hey, we're going to continue just to build out the same code base and continue to make it a great user experience upfront. And so I think about things like a practice that is, let's say, a vein clinic, maybe a vein clinic that's across a large city. So let's say a Los Angeles or a New York City. I they've got multiple clinics. They're able to craft their own, let's say, custom objects inside of HubSpots.

that would be specific to them. So maybe they track things like partners, maybe partnerships in the city. Maybe they want to track attribution rates a little bit differently. Maybe they want to certain things around appointment attendance. And they can do that whether it's through properties or through the fields that HubSpot has or some of the HIPAA compliant properties. But when you move into things like custom objects or...

things to take into account like 24-7 security monitoring for HubSpot. There's all these things that sort of start adding up where HubSpot makes a lot of sense for a lot of people across the whole spectrum of healthcare.

Paul Schmidt (05:36)
Yeah, that makes sense. And I know there's been more new use cases sort of unlocked as part of this change. There have been a few times in talking with some, I would say even more upmarket types of healthcare organizations, just maybe really larger ones that maybe they aren't, HubSpot's still not quite the best fit yet. Though you can still store HIPAA compliant data within properties, maybe there's some other areas where...

HubSpot's still not a great fit. Can you describe some of these examples? Like what are some of the ways that maybe they still is not a great fit quite yet.

Casey Peddicord (06:06)
Yeah, yeah, I think about certain things around, let's say out of the box patient portals. HubSpot has a couple of different portal types that are out of the box. But when you get into really specific patient type portals that carry over, let's say previous visit history, a lot of that still is in the form of some sort of custom build from a HubSpot perspective. Also, I think about like EHRs and EMRs in the space. So, you know, those EHRs and EMRs have typically been built

with things in mind around like pulling in data from all the different insurance carriers for your staff to be able to send out maybe different quotes to folks and pull in some of that insurance information or push out that insurance information right away. HubSpot's not going to handle that right out of the gate. I think that's something they're probably looking at down the road or something that we could potentially do from a custom standpoint. I think a lot of times there are those certain things, especially from like a big EMR, EHRE, think about Epic or

Athena Health, that are gonna have specific things, let's say around insurance and or billing, insurance billing a certain way, maybe are tied into certain financials a different way. And so some of those, again, we would be happy to help you evaluate what that use case looks like, but yeah, there are certain red flags like that that may not be a great fit for HubSpot right out of the box.

Paul Schmidt (07:19)
Yeah, that makes sense. it's like there, there are certain tools that are like you mentioned, you know, Epic and other HRs that just have that functionality that were built around that. so, um, though you may be able to push some of that data into HubSpot and other areas, it's like, you know, if you already have a pretty established type of system that, know, try to just lift and shift it over to HubSpot may not always be the right move. Um, let's get a little bit more into, into the weeds in terms of like types of functionality, how HubSpot actually helps healthcare organizations stay compliant.

Can you walk through like specific permission settings in HubSpot? Talk about permissioning and how you can configure that to best align with healthcare organizations.

Casey Peddicord (07:59)
Yeah, I think, especially for healthcare organizations, know, proper mapping and process mapping upfront and data governance or user governance really goes a long way. And it's something that we do for almost every client today. I think over the last 24 months, it's really evolved. really seen it pop up in most onboardings or implementations today. And I also think the beauty of HubSpot is, and I'll say it different way of something that I've already shared.

When you think about HubSpot is HIPAA compliant now and you dive into what those details look like, like the PHI specific properties or the audit trail things or how forms are now HIPAA or PHI compliant. You know, the beauty of HubSpot is that the experience didn't change. HubSpot didn't go, okay, we've got this product and now that we're HIPAA compliant, it's a totally different feel. If you were a user who hadn't used HubSpot before,

You wouldn't know any different today. If you had used HubSpot before, it still feels the same. It's that same user experience. But I think about the individual details. Once you get into that process mapping at a high level, I think about three process maps. The first is, hey, what's your current state? Second is, hey, from a future state perspective, what do we want it to look like? And three, how do we put that into HubSpot?

And our team is really good at being able to help you navigate that as a potential client. And we help clients do that all the time. But once you get past that governance part, HubSpot gives you really robust tools around user permissions. So being able to permission out different teams from a team structure, and then get into the individual, let's say within teams, user permissions to say, hey, this person should have access to this, this person should not have access to this.

And you could do that across the board with the objects. things like, think about from an architecture standpoint, we've got objects, records, and then properties or fields inside of HubSpot. So being able to do like the objects, the different tools, what properties are what, but then HubSpot last summer again, with the HIPAA compliance coming about, there's a whole other layer to it now where we say, for those HIPAA compliant properties or fields, or for those PHI type fields,

You know, I want a whole different subset. HubSpot really gives you lot of flexibility to say, gosh, who should have access to certain things? Who should not have access to certain things? And how can we make that, you know, first of really easy to use and manage, but also a great user experience for all those end users that are in the.

Paul Schmidt (10:26)
Yeah, that's interesting. you know, in my own experience, I'm setting up HubSpot functionality with the, or HIPAA functionality side of HubSpot in that user permissioning. You know, it seemed like the best use case for some of the user permission settings is setting up when you have, let's say you want your doctors to be able to have access to certain fields and property groups. And then maybe you don't want another group internally to be able to see that kind of information. was relatively easy to be able to say, okay, you know, my group of doctors only has access to these five fields.

But they're the only people in the portal that have access to that.

Casey Peddicord (10:56)
Yeah, a hundred percent. It makes it so easy. And again, I think a lot of times our mind go to like patient provider, right? It's a lot of that simple healthcare use cases, but I think about other use cases too. You know, if you're in the insurance field and you work with automobile accidents, you're probably keeping some sort of like personal health information from those acts from those, that accident data, right? And beforehand, you probably wouldn't be able to keep that inside of HubSpot, but today

HubSpot can be your source of truth through that. And you can segment just that part of it. So the insurance part of it is really big, but then this PHI or HIPAA compliance part around the automobile accident is small, but we can say, hey, certain users or certain teams or certain groups could only see this specific thing. And it rolls across the board with HubSpot with reporting, being able to see those fields or properties and dashboards, being able to export those fields. So HubSpot makes it really easy out of the box to say,

Gosh, we've got you covered. No matter what user level you're at, you're not gonna have that data stumble into the wrong hands.

Paul Schmidt (12:00)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I'm going to jump to just a question about integration with EHR because so many customers that come on board, already have an EHR. They may already be using another CRM2. But when it comes to integrating HubSpot with healthcare specific systems like Epic or Meditech, what are some of the more important considerations organizations need to address from a data governance perspective?

Casey Peddicord (12:25)
Yeah. think the number one, and we talked a little bit about this from like a data mapping perspective. When we think about, what is your current state? What's your future state? How would you like to put that hub spot? You know, I get the question all the time when we're talking with, with prospective clients or current clients around like, think one of the first things that comes to mind for folks, say, have, we have Athena health or we have Epic or we have Yossi health and we want to integrate that.

And that's usually as far as the conversation goes up front and we have to dig a little bit deeper. So if I was on the other side of the fence, I would say, you know, really think about what sort of data you would like to integrate between those two different systems, because what sort of data and I'll give you an example. Do we just want to send contact data from one to the other? Do you just want to have like email name, phone number? Do you want to do things like appointment data? When we think about

medical records, if someone has completed an appointment, do we bucket them into some sort of category around maybe what their condition might be or what the certain procedure might be? Do we want to send that stuff back from an EHR and EMR back into HubSpot? And so it works really no differently than most other integrations outside of the healthcare space, but specifically around healthcare, which really, really important upfront is to think about

Hey, what does our customer journey look like and where does, let's say HubSpot and the EMR EHR fit in there? And usually those two, you know, do talk or go hand in hand together. But if we think about that lead flow or that customer journey flow, it's super helpful to think about what sort of object data. So context leads, maybe accounts or partners or opportunity or deal data.

Do we want that to go one way? Do we want it to come back from EMR, EHR? I think sort of nailing down those things upfront can really go a long way for any healthcare organization. And it really does help speed up the process from like a partner standpoint like us to be able to say, hey, we can help you with this. Here's maybe some of the out of the box tools that do some of those things. Or do we look at some sort of custom route? I think the last caveat that I'll say to that, there's a lot of

partners, whether you're in the HubSpot world or some other CRM world and or the EMR EHR world. There's a lot of partners that do a lot of different integrating with systems. It's so common today where you have best of breed across the board and you're basically sending that data back and forth between the systems. From a healthcare compliance standpoint, you really want to be cognizant of what's what's going on with that data in transit. Right. And with most other organizations, maybe outside of healthcare and finance,

You don't really have to think about that too much, but in the healthcare space or HIPAA laws or what your legal team is telling you, if they lean more stringent to some of the HIPAA guidelines, you really want to think about how that data is stored, maybe at rest or at transit behind the scenes. And so there are certain tools for that folks, let's say like SmartBug, who do a lot of healthcare work in and around HubSpot, that can really help guide you and save you from a compliance nightmare down the road.

whether that's using some sort of third party application behind the scenes to transit data versus some sort of custom ETL or movement solution. So those little nuances really do go a long way in the healthcare space.

Paul Schmidt (15:38)
Yeah, know, when we, a lot of times when I talk to prospective clients that are looking to integrate HubSpot with their EHR, know, so often they're excited about getting going and it's really about, you have to kind of pump the brakes a little bit and, you know, think about, well, how do you want the data to be pushed back and forth like that? And it's like those types of mapping conversations are so fundamental before you can start connecting the wires.

Casey Peddicord (16:01)
Yeah, a hundred percent. think the more time that you can spend upfront with that and really figure out, you know, how much data would, or what sort of data do we want to send? And often, well, often is great work. How often do we want to send that data? Is it something to where, Hey, you know, people come in, let's say from a flow perspective in the HubSpot, we want to shoot that over to the EMR or EHR all the time, you know, in almost real time, but maybe your EHR data or patient data.

doesn't come back into like a HubSpot platform or whatever central database you're using. Maybe it only comes over, let's say once a week or maybe once a month. So there's a lot of different variables in there, but if you are able to map that out, that really helps from a conversation standpoint when you're thinking about implementing or onboarding to a HubSpot type system.

Paul Schmidt (16:44)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. So let's jump over to thinking about real world implementation exercises. And you've been working with clients and bringing them onto HubSpot now. I'd love to hear some specific examples, without naming names, but I just love to hear how specifically how have healthcare organizations improved their communication workflows with inside of HubSpot and what are sort of the like...

measureables that we look at and say, they became more effective when they integrated their EHR and their CRS.

Casey Peddicord (17:15)
Yeah. And again, I'll start with the misnomer that, you know, all of a sudden, because it's HIPAA compliant, we've got all these, you know, healthcare, like it's much better for healthcare. And it is today, but there's been a lot of healthcare organizations that have been using HubSpot for many, many years. And there's different workarounds and different ways that you would do that. And again, I we've got a lot of experts in that field of how we could, how we worked with that before, but in HubSpot making those tools fully HIPAA compliant, really goes a long way.

So there are some specific use cases that come to mind. You know, I have, worked with a medical device startup, started about three years ago inside of HubSpot. And so those HubSpot HIPAA compliance tools weren't there yet. And typically when you're in that startup phase, especially in the healthcare or medical device, a lot of times you'll see like outsource sales teams, right? They have, there's a lot of specialty companies out there that have relationships with

hospitals or hospitals or doctor groups. And so it's very attractive a lot of times from a startup perspective to partner with one of those sales groups because you don't have to go create all those different relationships with all the different hospitals or hospital groups or physicians groups. And so there was one specific medical device provider that started working with us about three years ago. what's doing that was basically had about 40 outsourced sales reps.

Not saying that that's not a bad thing to do. I think there are a lot of really good use cases for that, but the data was a nightmare. You you think about this, these 40 sales reps are using some other system. It's not tied into what this medical device provider was doing. They really had no analytics around, Hey, what are my, what are my sales reps calling? Who are they? How many touches are they having? You know, I think some of those folks will send over like Excel spreadsheets, Excel spreadsheets or some sort of activity tracker.

But again, you really don't have that true customer data. know, within 12 months, we basically had taken that outsourced sales team, pushed them to the side and this medical device provider was hiring on their own, had taken some of those relationships and really skyrocketed their use from a HubSpot perspective. Now today, they're able to see full customer journey analytics, full attribution modeling. And now that, and as a medical device provider, you're not always

or it's probably more common than not that you don't necessarily keep like PHI, right? You have those examples with the, where you're working with the doctor groups or the physicians groups, but a lot of times you don't necessarily end up with like patient data. But now that HubSpots went over that hump and become HIPAA compliant, that medical device provider is able to track that device from inception to sale to doctor group to, Hey, what is the actual inpatient? You know, what's the, what's, what's the patient at the end of the day? And that

putting, be able to put that data into HubSpot and see when those people come back and start looking at maybe other use cases has been transformational. They're able to run their sales team and the market teams more effectively today. They're able to see an increase by adding two other business lines because of that, being able to store that data inside of HubSpot. So from a revenue increase, it's helped them get almost $30 million in funding over the last 12 months.

just to have that data they couldn't have before. So that's just one use case. A couple of others that come top of mind, right now we're working with a group that is a fairly large vein clinic group across the East Coast, almost 100 different locations and come from, they're currently using Athena as their EMR, EHR. But a lot of times when you have those clients like that, they still have a pretty fragmented tech stack.

They have Athena, their sales team is not necessarily using Athena because it's not great for salespeople, right? Their marketing team, there's no marketing tools built into like an Athena or an Epic. So they end up using like a Sprout Social, they end up using like a MailChimp. The next thing you know, you've got 15 or 20 different tools and you can consolidate so much of those into HubSpot. And so this particular vein clinic group.

We're basically able to get them from about 20 to 25 pieces of software down to under five. You know, there's no way to get away from that full EHR tied in the HubSpot. And there are a couple of little ancillary tools, maybe some different calling tools just to make it more attractive. The last one I would share, you know, I think about when I worked at HubSpot, we brought on one of the largest plastic surgery groups in the nation. And it was really a struggle.

Paul Schmidt (21:18)
Hmm.

Casey Peddicord (21:41)
pretty antiquated email tools. And today, when HubSpot made that switch, all the things that they were trying to have to work around is just so easy inside of HubSpot, right? Things like, hey, what sort of, if we're gonna bucket patients into certain verticals and be able to send them more targeted emails without breaking that barrier, right? They're not saying, hey, you had this complete, this done, we're gonna send you this. But at least,

be able to segment them more easily and put them into certain buckets, you know, it's opened up a whole new world for them now that HubSpot has those PHR or HIPAA compliance tools. Makes it so much easier for the team to work in it. So I hope that's a few real world examples and a little bit more helpful for you.

Paul Schmidt (22:23)
Yeah, those are really great examples. And I think about each one of those examples before they came to HubSpot, you know, having 25 different tools. Imagine the reporting at the end of the quarter is probably a nightmare, trying to lots and lots of spreadsheets, probably for weeks, just trying to figure out how all the pieces connect.

Casey Peddicord (22:33)
Aw, terrible.

Yeah, there's so much, I think so many, business, not just healthcare, but there's, I saw a study one time by, I think it was automatic data processing that talked about the dollars that are lost into the transfer of silos. You know, there's so much soft costs there that the soft costs a lot of times will exceed what your hard costs are. And, and, and there's no way to put a hundred percent tangible dollar amount to it.

but every time you transfer it, there's dollars there, right? And so being able to just stream on that, again, not saying that HubSpot's the end all, be all, and it would be one system for everything, but if you can get it down to two, three, four, five versus 30, huge difference in reporting, for sure.

Paul Schmidt (23:18)
And maybe you're at, you know, if you have 30 different tools, that means you have 30 different account managers that you're having to talk with every year and having to deal with 30 different contracts. so, you know, it's, it's all, there's, there's just kind of goes on and on. So, you know, what about from a timeline perspective? I imagine it definitely varies depending on the complexity of the situation and integrations and data and all that kind of stuff. You know, what are some of the more recent timelines you've been seeing in terms of being able to get, you know, media value from HubSpot, you know, for some of these organizations you've been working with?

Casey Peddicord (23:26)
my gosh, yeah.

Yeah, I think this is a, this is such a cool topic and you're probably, are listening, are probably going, well, I'll talk about timelines. What a cool topic. But I, in the healthcare space, especially with the compliance and some of the red tape things that you have to go through, you know, anytime you hear software implementation or software onboarding, it's almost automatic that you go to a one year, two year, you almost, you almost talk about it in terms of years sometimes, right?

one year, two year implementation, three year implementation. HubSpot, I'm going to use an analogy here for a second. think HubSpot's kind of like bowling with bumpers, right? For those folks out there who've never went bowling, you can have bumpers that pop up and you can't gutter the ball, right? There's a lot of other CRM or marketing tools out there are more of a blank slate. HubSpot gives you the power to be really customizable, but it does it within guardrails, right?

And what's beautiful about those guardrails is it really cuts down from an onboarding or implementation experience timeline. Most folks that we talk to are somewhere in that, let's say two, three to maybe six month range to come onboard to HubSpot. Sure. Are there things that we're going to tweak afterwards? Absolutely. Are there things, you know, can you just set HubSpot and forget it? You can't do that, right? Like it's a living breathing thing and you definitely have to

you know, continue to support it and continue to change and HubSpot is going to continue to upgrade the product. So there are lots of things that, you know, from like an administrative or support standpoint that either we could help you with or help show you as a client or customer with. But on average, you know, three to six months to come off of your systems and come into HubSpot or integrate it with that EMR EHR.

Paul Schmidt (25:28)
Yeah, and I imagine it also depends on the size of the organization. And so, you know, if you're a big healthcare system versus an individual physician group practice, and yeah, there's not as much complexity involved. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the implementation approaches, how those differ between larger organizations versus those smaller groups?

Casey Peddicord (25:50)
Yeah, 100 % you hit the nail on the head, If I was to bucket everybody into, let's say two buckets, large and smaller, large and smaller. When we talk about large, let's say hospital groups, we're working with a client right now that is, I think, 26 hospitals, 46,000 employees, gonna be moving into HubSpot. Those type of folks have usually robust processes in place, right? They've been very successful.

They probably have lots of systems already set up and taking away those processes or systems is tragic, right? To that organization. You can't just rip it out and say, hey, here's exactly how you do it today. So I think there is a lot more like prep project management time that goes into, okay, how do we slowly transition maybe an MVP group or out of a 26 hospital group, maybe we do one and then just transition some of the other hospitals there.

the larger groups do tend to take a little bit longer. It's not so much around the HubSpot technical part that's longer, quote unquote. It's really more about the planning and making sure like, hey, we can keep this, you know, $2 billion business doing what it's doing without pulling out the systems that, you know, impact their day to day. In the smaller, let's say smaller bucket, you know, I think HubSpot's a great fit today for a lot of those like patient provider companies.

You know, maybe it's a one or two dentist operation. Maybe it's like the vein clinic that I was talking about where they've got, you know, maybe a hundred different locations. Maybe it's a maybe it's just a general practice. Maybe it's a senior living facility. You know, there's there's there's lots of those that fall under maybe some of the smaller buckets. And when you think about those buckets, that mapping is still absolutely crucial.

But usually it's easier to pull out some of those processes or move over some of those processes to give you a little bit better, almost like a land and expand version or try this and let's continue to build on it. Whereas in some of those larger, you can't do that, right? It's like, hey, you to have very much the process in place. Here's exactly how we're going to do it. Here's how we're going to plan this out. And it's more of a hard cut versus like a slow slide.

Paul Schmidt (27:58)
Yeah, no, and that makes a lot of sense. when you look at HubSpot's new Seats-based pricing model too, I think that really fits in with there pretty well too, thinking about some of the smaller group organizations or some of the smaller organizations that are trying to get onto HubSpot with the new Seats-based pricing model, know, it's an individual person getting a seat of enterprise to really see what that type of functionality is like to see if it could be a fit.

before they think about doing this massive scale implementation, they can go in and test it out, test the features, hey, is this going meet my organization's needs before they really go.

Casey Peddicord (28:31)
100%.

Paul Schmidt (28:33)
Okay, so this last section, I just want to kind of talk about some reporting and understand like how do we measure success from doing this type of implementation? You know, what specific metrics, ROI metrics should organizations be tracking to measure the success of HubSpot implementation?

Casey Peddicord (28:50)
Yeah, I think this is a totally loaded question, Paul. I'm almost laugh a little bit with the Senate, but it really depends on what your customized plan looks like. And what do mean by that customized plan? Well, again, when we talk about healthcare being so broad, right? There's the hospitals, there's medical device, there's senior living, there's all these different verticals and sub verticals inside of that healthcare space. And I feel like those reporting metrics can really be different, wildly different from

from category to subcategory inside of healthcare. Overall, there are some that come to mind that are sort of like top of mind for all. think about patient acquisition and growth metrics. I think about cost per acquisition. What does that look like? I think about patient, maybe patient engagement, patient retention. I think about operational efficiency. What are those cost savings look like?

marketing ROI versus sales ROI. What are the automation ROI's look like? There are some cases where you do pull that some of those like revenue metrics in the HubSpot too, or even, you know, now that HubSpot is Epic compliant, you can do a lot of sales type stuff that you couldn't do before inside of HubSpot. And so like revenue, financial impact reporting, service bookings. I think the last is

I see it all the time from a health care standpoint. A lot of a lot of a lot of folks, no matter. I'll generalize this one again. I know we've talked about broad topic in the subcategories and categories, but broadly across the board, I think I feel like most clients from a health care space don't have a great handle on, hey, what's our attribution reporting? What does it look like from a Google ads perspective? Do we know they're getting things like? Hey, here's our clicks.

And here's our impressions. But really today you should be able to see, Hey, this person, this potential patient went here, clicked on this page, saw this ad came in, filled out a form or got some sort of email from us, went through this process, became a patient, you know, three months down the road and bought X number of ancillary services over the next 12 months. And you should see it an instant. Hey, here's what we spent. Here's what it cost.

And what was our ROI on it? You know, and a lot of times that is so hard, especially for folks in that health care space, because sometimes you do have those different teams and trying to put all that report in together. HubSpot can make it really easy to merge all that together and get one solid view for your entire team.

Paul Schmidt (31:16)
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. you're thinking about some of those different metrics, it's definitely gonna depend on what types of systems you're implementing, whether it's a patient intakes type of system or any other sort of operational system you're putting into place.

Casey Peddicord (31:31)
100 % and HubSpot does give you that flexibility, right? I mean, when we talk about like being able to do the custom objects and different properties, you know, within your category or subcategory of healthcare, it's, I would, I would promise you, if you're watching this day, you can take your process and probably put that in HubSpot and streamline it.

Paul Schmidt (31:52)
Just the last couple of things here. in terms of if organizations are looking at consulting partners to help them bring on HubSpot, what's the approach that they should take in evaluating? There's thousands of HubSpot partners that are outside, out in the marketplace that they could leverage. Like how should they be looking at different consulting partners to see if they have the technical chops and if they've got the strategic ability to help that organization get on board to HubSpot? What's your take on that?

Casey Peddicord (32:19)
Yeah, it's really easy. They should just use SmartBug. That's it. No, I, yeah. So I do, I have a pretty good checklist here. feel like, first of all, that mapping defining what, you know, not just a process mapping, but also having a defined organizational need structure. You know, what are you really trying to get out of it? Is it just that the marketing team is, you we don't have good analytics there. Is it really that, Hey, we have a bloated tech stack and we want to reduce that.

Paul Schmidt (32:23)
Easy!

Casey Peddicord (32:45)
If you really nail down, what are the organizational needs? What are the organizational objectives and how do those tie into a possible move to HubSpot? think number one, that goes a long way. When you're evaluating partners that can help you do that, man, that is key. The other thing is I would definitely assess healthcare knowledge and experience, specifically around compliance. So.

And this is where it it's vastly different. used to work in the partnership space at HubSpot and I used to see it all across the board. you know, having a partner who has, let's say a third party HIPAA certifications, you know, believe it or not, you can actually go get those as a, as a, as a, not just HubSpot partner, but all the different services partner. It's not something that I see a lot in the HubSpot space today because it's so new, but having a partner, for instance, like a SmartBug bug that

We actually have a third party HIPAA certification that specific onboarding teams go through. So it's held to a different standard in that regard. I think from a compliance standpoint, having things like, you know, your HubSpot partner should have a legal team or some sort of legal team to run things through. Somebody who can navigate GDPR, someone who can navigate HIPAA and PHI, someone who can, a partner who can work with your legal team to define, hey, where do you fall from that

HIPAA law standpoint, I say that as not a lawyer, right? But in working with a lot of healthcare organizations, depending upon how their team interprets those guidelines, you can fall a little bit less strict or a little bit more strict. And having a legal team from a partner standpoint help you navigate that can really go a long way. I think a couple of other things are, being able to look at data security and privacy best practices,

If your HubSpot partner can't provide you with that and say, if they can't tell you, how do we, if you ask them, how would you handle patient data? If they can't share that with you or how they're doing that today, that's a pretty big red flag for me. The last thing, I'm a big case-statering or client-references type person. So if you go to the website of that HubSpot partner and they have, you should be looking for specific healthcare case studies.

not just generalized other case studies. It's great if they have those, but specifically to that healthcare space, look for testimonials, ask for a reference. I think when you, at the of the day, to put a cap over all that, obviously that partner has to have HubSpot technical expertise and evaluate just overall their HubSpot readiness or HubSpot knowledge. So again, those...

Those can vary across the board, but I hope that's three or four things that I would look for.

Paul Schmidt (35:20)
Yeah, no, I think those are good things to look out for. think it's, you know, I've been being in the ecosystem for the last decade. You know, there's lots of kinds of partners out there. There's just technical consulting partners that can just do the integration. And that's all like, that's really what their bread and butter is. There's others that, that are good at strategy, but they aren't as good in the tech side of things. There's ones that are great at both. There's a lot of flavors of partners out there. I feel like we can have a whole episode just talking about that topic.

Casey Peddicord (35:45)
100%.

Paul Schmidt (35:45)
But we'll

save it for another day.

Casey, thanks so much for joining today's episode. I'm really excited about all the things we cover related to HIPAA and HubSpot. If people have any additional questions about using HubSpot and bringing their healthcare organization on HubSpot, where can they find you online?

Casey Peddicord (36:02)
Yeah, I'm so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. Also, my email address is cpedicord at smartbugmedia.com. think you'll see our name down on the bottom, bottom corner there. feel free to reach out to me. You can always reach out on LinkedIn or reach out via email. Probably find me on the SmartBug website too. But, if you have any sort of questions, if you're watching this and going, man, I would really just love to talk to somebody and just bounce ideas. Would love to have that conversation with you. There's no charge for us to be able to do that. So, happy to ha happy to do that, but Paul, thanks for having me and.

If I can help with any, you know, any questions out there, I'm happy to do it.

Paul Schmidt (36:33)
Casey, thanks so much for joining and everybody thank you for listening in today. Have a great day.