Building Healthcare Growth at Scale: Inside Jackson Health System’s Marketing Playbook

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Welcome to the Healthcare Success Podcast. Today, I'm interviewing Matthew Pinzur, who's Chief Marketing and Growth Officer for Jackson Health System.

Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Thanks so much for having me.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I'm excited to do this. And so, first of all, we were just talking offline before we began, and I would love to know, I'm assuming not everybody on the planet knows about Jackson Health System, and there's some unique things there.
So help us get a sense of, you know, Jackson, basically. Tell us about its role in the community, what makes it unique. I'd love to know more about that. Then we'll get into all the details.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): First thing to know is, despite our name, we are not. We're Jackson, Mississippi. We are not in Jacksonville, Florida. We are one of the largest public hospital systems in the country, and we're here in Miami.

That's a start. And one of the things that really makes Jackson special is we're kind of one of the last health systems in the country that fills two unusual and important roles in the community.

So on one hand, we're the safety net hospital for Miami-Dade County. I mean, we have seven hospitals across four different campuses, but what holds them together is we are part of Miami-Dade County government, and actually in the county's code of ordinances is our mission statement, which is our requirement to provide the same level of care to everyone who lives in Miami-Dade County, right?

That's regardless of their insurance status, regardless of what their family looks like, of how they got here, of what language they speak.

We like to say that at Jackson, everybody comes in through the same door. And that's for the full continuity of care.

So whereas another hospital, if somebody who doesn't have insurance were to go into the emergency room with really bad belly pain and they're able to diagnose it as a tumor and then they discharge you and say you need to go get care for that somewhere, here if you're uninsured and that's what we diagnose you with in the emergency department, we will then sign you up for whatever you need, the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, whatever it is, and you'll get the same level of care that I would coming in.

The other side of that, the other kind of bookend in our identity is we're also the main academic medical center for South Florida.

So we're the teaching hospital for the University of Miami and that means that we are, for example, one of the largest organ transplant programs in the country.

We have one of the top trauma programs in the world. We have one of the largest newborn ICUs in the southeastern United States and one of the top ranked spinal and neuro rehab programs in the country.

That's all possible because of our partnership with the University of Miami. So when you pull all of those things together into one organization, it creates a lot of opportunity, creates a lot of challenge, but also makes it a lot of fun.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's awesome. And so I want to talk before we get into the details about your role and specifically, broadly, what your role and your mission is in terms of the hospital.

And there's also something that's a little bit of an aside. The title chief growth officer has really taken off and you're chief marketing growth officer.

So help, I think this is an evolving title right now, but I'd love to get your feedback on both your role specifically, and also the whole growth versus marketing versus communications. Like how do those lines break down for you?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): For some of that, I need to give a little bit of a history lesson here.

Fifteen years ago, Jackson was, the big question around community leaders in South Florida was not whether Jackson was going to stay open. It was when was Jackson going to close? The health system was losing 90 million dollars a year for a number of years on end.

And while the clinical care was good, the business operations were not. And rather than letting the place essentially be sold off for parts, the local leadership turned over the board and brought in a new CEO, Carlos Magoya, who had been a banker.

He had never worked in healthcare. He'd been the chief operating officer of Wachovia. He had spent forty-some years in that banking system and retired when it was sold to Wells Fargo.

And he came in and I knew him a little bit through civic leadership. And he asked me to come in on the marketing and communications side, which at the time was a verysmall function with a very small staff because the health system just didn't have the resources to be doing any kind of marketing.

And the plan was that I was going to stay just on his transition team for about six months. That was fifteen years ago. He keeps forgetting to fire me. I keep forgetting to quit.

And as we have built up the strength of the system overall, the marketing and communication functions have followed along with that.

So as we made that entire program more robust, we then used our department to spearhead some of the other initiatives.

For example, we're really lucky to have a great partnership with our IT team and with our chief information officer. About five years ago, we made a decision that the digital patient experience really needed to be living in marketing, supported by IT rather than vice versa, which is how it had been before that.

We also made a decision rather than buying an off-the-shelf CRM that we would build our own customer relationship management system and have it live in the health system’s enterprise data warehouse.

That way, whether we’re looking at marketing data, clinical data, or financial data, it’s all coming from the same single source of truth.

And about a year ago, we were finally in a position to start talking about growing into entirely new types of business that Jackson had not been in before. That’s where the growth title came from.

Marketing sits at the intersection of internal operations and the community, and that made it the right place to support those new initiatives.

I like to say I don’t actually know how to do anything in the health system, but I know how to help the people who do things, do things really effectively.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's awesome. That's a great synopsis. I love it. So talking about Jackson Health, you're known for scale and impact on the community.
How do you ensure that marketing is fully embedded across your operations, finance, and business? You mentioned the database. So there are other things that you're doing that do that.

And by the way, kudos to you. That's an enormous job building a database like that. That must have been, you still must be tired from that whole endeavor.

But tell me about how you scale this.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): We're lucky to have great folks who are leading that work, both on the IT side and on the marketing side.

It's still only kind of in phase one, and we're about three or four years into it. I think in 2026, we're going to bring a lot of new functionality online with that.

And it's kind of a great example to your bigger question, which gets to the ways in which we see ourselves as a support department first. So it's how do we make our, we call them clients, how do we make our clients more successful?

And by taking that perspective, we’re able to do all of those things that are, you know, MBA buzzwords, but that really do matter, which is kind of having these cross-functional teams, having these really stable relationships with finance and operations and quality.

And that's what sets us up to create that level of integration. So I'll give you another example of how we've evolved this.

Way back in our history, there used to be business plans that each hospital and each operational department would do, but they were completely divorced from the health system's budget.

So a business plan might say that we were going to grow this much volume next year by hiring this many new doctors, but over here in the budget, there was no funding to hire those doctors.

So part of what we put ourselves in a position to do was, again, just to be that administrative scaffolding for everyone.

So we said we will be the bridge between operations and finance. And so now when we go through a process that really takes almost 10 months, the business plans and the budgets that come out for the next fiscal year are the same document. They all tick and tie to one another.

There's no enabling strategy in the business plan that isn't funded. And there's no volume assumed in the budget that doesn't have a tactic that's going to help generate it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Wow. That's great. One question is just an aside. You used the word relationships. And in the hospital world, that's such a big deal, I think, to have different stakeholders with different viewpoints.

Some think marketing's a joke. Some people think marketing's essential. Some people want to be on TV. Some people want a billboard.

You know, you've been there a long time. Do you think that's important for success in healthcare marketing? Because, you know, you're clearly, as I say, I stole this from somebody at the adult table, not at the kid's table.

And marketing can be at the kid's table, sometimes at various hospitals. Do you agree that relationships are really important to build and to invest in over time?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Not only do I agree, I don't see how anybody could disagree on that.

Part of what we're looking at here is so much of our senior executive team has been very stable.

Like I said, our CEO has been here almost 15 years. I came in with him. Our CFO got here the year before that. Our president and chief operating officer has been here nine or 10 years. We know how to work with one another.

We know what one's strengths and weaknesses are, but more importantly, we know we can trust each other.

So that makes all of these other things not only possible, but I mean, just explosive. There's so much potential that's unlocked through that.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): We had a client recently about a year and a half ago that said, we're the fourth management team in five years.

And then a year later, they have the fifth management team in six years. And it's just impossible to get anything done. It's just really, really difficult.

So I love that. I think that's a good lesson that, you know, I've always been on the agency side as opposed to in the hospital. I've been working with hospitals, but what I've observed is having strong internal relationships are sort of a foundation and not everybody gets that. They just think that, just do their own job.

And you're never in a vacuum in a hospital or health system environment ever.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): We've also been really stable within our team. So I think we're about 43 or 44 people in our department now.

My deputy got to Jackson the year before I did, and she and I knew each other. We both started as newspaper reporters, and we were at the Miami Herald together for a while.

Our head of marketing strategy was our account lead with our agency for a number of years, and then after a break of a couple years, I brought her in-house as the lead.

So there's a lot of trust and stability among our team as well, and we can hold each other accountable for those relationship things, and that's really important.

And what do I mean by that so that it doesn't just sound like kind of jargon? I think one of the hardest things that I hear from my peers, and it's true for me as well, is kind of what you said, you know, we've got 15,000 employees here at Jackson, and I'm the only one who doesn't think I'm an expert in marketing.

So, you know, you're going to have a doctor who says, there have to be billboards. You're going to have an executive somewhere who says that there need to be 17 more different Facebook accounts so that there can be one for each unit.

What we have learned because our internal team is so stable is how to stop each other from overreacting to that stuff and from getting frustrated and from getting exhausted because it can be very easy to shut down those relationships just by saying, I've been hearing this for years. You're the 29th person who's asked me for that. Let me tell you all the reasons you're wrong and I'm right.

And that doesn't really get you anywhere productive.

So what we've been really good about is pulling each other back and saying, we're going to have this discussion again like we're having it for the first time, and we're going to focus people on what they really care about, right? Or at least what they should really care about.

I don't know anybody who wants to have billboards for billboards’ sake, right? When they're talking about it, it's because they think that's the way they're going to bring in more volume.

So if we can show them data, if we can show them experience, and if we can show them proof that really there are a lot of other ways that are going to give them a lot more bang for their buck—and by the way, we might use a billboard now and again as part of an integrated plan—but don't start at the very end of the conversation. Start at the beginning of the conversation, which is: what are we trying to accomplish here as a team?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Totally makes sense. So one of the questions we talked about before is the concept of structural integration. What does that mean in the context of operations, marketing, planning, business development, and why is that even important?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): I think the best way for me to answer that is with very concrete the way that we develop our big annual plans.

So we're on an October 1 fiscal year. We will start planning for fiscal ’27 as soon as we get back from the holidays in a few weeks, right?

So by the middle of January, we will bring in one of our outside consultants with all of our hospital CEOs and a couple of the senior executives.

And we'll say, let's vision three to five years. Which are the service lines that are the most ripe for growth right now, both in our market and within our organization?

And we're going to have some of those conversations with a very three- to five-year window.

And then over the 10 weeks or so that follow that, between middle of January and end of March, is when the business development folks from our team, the chief financial officers for every business unit, and the CEOs and the heads of operation are going to work as a triad, but also talking to the major physicians within their business unit, talking to the directors and the nursing units, and saying, we really think that we can grow this particular service 5% next year. Here's why we think that. What do you think, Dr. Gandolf?

And he's going to say, yeah, I think we can totally do that.

We'll say, okay, if you think we can do that, Dr. Gandolf, I need you to be bringing in seven additional cases per month. Is that something that's realistic for you? Can we hold you accountable for that?

So we get everybody on the same page by the end of March so that when we start actually building the ’27 budgets at the beginning of April, nobody can say, I didn't know about those volume goals. Nobody can say, I'm not responsible for doing all of that work, right? Because everybody was together on where we were trying to get.

So then we spend the spring kind of building out those budgets, right?

I will bring the preliminary marketing budget to our CFO. And when he finishes laughing, he's going to tell me to cut 6% or 8% out of it.

And by the beginning of summer, that'll more or less be done. We'll kind of have a sense of the budget we want to spend for each of our clients.

Then our staff and our marketing agency will spend most of the summer breaking that down into tactical plans, looking for really innovative ways that we can reach people differently than the way our competitors do.

So that then as things in Miami are a little bit slower over the summer, as we start ramping back by Labor Day, we're going to then circle back with those operational and those financial leaders.

And we're going to say, based on what we all agreed upon back in the spring, here's the plan that we think is going to accomplish all of those goals.

And we give them an opportunity to give feedback on that. We've now done this enough that 99% of the time, they're perfectly happy with what we're proposing.

Everybody signs off on it. And that gives us the 30 days of September to start ramping all of that up so that October 1, when our new fiscal year starts, we hit the ground running.

We work on that for a few months. And by January, we're starting all over again.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's really interesting. I love the idea of, can we hold you accountable to that? That's the closing question, right?

I love that. I’ve got to remember that one.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): And it doesn't matter whether they're employed physicians or private practice doctors out in the community. What they want is to feel like they're part of the organization and part of the process.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that we make as marketers is seeing physicians as product instead of seeing them as process.

They are part of the process. They are owners of it. They care about it very, very deeply. They just sometimes talk about it in different language and think about it in different terms than we do.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So I have a question that's fundamental to, as a safety net hospital, in terms of your marketing dollars, what are your objectives?

Are you looking to keep people out of the hospital? Are you looking to attract specific service lines? Do you feel like your objective is just to make the community aware that you're there when they need you?

What are some of the major objectives that come up all the time? Because it's not as simple as just bringing in patients, I'm assuming.

So I'm curious how you prioritize across these very different kinds of objectives.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): So the answer is yes to all of those things.

And there's kind of a model that we think about it through. So let me set off to the side one minute.

Keeping people out of the hospital, keeping people healthy to begin with—that's a really important initiative for us as we have gotten better at proactive management, especially the uninsured patients who don't have anyone who's navigating them, right?

That has been a huge unlock for us, both from a mission perspective. Obviously, we're doing better by our community if we're keeping them healthier.

And also from a financial perspective, because anybody who's watching this doesn't need me to tell them, right? That when you keep people healthier, you keep them out of the hospital, you're saving a lot, a lot of money for your organization.

So as huge as all that is, set it aside because it's not really a key part of the marketing planning per se.

Within the specific way of thinking about a marketing budget, I kind of think of it as a pyramid because we have to think of everything either as pyramids or as two-by-two boxes because we've got to be able to put them on PowerPoint slides, right?

But if you think of the base of the pyramid is we want to be making sure that everyone in the community understands who we are, what we are, and why we're valuable.

Because even if for whatever reason, they don't want to use us for care, because we're owned by the taxpayers, and we have on occasion gone to the taxpayers and asked for a bond issue or things like that, right? They're our owners.

So it's really important at that kind of foundational level for them to be bought into our mission and to our operations.

That next level above that is when we talk about the entire lifetime value of a patient as a consumer, the fact that we can provide an integrated experience for them, that we have everything from urgent care centers all the way through organ transplant.

We want people to think of the Jackson brand in a particular way.

And then the top of the pyramid is what you're talking about, which is those services where we are highly differentiated and where we do get the margin that lets us keep our mission going, which is things like transplant. It is things like spinal and neurological procedures. It is things like some of the very complex pediatric surgery that we do or the NICU.

So each one of those is its own client. And each one needs really a different strategy and a different approach.

But because it is all centralized, it lets us keep the brand message and the brand image consistent among all of that, even as we are having different target audiences for different parts of the campaign or different tactics to reach them.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Great. So that was really insightful and helpful. So coming up to all those objectives, how are you using data and insight, patient insights to build your campaigns so that works across Miami and South Florida?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): It's been a journey.

Because of that long, 10-month-long process that I told you about a few minutes ago, we now have for every one of our operating units somewhere around a dozen key indicators of whether they're going to hit their volume goals for the year.

You know, I see their operational efficiency and their financial goals is really where I defer to my colleagues and those teams.

Really what I feel a lot of responsibility for is if we say we are going to bring in 75 open-heart surgery cases, I got to make sure we bring in the 75, right?

So for each of those business units, about two weeks into every month, we have pretty clean data for the prior month, and we're making sure that the leadership teams in those business units are seeing that data every 30 days so that they understand by service line, by specialty, in some cases even by physician, where are they tracking relative to their goal, right?

Because certainly they know their business better than I do, being in their hospital all day, every day. But that's also a recipe for if you're there every day, you kind of need somebody to kind of grab you by the scruff of the neck every 30 days and make you pull up and see where you actually are.

So we provide that level of service on kind of the growth planning side.

And then with each of our service line clients, we meet with their stakeholders once a quarter, and they're all kind of staggered so that we're not overwhelming anyone.

And there are KPIs for those marketing plans that are separate from the actual volume that you get at the bottom of that marketing funnel.

So depending on what the campaign is, we might be looking at number of appointments booked online. We might be looking at the number of people who take a certain healthcare quiz or something like that that we use to help fill our funnel.

We might be looking at volumes of new reviews that are generated on Google or something like that.

So we've got one set of data that's actually tied to putting heads in beds, and another set of data that's asking how effectively are we bringing qualified leads into the health system, right?

And if you look at that very busy-looking whiteboard over my shoulder, you can see that I'm updating that on a very regular basis so that I can't walk into my office without being reminded where we're doing well and where we need a little bit more TLC.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's awesome. So pivoting a little bit, Miami—you know, I've traveled, you don't know this about me, Matthew, but I've traveled to the point where I'm on American Airlines Platinum for Life.

I've been in every city many times. And I often talk, when people ask me about the different cities and different markets in the country, there's a couple that are just unique from everywhere else.

And Miami is way in that. New Orleans would be, or N’Orleans, sorry, not New Orleans. Nolens is another one where it's just so racially diverse, ethnically diverse, so many different populations.

And the sort of Hispanic influence, and then you've got Haitians and different ethnic groups, it's just, it's a melting pot, but it's actually more of a salad bowl. It's just different, right?

So, and even within the Hispanic communities, you know, Cubans aren't exactly the same as Colombians. And it's really easy to over—you’re nodding your head—it’s really easy to oversimplify.

So you have all these different objectives and all these different stakeholders, and now you have a completely diverse and multilingual audience.

And oh, by the way, you're serving the poor too. So you have pretty much everybody across every possible language in the entire city and county.

How do you do all that? And how do you work across the teams to effectively reach all these different people effectively?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): So I think it starts with the people who are doing it. So our department, our leadership team look like the community that we serve.

And I think you're really right. In Miami, it would be really unusual to have a large team in any organization where you didn't have a significant number of people who are first or second generation living in this country, right, who grew up speaking a different language than English. It is not at all unusual.

I could just in the last year pull out examples between us and our peers of printed direct mail healthcare marketing in five different languages.

English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, for sure, right? Pretty much everyone in the market is marketing in those three languages.

And depending on what part of the market you're in, you very well may also be doing Russian and Hebrew.

So all of that stuff we see on a regular basis. And to your point, it's not just about the language that's spoken.

It's about what are the cultural norms there? What are the expectations around care delivery? What are the perceptions of a public health system or of an academic health system?

And I also teach healthcare marketing over at the University of Miami. And one of my mantras in there is you can't market something you don't understand.

So we really do expect the people who work on our team to understand this community and be integrated into this community.

And, for example, we have not done return to work for the marketing team—return to the office. I don't see us doing that anytime soon.

We have a relatively small corporate office that has cubicles where people can come work whenever they want to, and they do. But I would say 80% of the team works from home 80% of the time.

That being said, you must live in the state of Florida. You must live within driving distance of Miami, right?

And one of the things that matters a lot to me is that people are working at Jackson because they want to be a part of the Miami community.

So I have a very lean kind of organizational structure within our department. I only have two or three people reporting to me at any given time.

But I insist upon doing the last interview with any candidate who's going to be hired into the department. And one of the things that I always ask them is, why do you want to be in Miami?

Because anybody who's going to work for an organization like this could get a job working at a big health system in Denver or in L.A. or in St. Louis. And I'm looking for people who care about the things that make this community unique in the ways that you're talking about.

There are people who don't love it. And that's great. I mean, live wherever you want.

But the people who I'm looking for are the ones who, when I say there are three great things about living in Miami, right—we have great food, we have great weather, and we're very close to the United States—I want people who see those as positives, not as negatives.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah, it's so funny, too, because the whole international element, too, in terms of like South America, and it's such an international city in another way.

So it's just such a unique, like I said, it's—I’ve been everywhere. I've been to Devil's Lake, North Dakota. I've been like everywhere.

Miami is unique. It's just a unique city compared to most of the…

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): And it’s not just cultural either, because there's also from a very purely healthcare perspective, right, lots and lots of competition. More than two dozen hospitals in Miami-Dade County.

The Medicare Advantage market here is heavy. It's, I think, 80% of Medicare recipients are on Medicare Advantage in Miami-Dade County, which is way higher than we see in other major markets.

And that has implications for payer relationships. It has implications for how you bring patients in the door. And therefore, it has implications for how you even market to them.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. So going back to the sort of data and insights, like how has—or share an example how—some of your insights that you've been able to get have reshaped the broader organization decisions or the initiatives that you're doing there?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): So like I said, we're really still in stage one of building out our own CRM system. So we're just kind of in the early days of being able to learn in the ways that a lot of my peers at other academic medical centers and certainly in the for-profit hospital world, they're years ahead of us on this stuff.

I’m not proud of that, but not ashamed to admit it either.

I do think that there are places where we've shown how to use data in a way that is really, really effective for our team. And I'll give you two easy examples.

Number one is because so much of our marketing we're doing in different languages, we have really been able to understand, looking at engagement data on social platforms, which topics get much more engagement when we do it in Spanish versus when we do it in English.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's really intriguing.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): For example, when we do parent-facing webinars, right, which we do once or twice a month with different experts from our pediatrics program, when we do stuff in Spanish, it way outperforms.

The marketing for it beforehand outperforms, attendance outperforms—whereas in other service lines, we're going to get much better engagement and traction when we do it in English.

Now, that could be because there's more demand or because there's less competition in those spaces. There's lots of reasons why.

I don't think the data can tell you why, but I think the data can help you start asking more questions of other things to test.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I think the insights, the key thing beyond data is just insights. And by being in the community, by having people that are attached to it—you know, my wife was born in Colombia.

And so her mom is, it's a classic, you know, second generation, or I guess she's first generation, but, you know, helping abuelita figure out her healthcare system. We're going through this in real time.

Like I see this and, you know, trying to be there. And for her, she's like, I left when I was 11. She's still fluent, obviously, but she left when she was 11.

So, you know, communicating these really complicated healthcare things, she has to really stop and think of how to do that.

But that's very real. And that's a sample size of one. So you can imagine all the different families, all the different situations, all the different things you guys have to deal with. It's pretty amazing.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): And then the other one, the other example I would give of how we've really been able to use data to kind of empower the marketing program, we stole an idea almost two years ago now from really just one of the smartest guys working in healthcare marketing today, a guy named Steve Taliano, who's the head of marketing at UC Davis Health.

And Steve, a number of years ago, built a really robust newsroom function within his team. And what they would do is they would look at phrases that were trending on Google on a daily basis, and they would build content around those keywords that was about their health system.

So we started doing the same thing about a year and a half, two years ago. We started doing it a couple times a week. Now we're doing it five days a week, sometimes twice a day.

And we have gone from being able to bring in, in any 30-day period, maybe a couple of thousand people into our news type of content to 35,000 a month.

And because we have sucked specific data around all of that, we can see what kinds of headlines, what kind of stories bring in the most viewers.

But then the next evolution of that, which we launched about six months ago, is we always try and quote one of our physicians or nurses in each of those little pieces. We then have a link to that physician's profile. And if they're a physician that has online scheduling, a link to schedule an appointment with them.

So we can actually start to see the throughput all the way through that funnel and see what are the most effective ways that we can bring people in through news but convert them into a patient.

So it's all of a sudden, this traditional way of looking at the marketing funnel becomes much more of just a vertical pipe because you're starting with awareness and you're getting all the way to conversion in one tactic.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I love it. And I can see the journalist in you and Skip, by the way.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): And Skip, right.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): The way you guys are, the way you guys…

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Well, and Steve was so effective at doing this at UC Davis that Google starts to see their website more as a news source than as a hospital webpage, which then upranks everything that they do in SEO and really, really just makes their visibility in that market second to none. It's an incredibly impressive operation.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I love it. It's great. You're catching away, which is a lot easier than swimming against it.

So we talked a little bit offline and I've described yourself in the past as a process person. What are some of the most effective processes that you've integrated with your team, with your system? How does it influence your leadership style? Help me understand that part of this.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Yeah, I really am a process guy because I think when you're relying on one person's memory, one person's skill set, one person's experience, as soon as that person moves on to do something else, the whole thing falls apart.

So I'm always looking for how do we hardwire, you know, our chief physician executive here has really taken us a long way down the path of being a high reliability organization. And one of the tenets of that is having standard work.

So we try and take these things that work on a nursing unit or work in an OR and make them work in a marketing department as well, right?

So that's why we have this really structured system of making sure that our teams are working well together across skill sets.

And at the very ground level, right, that means every other week, every one of our account teams have little 20-minute Zoom stand-ups in the morning so that everybody who works on the maternity account or everyone who works on the cardiovascular account, right, just from within the marketing department, they all hop on a call, make sure that nothing's falling through the cracks on that, right?

That then scales up to every quarter, right? We're having these touch-base meetings with the client, with the stakeholder, looking at the KPIs, figuring out where we need to adjust what's in the plan, making sure that everybody is staying aligned, that we're doing what we said we were going to do, and that what we said we were going to do is still the right thing to be doing.

And then that levels up to that annual process that I described for you. So by doing it that way, we're making sure that the same data sets are cascading through everything that we do and that we're not wasting a lot of time on unnecessary meetings, but we're not getting so into our Zoom cubbyholes that we're forgetting that this is a relationship business and that we need to be staying aligned with one another, both for the productivity, but also for the creativity.

It would be so easy to fall into the trap of this worked last year, we're going to do it again next year, right?

We don't have to come to an in-person meeting and talk about this stuff. We're just going to keep the Google paid search, right, and the Facebook ads, we're just going to keep that machine churning.

And to some degree, that might be productive for a couple of years, but it's not going to be sustainable in the long term. And it doesn't give the professionals who are working on this a lot of opportunity to have a good time with what they're doing.

I really do think that you can look at a health system storytelling and you can have a pretty good sense of whether their marketing team is having fun with it or not.

And if they are, everything's going to be more dynamic, everything's going to be more lively, and it's going to capture the imagination of the community that it serves much more effectively.

And that requires having opportunities where you're just bouncing off one another.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's great. I think that's so underrated. A couple of things on that.

One, I think it took me forever to figure that part out about the operational side of it because, you know, I'm a creative person. And so it's like, and everything's easy for me.

But as you start scaling out an agency, it's very different. You have to really, really—it's like, you can't just rely on everybody to be resourceful. Not everybody is resourceful. There's no systems. Things fall apart.

And the other part of it was the idea of inspiring your team to bring them better. And then going back to the relationship side, it's tough in a virtual environment because it's really easy to fall inside the box.

And so I totally agree with all of that. So let's, you know. You've got a lot going on. I'm assuming you have some timelines that are tight. You've got a plan. You need flexibility.

How do you stay agile enough to move with creativity, innovation, all these things?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Empowering people at every level of the organization to work all the way up to their capacity and maybe a little bit beyond it to push them.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Sounds like we have a similar philosophy.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): I mean, I'm at the stage where luckily, you know, I'm blessed that I can spend 90% of my time working on really transformational new initiatives for the health system, right?

So most of my time today is spent, for example, we're going to move the entire patient contact center, which has historically lived inside revenue cycle.

We're going to move that into marketing and reimagine that as a patient acquisition tool, not as a functional tool.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): We'll have to talk about that on the next podcast interview. That's a, that, that is part of, that's dear to my heart right there, what you're talking about.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Yes. It's, I'm learning a lot about it and it's keeping me up a lot.

You know, we're looking at launching a couple of new kinds of ambulatory modalities that just have never been part of Jackson's portfolio.

We're looking at really scaling up what our physician core looks like, including not just employed physicians and our partners over at the university, but really kind of innovative new joint ventures and affiliations.

I'm able to spend most of my time on that, right, because the people who directly report to me are able to keep innovating and coming up with creative ways of executing the stuff that we've been doing for a long time, right—the service line campaigns, the opening of new facilities, those kinds of things.

They're able to spend 90% of their time on those because the people one step below them really feel empowered to keep the day-to-day work going—not just moving things from one box to the other, not just replying to emails, right—but to really being thought leaders within their accounts, within their specialties, who are empowered to ask questions, to look at data, and to really speak up with their ideas on how we need to be constantly changing what we do.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So having been somebody who's worked with literally thousands of doctors over the years, I think that's really brilliant, because that would build the internal credibility for your individual team members.

Otherwise, marketing people can be eaten alive. Like, if they can't bring anything new to the table, they don't have any additional insights, then they just, they're—I've just seen it over and over again.

So I love that. That's really cool.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): I mean, one of the ways I knew it was working, when we had a new vice president come in for pediatrics and maternity services, he came from another position within our health system.

And he came to me and he said, the only thing that I really need from you is to make sure that Cindy stays on this account, right?

The woman who has been running marketing for that service line for the last five or seven years now is so well-respected and trusted by the leadership, by the physicians, and by the nursing staff, right?

Their highest priority is not, I need more budget. It's not, I need more tactics. It's, I need this person to be a part of my team still.

And she's not a manager. She's not a director, right? She is a senior media specialist, but her title isn't what matters either to her or to the people around her, right?

It's the expertise that she brings and the synergy that she brings to their team.

If I don't have to be giving that, if my AVP doesn't have to be giving that, if that can be brought from the front line, then we're doing something right.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's awesome. And so going to the role in the community you have as a safety net and, you know, being owned by the community, how does marketing strengthen trust with your public health system? Like, how does that work?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): I think when our taxpayer owners see on the local news, right, when they see in their Instagram feeds, when they hear on our podcast the kinds of things that are being done in this community in their name with their dollars, it really makes them feel proud that that's the kind of thing we can do.

You know, we say that we are a role model for how you can take the best of the public sector and the best of the private sector and create something special.

So, for example, our entire executive team huddles for about 15 minutes at 10 a.m. every day. And it's where we go through just any major incidents happening at the hospitals.

And once a week on Wednesdays, there's a report out from marketing for another five minutes on what's going on.

So my deputy was leading that today, and she showed a local news clip that ran here a day or two ago about a new genetic treatment that is effectively curing sickle cell disease for people over 12 years old.

So I've got 40 or 50 executives who I'm seeing in my Zoom. And I see tears rolling down people's faces as this boy is interviewed, as his father is talking about how he cried because his son, who was barely able to do more than exist because he was in pain so much, can now go out with his friends and do everything that a teenager is supposed to do, right?

If that's how the people inside our office who see these kinds of things all the time—if that's the way they're reacting—I know that all of my consumers, that all of my taxpayer owners out in the community are seeing that and they're saying, even if I never need Jackson, man, I'm really proud that a half penny of my sales tax goes to keep that open.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's awesome. So looking at AI, which is one of the near and dear topics to my heart and where our agency is leaning into, how have you used AI in terms of transforming your own internal marketing strategies or what do you see as the big categories?

I talk about this a lot, but I'm curious what you think.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): I really love stealing a phrase... We've got a brilliant guy in our organization here named George Rossello, who's kind of our head of innovation, and he's really overseeing the way AI is being deployed across the entire organization.

And what he is fond of saying is that we need to think of AI not as a tool that's going to replace people, but as a tool that's going to replace the 10% of every person's work that they hate doing.

And how are we looking at that on the marketing side? We've really been eager to launch a podcast for a number of years.

And knowing that the biggest podcast viewer right now is actually YouTube, more than Apple Podcasts, more than anything else, we know that it's video first these days.

And we just couldn't figure out a way with the lean staff that we have to put out something that was going to be as frequent as we wanted, right, which is every other week, but with the level of polish that we wanted.

Because it was just—the hours that were required to edit it—was just more than we thought we could contribute.

Well, we found an AI solution off the shelf that's able to do probably 75% to 90% of the editing before one of my videographers has to sit down and do that final polish, right?

Well, that didn't replace anybody's job, but it took us from being unable to do something that we really wanted to do—or if we were going to do it, somebody was going to have hours worth of scut editing to do every other week—and turned it into a project that everybody could be excited about, right?

From our CEO, when he wants to go on it, you know, to the physicians and the nutritionists. And we had the mayor of Miami-Dade County on it a few weeks ago, and we've had community activists on it.

We just wouldn't be able to do that without those tools.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Very good. So the last question I want to ask today, this has been fun. I promised you it would be fun, right, Matthew?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Oh, yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So the last thing is just what would be any final takeaways for other healthcare leaders about building, you know, processes that are rigorous but conclusive, what would you say? What have you learned that you could share?

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): Definitely relationships first.

And I actually report to our chief financial officer, and he's the one who has really instilled in me that all of his departments, right—finance, procurement, IT, and marketing—we are support teams first.

So we need to defer to the expertise of our clients. There are things that we are expert in, but it is in service of what they're doing, because they're the ones who are touching our patients every day. They're the ones who are keeping people healthy. They're the ones who are healing people's injuries.

So that humility of understanding that all we're doing is empowering somebody else's work is really an unlock to being able to build all of those relationships.

And as you do more and more of that, that's when you find yourself, for good or for bad, trusted with other things like business development, like strategic planning, like patient contact.

All these things that marketers complain when it's not working the way they want it to, right? When you build those trusting relationships within the organization is really when you set yourself up for success.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): What a great way to add. Matthew, like I said, I had a good sense about this. I thought it'd be fun.

I've enjoyed meeting you, and we'll see you again someday. Thank you for your time.

Matthew Pinzur (Jackson Health System): It was a lot of fun. Invite me back anytime.