Ep. 193: Using Geofencing and Google Ads to Grow Your Urgent Care - Interview with Brent A. Kell R.T., CEO of Valley Immediate Care

PCMP (00:00)
What is going on? Walk-ins welcome family. Nick and Michael here. I got to tell you, I am in super chill, relaxed mode. I just got back from a week in Cancun. It was a vacation wrapped up in a business trip, but I am super excited to be back here. We haven't got a special guest. do have a guest. And you are a couple of shades darker tan. I am. You just like, look, I just now noticed. I'm a big dude, right? But it's true what they say. Fat looks better tan. It's true story.

Brent Kell (00:11)
Thank

PCMP (00:28)
It's a true story. Here we go. We're off to the races. actually do have a special guest. I apologize, Brent's like, I accidentally got dropped off of this call. Now we'll introduce Brent in a minute, but I got to tell you, we're always here to help you get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits and scale up your clinics. And the reason I'm excited about Brent being on here is because this, this CEO has

been doing his own marketing and not just doing his own marketing, but doing it for decades. with that, I'm going kick it over to you to do an intro and then we'll bring Brent in. So I have Brent Kell here with us today. He's the CEO of Valley Immediate Care, which he's been there since 2002. he's seen it all, right? Right. He has seen it all. he's CEO there. He's been pushing 30 years in the world of healthcare anyway. But like you said, like

he is part of the marketing. He's rare because CEOs and marketing usually don't go hand in hand. They usually just pass it along. So Brett, I'm super excited to have you on just because one, love, it's kind of rare. We never get enough of the CEO of Urgent Cares come on. So we love having you on. Thank you so much for coming on. Brett, say hello to the Walk-Ins Welcome audience and tell us one thing about you that nobody else knows.

Brent Kell (01:42)
Thank

Great. Hello, Watkins. Welcome, audience. I think one thing that nobody knows about me, I've got a good friend who happens to be an orangutan.

PCMP (01:55)
I did not see that coming. I did not see that coming. kind of see that coming because like you have all this background and like rescue and mountaineering type stuff. So the Rangan thing kind of makes a little sense. You're not allowed to just drop that not give context and story. So the floor is yours, sir. Go.

Brent Kell (02:10)
Okay,

so I worked for years as a vet tech. I started my healthcare career as a vet tech. ⁓ Worked in Fresno. I actually ran a bunch of veterinary practices, eerily similar to what I'm doing in human medicine now. We're open seven days a week. We took lock-ins, similar. And we also did all the work for the Fresno Zoo for a period of time.

And we had an orangutan that had swallowed a little piece of wire that they wrapped around spinach and could not pass it. And so we had him in the clinic, had him do surgery on him, remove this piece of wire. And we went for walks every day in our little neighborhood, it's together. His name is Keeflee. he, last time I heard from him, he was down at the, not about him, was at the San Diego Zoo. He was down there on a breeding program, but he was like a teenager when I knew him.

PCMP (02:55)
Do you think? I need a photo. I was going to say, do you think if you went down there and visited, he would remember you?

Brent Kell (03:01)
I'd spent a lot of years. I would hope so. Later on, years after we treated him, I used to go visit him at the zoo and I used to get to kind of backstage pass. We'd go back and there was a chain link fence at kind of the back of the exhibit. And his favorite thing to do was go up and make kissy noises on the chain link fence that he'd either pee on you or spit at you. But not me. I was the only one he was pleasant with. He thought I was great.

PCMP (03:20)
Okay.

So you'll

know if he remembers you, if he doesn't spit on you or pee on you. Now, if you haven't been spit on or peed on in your urgent care, that's a whole different, I'm just kidding. By the way, ⁓ perfect segue doesn't exist. I do want before we get an urgent care, ⁓ I would be sad to not talk about your hiking and your mountaineering and Michael, I believe you told me that he was like a snowboard. What is it? The patrol.

Brent Kell (03:26)
Sure bet, sure bet, yeah.

Let's get it.

PCMP (03:52)
Ski Patrol. Ski Patrol. That's it.

Brent Kell (03:54)
Yeah, it's been my volunteer stuff for years. I've done search and rescue and ski patrols over the years. If nothing else, it's way to get you out. It's good excuse. If your staff says, we're going this weekend, I'm going to go skiing. It's like, oh, that sounds cool. Oh, I got a patrol. I'm on the schedule. It's more selfless, I guess. Same excuse.

PCMP (04:03)
There you go.

I'm sure there's

some, I'm sure there's some sad stories in there. That's not what we want today. I want to know the stupidest story. Like this guy was an idiot and should not have been doing this.

Brent Kell (04:21)
No, goodness.

Funny story,

a hunter. hunting season in the Sierra, when you have a hunting season and hunting season starts with a snowfall, there are people lost all over the place. They don't know where they're going, they're stuck, whatever. So it is one of these days, Saturday morning, big snowfall.

And we're looking for this guy. He found his rig. He's somewhere out in this basin. And we're driving along in these rigs. And we see this smoke, trail of smoke. We thought, oh, that's gotta be him. Get on the bullhorn. Hey, Bob, I can't remember what his name was. If that's you, stay put. Let us know. Fire a shot if you hear us. One shot. Okay, great. Stand still. Let us know. Please don't move. Please verify you're not gonna stay put. Nothing.

repeated three or four or five times, nothing. Well, we better get on there and find, get on the fire, smokes, you know, still coming up, almost out. They'll be around. We're yelling the bull horn, nothing. All of we hear this scrambling up through the brush. This guy's like running towards us, diving, falling. And he says, yeah, I heard you the first time, but I only had one bullet left. I figured I had to get back to that fire as soon as possible.

PCMP (05:33)
I ⁓ only got one left. From that I would have been thinking he would have been chased by a bear. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's a cool story. Let's get into urgent care marketing. Michael, why don't you start us off? Start us off? Yeah, man. Get us some questions going. Well, okay. So obviously, you've been in this role since 2002. A ⁓ whole lot has happened since 2002.

And I know that we had joked about this right before the call. Marketing used to be a lot simpler. Where you took out a certain type of ad somewhere and it just kind of worked. And then it has evolved into a whole entire mess of things, I feel like. There's just too many options now. So kind of tell us like the path you started on, like where you were and then what's becoming the norm for you guys and what you're like, I wish I had done this forever ago. That type of line.

Brent Kell (06:27)
Yeah, it's really exciting time. It has been exciting time for the last 10 or 15 years in marketing. know, running veterinary practices back in the late 70s, early 80s, you know, it's the phone book. That's how you had. Although we got in a little TV even back then, you know, we sponsored one of our local children's television shows. There was a romper home affiliate. And so I'd go on the show and I take some animals and we talk about animals and exotic birds, whatever. And so we were able to TV back then was basically the phone book. And your business had to be very static.

PCMP (06:46)
Okay.

Brent Kell (06:57)
You had to make up this, decide what you're gonna do the next year, 18 months.

two years out, you couldn't change hours, couldn't change service lines. It was really, really challenging, but it was basically a phone book. So we've come a long way since then. Certainly the next evolution for us was lots of TV and radio. When we first got to Valley, we spent 90 % of our budget on TV and radio. We live in a fairly good region for that. We don't have a lot of competition, but I can buy a radio and TV pretty inexpensively in our area. But again, it's this diluted market and you buy all the TV stations,

radio

stations, do you believe their demographics or not, do you have any idea whether because you ran on an NFL football game that you had a busy week the next week, you had no idea whether that existed or not. So the digital evolution now when you can actually place an ad, see clicks almost immediately and then follow those people right to your business is just fascinating to me. We're just in a whole different world.

PCMP (07:44)
Right.

Brent Kell (07:59)
I think that all CEOs ought to at least understand the medium. I don't know if it's wise to spend all their time, like it's the time that I do on marketing. So getting somebody in your organization that does allow that or hire somebody like Nick that really knows what they're doing, it gets a lot more bang for the buck. But I think all people running urgent care ought to understand the power of digital advertising now and also...

help whoever's doing that marketing for you connect to your audience. Because I think you all, if you've been doing it for any length of time, you understand your audience, you understand what resonates with them, and you need to, in partnership with your digital marketer, create some creative that speaks to that message.

PCMP (08:40)
I love the way you talked about the partnership and not thinking of almost say us, but whoever you put us, put your vendor in there as a vendor, right? But, but as somebody who is coming up alongside of you, I will tell you from our perspective, we want to know your brand voice. We want to know your people and what makes you tick. And I know that you dig into your demographic.

⁓ pretty deep, especially if you're in digital, you want to make sure that you're targeting and talking to ⁓ your audience in a way that they want to be talked to and on the medium they want to be talked to on. Is that correct?

Brent Kell (09:16)
That's very correct. And you let people choose what medium that they choose for, whether it's the way you market to them or the way you communicate with them. We're pretty flexible. We do a lot of SMS communication with our patients. Some patients want to talk to us on Facebook. You want to talk to us on Facebook? Sure, we'll talk to you on Facebook. I think letting patients communicate and consume whatever medium works for them ⁓ should work for us.

PCMP (09:42)
Is there anything that you at ⁓ Valley immediate, is there anything that you guys are doing that is out of the box or y'all following a standard digital format?

Brent Kell (09:53)
Oh, I don't know if it's out of the box or not. I I think it's out of the box for us to do it ourselves. I think most people are doing it with an experienced, astute marketer that's formally trained. I think some of the ground truth, some of the geofencing and geotargeting we're doing, I think is maybe a little out of the box.

PCMP (09:59)
Right.

Sure.

Brent Kell (10:11)
One of the we do, we have a region where we have lots of sporting teams come to town, large tournaments, and that's increasing. One of things that our region is doing is really marketing to tournaments of all sorts. so bringing those people to town, we have a large new aquatic venue, basketball venue, a huge complex with lots of soccer fields, and then a complex with tons of softball fields. So when these big events come to town, we do a lot of geofencing of, or geolocation targeting of the

during the day, a place for that, and then in evening, then we geofence all the hotel rooms and motel rooms and campsites and RV parks where those people are at the evening. And think that's a little bit innovative and has netted some real good results as well. ⁓ We do an awful lot of, we have a lot of tourism on our area, so we do a lot of geolocation or geofencing of all the hotels, motels, RV parks, it's real good luck there as well. These people are traveling to your region, they don't have a primary, obviously, that's in a region, they don't have any idea where to go.

on their phone, know, these fields are creative at something like broken, sprained, not sure, check in right here. And so we get a lot of traction out of those ads. ⁓

PCMP (11:20)
Right.

I love that you brought up

ground truth, which for the uninitiated listening in is a way for you to geofence. And I'm going to break this down just in case you don't know what it is. Geofencing is simply when your cell phone penetrates a virtual barrier. ⁓ When you brought up, well, I'll tell you what, instead of me explaining it, why don't you explain it? You, you doing it all day, every day.

Brent Kell (11:44)
Yeah, no, it's basically just

as you said, you when you're in that region, add your pitch to you within a geographic location. So in ground truth, we can go down to a one mile radius. There's other ⁓ vendors out there too. Now there's one called the Chile where you can create different size boxes and things, but basically you're able to pitch an ad, create it within that box. as people are, you're actually then able to fence your facility or your place of business as well. And when that customer clicks on that ad, it gathers that cell phone data, numeric data. ⁓

insights when they enter your waiting room it's it's tracking that patient all the way into your place of business which a little bit creepy if you're if you're a consumer but it's fascinating and it's great if you're an advertiser you can really show proof of concept there as well

PCMP (12:30)
It's the purest form of actually tracking foot traffic through your door. Cause you'll barrier your own business and you're like that cell phone that got that ad served up to them at the ball field. They actually broke and penetrated the fence of my urgent care and came through the door. Like I can make that connection. Yeah. It's kind of wild.

Brent Kell (12:48)
Yeah, advertising.

And then you can, with all these different platforms, you can start to put a monetary cost per acquisition. And I'm still doing it. You're probably spending too much over here, not enough over here, but you can kind of see what is your cost acquisition versus Google Ads versus Microsoft Ads versus Ground Truth versus Facebook advertising. And then you can put more resources.

PCMP (13:01)
everybody.

Brent Kell (13:11)
on more productive resources and instead of this, the old radio and TV, the spray and pray idea, you can really do things scientifically now, which is to me just really fascinating. When I retire, I to go work for you, Nick, because it's a lot of fun.

PCMP (13:28)
Come on.

If you retire and you don't call me to come work here, I'm going to be, I'm going to be offended. You can work remote. You can work remote. I'll tell you what, I'd love to fulfill somebody who just, who just focused on a geofencing. I'm in let's approved. Michael. There you go. I am curious. So obviously geofencing is a good topic for you, but I'm outside of geofencing or soft or that particular software on ground truth. Do you have a favorite go-to software?

Brent Kell (13:35)
Deal. Deal.

Yeah, awesome. Good deal.

PCMP (13:58)
that you like to lean into, especially on the marketing side, like, if I if I only had one software that I had to interact with, this would be the one.

Brent Kell (14:05)
I think it's still gotta be Google Ads. I think that's backbone. There's a lot of other stuff out there, but Google's still king in my mind. That's where most people go. We're doing some more. I think YouTube is right behind it for me. I think YouTube. One of the things that we're gonna do is some precognitive marketing, and it's been on my list a while to do.

PCMP (14:08)
Okay.

Brent Kell (14:26)
We've got actually a in-house videographer that I stole from one of the TV stations who wanted to be an x-ray tech. And so we taught him how to be an x-ray tech. And now he does video for us. But I'd to do some precognitive videos on ⁓ people looking on Google and YouTube for like home remedies first. know, what can I do for police knocking home?

PCMP (14:32)
love that. Nice.

Brent Kell (14:44)
I want them to find very easily a video of one of our providers saying, here's some things to prevent poison oak. If you get the oils off within the first hour, you're much less likely to get infection or a reaction. But if you do, if your rash looks like this, come on in. Let's get us in. Let's check you out. I want to catch those people. When they haven't decided they need to go to urgent care yet, they're trying to figure it out on their own. If you can catch those, then I think you'll solidify that transaction.

PCMP (15:13)
I think one of the unknown benefits and we're experiencing it just in the digital marketing agency itself is the content that you build over time. It's very, very, very, very slow. But once like you're putting in all this energy and effort and you get nothing and then all of a sudden it's like the windows of heaven open up and all of the content for some reason it all clicks together.

And that omnipresence starts bringing people in. And I think there is very much a space for that in urgent care.

Brent Kell (15:47)
I there is too. And I agree with you. And a lot of the stuff you create is evergreen. One of the things we do, and I only do it because it's super inexpensive. One of our local, our NVC affiliate here ⁓ does these public service announcements. And so we volunteered to produce those. And they're typically health related, safety related. We get on the river and talk about cold water safety or go up on the hill and we talk about.

PCMP (15:52)
Right.

Brent Kell (16:12)
poison oak versus regular oak. those tend to be, urgent care has these seasonal themes. In the wintertime, it's flu, it's episodic illness, it's washing your hands, it's all that stuff. During the spring, it's more injury prevention. During the summer, depending on where you're located, there may be heat-related injuries or illnesses or cold water-related injuries. do fish hook removals, that sort of thing. We're in a big fishing area. So I think once you get that,

that group of content is evergreen. You can use it year after year after year.

PCMP (16:49)
I love reusing content. One of our go-to ways to do that, and I'm sure you do it too, is when a question comes up from a prospect or something like that, we'll go into our archives. We'll find what we need because we've organized it, and we'll just send them a video. Hey, watch this, and here's a walkthrough of how to handle that situation. And we already built that content forever ago. Yeah. We used to have lots of interactions on old podcast episodes, and then we may take an episode and just repurpose it where

It may have been recorded a year ago or plus, but then we needed a break. And so we bring it back in, give it a different title, an adjustment. And then like, I'll give it like a 30 second intro for it. And then boom, it gets more listens than it ever had before. Just because the audience is now bigger and then it becomes, if it was a good piece of content, people are happy to re-engage with

Brent Kell (17:43)
Yeah, no, very, very, very true. The only thing we have with some of our aged stuff is back in COVID, we shot some stuff with masks on and we had to redo those because it's very obviously this is an old video.

PCMP (17:52)
Hmm.

Well, but those archives, we'll be able to go back to that, you know, 30, 40 years from now and remember what happened and where we were and all those different kinds of things. You want to talk about a well-documented event in history that'll now have video evidence attached to it. It's kind of wild. Well, like I even found like one of my wife's masks out of the car or something. like, man, I haven't seen that thing in a long time. Right. Thank God. ⁓

All right. So Brent, decades in the business, you mentioned earlier, just even having the conversation or the thoughts are popping up about retirement. And yet you still talk about marketing the way Michael and I talk about marketing, like excited about it and the changes. You don't sound like my dad who is, I'm done, man. That's my life. That part of my life. That's not how you speak when you talk about it. What's kept you engaged in the marketing side?

Brent Kell (18:55)
⁓ I'm engaged in all kinds of things. That's just me. It's ADD probably. ⁓ I'm curious about the...

PCMP (18:59)
Okay, that's the best answer probably. Well, so I

go ahead, go ahead. I have a follow up question. You're good.

Brent Kell (19:06)
I think I'm just curious about life in general. I've got way too many things to do. I need like two to three more lifetimes to get all this stuff done. want to get that. So it's fascinating. But the marketing specifically, because of my Genesis background, trying to run these veterinary practices and figure out how to get people in the door and how challenging it was and all the tools that are available now, it's really, marketing has always been a reoccurring theme in my life now because I intentionally did it just because my job required it.

PCMP (19:15)
Feel that.

Brent Kell (19:36)
these ages, I really, really love placing an ad and see what happens.

PCMP (19:42)
⁓ You said Google Ads is your favorite platform. Do you?

Brent Kell (19:45)
I don't know if it's my favorite

platform, but I think it's the most bang for the buck for us, at least in our region.

PCMP (19:51)
Okay.

Well, okay. Given that it's the still 83 % of all search volume is coming from that. And, and by 83, that doesn't necessarily mean that the volume has fallen off. It's just that so many more people. More players. Yeah, there's more players. So you have all these large language models, these AIs. I'm going to ask the question. You had a follow up question and I totally stepped on it. So let me ask it, remember it so that I don't get... I got a note for it. Okay, good.

Where do you see advertising, marketing, patient acquisition going given the temperature of AI right

Brent Kell (20:28)
Yeah, I think AI is going to get really good at creating content. I think the struggle with us creating content will be somewhat less. ⁓

I think it's going to take a while for AI to totally understand our audience, but once it does, I think it's doing a real good job of creating content. Also placing ads, I think AI is going to get good at ad placements, whether it's the type of demographics, whether it's geographic placement, you know, habits, I think it's going to get better and better at placing, replacing a lot of that. I think...

they're still going to require a human touch. think patients still want, if they're looking for care, there's still a human aspect to it. We've been piloted a couple and we have a voice AI that's answering phones for us now. We're doing a lot of SMS and things and we're finding patients, if it's just transactional, they just want an appointment, they're fine with that. But many times they want to talk to a human and there's still the voice, the AI voice is still not there. So I think AI is going to do a lot of things for us. I think it's going to expedite things.

going to be doing our jobs anytime really soon though.

PCMP (21:38)
I mean, know some of AI and they're good on transactional, but people still like to talk to somebody. I think there's a trust factor that hasn't been established yet, where if I need something done and I feel unique about it, I don't trust a piece of software to understand my needs yet. Or I don't trust that what it's telling me, it actually did the work or not. Because even ourselves, like we have we use AI all over place in our agency. And sometimes AI just gets it wrong.

Well, so let's say this proper though. We use AI all over our agency and I hired five humans just this month. Yeah, exactly. to be clear about that. If it were replacing people, I wouldn't have hired five people. That's a real thing. But no, like the AI side, but AI what it has done is allowed us to grow and reduce costs and like not transfer the costs to our clients type of thing quite a bit.

Brent Kell (22:07)
you too.

PCMP (22:34)
But no, like you talk about how people still want to talk to people. Yeah, there's still a human element that only a human can fully understand. Like, you know, AI can try to be empathetic, but it only knows so much empathy. And it was probably taught by the most empathetic trainer of all time. But it doesn't have Mother Teresa training. It doesn't have like the attachment, right? So, but I agree. Like I think AI is well on its way and it's going to, it's always improving. My goodness, the AI that we had.

three years ago to where we are now is insane. The difference is just incredible. But the sort of follow-up question I had from earlier, it was about, so you are unique in the sense of you're a CEO and you dive deep into the marketing side, so you know your numbers. But at the end of the day, if there were just a handful of KPIs that truly mattered to you, these numbers are the most important numbers to me from a marketing standpoint.

What would you tell that urgent care owner? Like if you really care about marketing, but you have time to dive in, care about these things, just so you're always in the know and you know whatever you're paying for for marketing, there is a work, it is working or it's not working in the, in the KPI can tell you that. What tends to be those KPIs?

Brent Kell (23:49)
I think I would distill it down to one. What is your cost per patient acquisition? We're running between six and $10 probably in our marketing efforts. We're in a unique market though, we're very small, we don't have a people doing digital stuff down here. If you're in a...

PCMP (23:54)
What should it be?

That's pretty good. Yeah, that's good.

Brent Kell (24:11)
A large metropolitan area like a colleague of mine up in Portland, dramatically different, east of the $30-some range or more. So I think it's going to depend very much on your market.

PCMP (24:23)
Yeah, that's good. So so your cost per patient acquisition is the number one metric. Well, let me ask you so because we love CPA, right? Like a cost per patient acquisition. That's super important. How in your like, how do you calculate it? Because some people view how they calculate quite different from others. So at the end of the day, how when you say that, what is going into that formula to give you that?

Brent Kell (24:46)
Ideally you check and see if they actually were discharged and that's really difficult. The voice platform we're using now that actually registers people online.

they articulate with clockwise, is our patient scheduling tool, they can actually see discharge patients. That's as good as they can get. The others is sort of an inference. You know, how many times are they hitting you? Do they actually schedule? It doesn't necessarily mean they actually were seen. So there's a lot of walk-ins and there's some interpretation of that data.

That maybe is is not always exact. Certainly not exact this this company we're using now for our voice I think I can say the name flip is actually as articulates with clockwise we can act Good. Yeah Good. Yeah, we can actually see that they were discharged which is the best that I know of right now, know, even the ground truth Yeah, you can see if they walk in your office, but did they really stay where they seem? You can't track them beyond them. But I think if for first see in a CEO level

PCMP (25:27)
We're friends with Flip. You're good. They're good people. She came here.

Right.

Brent Kell (25:45)
cost per patient acquisition, I think it distills down. mean, you know, we all look at impressions and clicks and, and certainly I think in, in urgent care marketing, there is a top of mind awareness component as well. You know, you want people.

to have heard about you, some name recognition. So I have an owie. I go to Google, I say, know, urgent care, value, oh yeah, I heard that them, you know, mean, that's they made a decision. You got four and half stars, boom, they're going to click and go. So I think there is some, some name recognition that's important and that's top of mind, you know, top of mind awareness. So I think some of the stuff like stuff we're doing on TV, I'm not creating any visits on TV talking about poison oak.

But I'm creating a familiarity with our brand. so when people are looking for stuff, they use Google, they use YouTube, whatever they're to use. When they see us, name recognition is there. We've got good Google ratings. And I can check it online. I'm not going to look beyond that. I'm making a decision right now check in. So I think that the impressions are important. But for a CEO to understand that, I mean, they've got a million other KPIs they're looking at. I think cost of patient acquisition of Google versus YouTube versus broadcast TV versus

I think they they need to figure out where those dollars are gonna go

PCMP (27:00)
Right. I love that. That's good stuff. let's go back. Let's go back to we don't have to talk about flip specifically, although we can, ⁓ but just the AI, ⁓ the voice AI. ⁓ You were talking about people still crave a human touch. Okay. ⁓ My question to you is, well, let me set up one other thing and then we'll keep going. Just coming back from this conference, high level as a software that we use internally for all different kinds of things.

And they have 53 million users. Oh yeah. They have a lot of users. We were one of the first. And we were. We have a bunch of zeros in front of our account. That's right. That's right. So we're early adopters of the platform, but that's, that's they only service agencies. So it's not, I'm not, anyway, knowing that though, they said a little over 61 % of calls go unanswered. So going back to AI. So do y'all use

flip or or an AI voice caller on the front end or do you have it roll over after a ring or two?

Brent Kell (28:00)
⁓ We have it on the well we don't have it on the front end currently currently we're using podium on the front end So I'm using podium and flip together So when you call in you get a nice greeting says hey Thank you for calling Valley Media Care press any key to turn this into a Let people opt out they go into a podium environment after that if they don't pin anything then flip picks up says Thank you for calling Valley Media Care this message may be recorded

PCMP (28:06)
Okay, podium is your intercept.

Brent Kell (28:28)
What can I help you with today? So we offer them two different pathways SMS or voice to begin with ⁓ I'm not so we've just kind of put this into play in the last couple months I'm not 100 % sure what I want to text up front or I want the voice up front at this point in time But but the text is definitely for us a little easier. We have great templates set up in podium I think most people do want to text instead of call right now ⁓

And I think our text communication, ⁓ oddly enough, maybe is more human than the voice as we speak at this present time. Things are evolving really quick. So we'll see. I may rethink that and switch, put voice up front and the text to second.

PCMP (29:11)
Sure.

But either way, you're three touch points away from a human. Yeah. So you have podium and or flip. And then at some point, if they ask for a human, they're going to get rolled over to the front desk. So let me ask you a question about that then. So once they get rolled over, what is your answer rate?

Brent Kell (29:17)
Right, absolutely.

⁓ Our entry rate has gone way up since we use the other two platforms because we have more time Yeah, so we were having a nice Yeah, so our unanswered rate was about 40 % which is pretty high as some we've have that yeah We've have that now we're sure on 20 %

PCMP (29:35)
Good. So that's helping. It's filtering. Yes, because it's getting a lot of the garbage out of the way.

Okay. Yeah, that's high, but normal.

That's amazing.

⁓ And then on top of that, have you found that your AI is turning people into appointments better than your front desk? Okay, that's interesting data I'd like to know. Yeah.

Brent Kell (29:56)
Jury's still out there. I think that's true. Yeah,

yeah. Jury's out. I think our staff did a good job. I think certainly they're doing it cheaper than our staff doing it. There's no question. Flip, yep. And even podium, yeah.

PCMP (30:08)
You're talking about flip. Okay. And even podium for that matter.

Yeah. Yeah. So, that is, yeah, it's a lot cheaper to, don't get, you know, Susie ain't mad at you. There's a vacation sick. None of that exists with AI. ⁓ But also you still have to recognize the fact that people want to talk to humans. Well, I'm curious.

Brent Kell (30:30)
Yeah, and the other thing with AI

is it's on 24-7. It's not, know, our call center's open long hours, but they're not open at two o'clock in morning. And so if somebody's sick and they call us up, they can get the appointment schedule for next morning.

PCMP (30:34)
Yes, exactly.

Right.

So I am curious on, I'm actually extremely fascinated how you're using text first, where you're like, yeah, you call, but you just hit a button, switch over to text, which is so, that makes sense. Like why wouldn't we want that honestly? ⁓ But I'm curious, like how often do they get into a text and then it becomes like, no, you need a human again, because we can't answer your question over text.

Brent Kell (31:09)
Our text is we're able, only because we've been on podium for eight or nine years, we've got all these great templates, we're able to handle many more conversations in podium than we are in voice currently. If get our voice, we've just gone within the last month, six weeks to voice, and so we've got a lot of teaching to do in voice. But we're able to, most of our text are able to be handled via text.

PCMP (31:17)
Mm.

That's cool. It's funny and I'm totally on a departure here. Podium is a cool platform. It's been around a long time. The Pelham tire shop that you turned me on to. Yeah. They use Podium. And so I've done everything from looking at the tires. They've sent me pictures of the tires. They verified my car. They've done all these things. I bought three or four sets from them now. All through Podium by the time I get in there. And I don't even speak English. Yeah, they don't speak English. They don't speak a lick of English.

Brent Kell (32:00)
That's a real podium. put it in Google Translate, you can have conversation in language you want.

PCMP (32:03)
Yeah.

Right. But it was just fascinating to me that like they have, they have fully quoted tires. I've paid for them, by the way. My deposit and everything has been done. And now here I show up and they're already ready to put tires on my car. And it's just fascinating to me. I only bring that up simply because I want to talk HIPAA for a minute. Right. So, you know, how, how, how does the systems work for you and still be compliant with HIPAA?

Brent Kell (32:34)
So we do a little dance there. I mean, it's challenging. Our phone, our call center is pretty careful with the kind of conversations they're gonna have. Podium does have a secure messaging program. So we're delivering like lab results and those sort of things in Podium now via secure messages. So they gotta put in a code, it takes them into a secure browser. It was taken as three to four phone calls delivered lab results because of the HIPAA thing. Our lab texted call.

Hey, Brent, this is Bob from Value Media Care. Can you call me back? Well, when Bob calls back, well then, somebody else is busy. They're in taking an x-ray. They're doing some labs. And so we go back and forth. Now it's secure messaging and podium. We deliver those results. And it's on their phone. So when their wife says, hey, Brent, did the doctor say? Oh, here. Here's what they have to say. So it's on there. We did some stuff in podium else and clockwise during COVID where we decided that, oh, man, everybody needs to see a provider.

there's no way we could pull it off with COVID. So when they get a test, if they didn't have, if they real sick, they just didn't need the test results. We created some YouTube videos, which we text on the URL. You've tested positive. Here's what it means. Here's what you do. Here's what you shouldn't do. So that's another thing on my list of things to create some patient instruction videos that we can send via podium or via clockwise. Because nobody reads that piece of paper, know, but they'll watch it.

PCMP (33:52)
Yeah, but now you've

become an actual resource to your patient ⁓ and not just somebody who did a service. Now you're providing service and function. Well, like I, and I've had that personal experience with talking about the training videos when I

PCMP (34:07)
They had me in the sheet and you know on the sheet it was all just straight up here's how to do these things it was like really poorly done writing and so forth and then it but then they said hey download this link or go to this link right here and you'll find it and it actually shows like full walkthrough videos on everything which is super awesome I really enjoyed it but

Brent Kell (34:31)
Yeah, I

the power of video versus written language and written instructions is huge.

our patients aren't always real literate, you know, and we tend to use in healthcare a lot of words that maybe aren't commonly understood with our patients. So having a video is huge. And then also, you know, patients remember about 30 % of what happens in an exam room. So if you go back and review a video later on, it's super powerful.

PCMP (35:01)
That's super cool. So, all right. Well, we're coming near the close of the ⁓ podcast and I want to kind of fire some questions off to you. I like to do this from time to time and just like the fastest thing that comes to your head. ⁓ So if I say, if I say favorite food, you would say,

Brent Kell (35:21)
⁓ Mexican.

PCMP (35:24)
Love it. Perfect. So now you get it. I'm pretty good there too. Favorite digital marketing software.

Brent Kell (35:30)
⁓ ground truth.

PCMP (35:32)
Ground Truth is your favorite and I'm going to follow up with a very quick why.

Brent Kell (35:38)
Super flexible do it yourself

PCMP (35:40)
Love the flexibility. Okay. Very

good. All right. Favorite organizational conference that you go to?

Brent Kell (35:47)
Urgent Care Association.

PCMP (35:49)
So the UCR now, are you talking about the big one or one of the 27 little OOCCAs? The OOCCAs. All right. What's the next one you're going to be at so somebody can come high five you.

Brent Kell (35:53)
The big one.

Good next year. I think it's in Nashville

PCMP (36:02)
Okay, we're gonna be like, Oh, we got to go to that one. Because that's like really close to home. So that's just north of us. Help me fire off one more. If you were gonna if you were gonna dump all your marketing dollars into one platform. So this goes out to the people that I don't know where to start. Or if I only had $10,000 in marketing, where am I going to put it? Where are you going to put it?

Brent Kell (36:27)
I'd have to put it in Google. I wouldn't want to do that. But if I had to put it in one spot, it'd be Google.

PCMP (36:31)
Okay, so you wouldn't want to do it, but you'll do it anyway. I'd rather do it in ground trees, but Google just makes the most sense right now. That's what it sounds like. ⁓ And your favorite AI platform that you're currently playing with?

Brent Kell (36:34)
I'll do it anyway.

Yeah, it does.

think it's Freed, which is an AI scribe.

PCMP (36:49)
Okay, cool. Are you using that inside the clinic?

Brent Kell (36:51)
We are, yeah, we've got, don't know, 10 people use it all the time. We've been doing lots and lots of trainings with folks and it's getting better and better and better. ⁓ Really happy with it.

PCMP (37:01)
That's good. Man, I love it. Brent, I can't thank you enough for coming. So quick context and then we'll wrap up. Brent and I met on an Xperity webinar and I didn't know if there would be connections. This was my first time to be invited to something like that, especially with a big industry player like Xperity. ⁓ And just like Brent and I hit it off very quickly because he talks marketing and I'll talk marketing. And I was so impressed to have a CEO of a not only just an urgent care, but a very successful urgent care. And

with all due respect being older than me and also older and I'm also say wiser and doing things in marketing that I'm excited about too. just don't get that a lot. No, we don't. So anyway, Brent, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today.

Brent Kell (37:47)
It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. Thanks for the invite.

PCMP (37:50)
Well, typically speaking, we would just say bye right now, but we're going to have to go back and edit this part of the podcast. Cause I got to get up and figure out how to turn this off because our screen went blank in the middle of the podcast. So we're still rolling, but just hang in here for a second. Cause we're going to edit this anyway. All right, cool. We'll see you all next time. Thank you so much, Brandon. We'll see you guys.

Brent Kell (38:08)
Thanks guys