*The following transcript is computer generated and may contain errors.

Tom Bradach (SHSMD): Alright, here we go. Welcome to the SHSMD Webinar from Fragmented to Found. Building an AI-Ready Healthcare Brand. SHSMD would like to extend a sincere thank you to Healthcare Success for sponsoring today's program. This webinar is now being recorded and is broadcast in listen-only mode. You may click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit questions at any time.

Please note, all attendees are strictly prohibited from using artificial intelligence tools, including note-taking apps, during any American Hospital Association virtual event. There are 3 poll questions that we will ask you to complete throughout the presentation. They will be available shortly, but we ask that you wait for the prompt to complete each of them, and we will share the results at the end of this webinar. And with that, it's now my pleasure to introduce today's speakers. We're joined by Brandon Schakola, who is Senior Director of Digital Services at Healthcare Success, leading SEO, paid media, and development disciplines that shape how healthcare brands are discovered and represented online. And we're also joined by Paul Knipe, who is Director of Client Growth at Healthcare Success, and brings more than 20 years of creative agency leadership and account management experience across brand strategy, creative web, SEO, and digital advertising.

His experience includes leading more than a dozen web and digital programs for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in orchestrating mental health and regenerative medicine marketing initiatives for the University of Colorado Medical Center. So, Brandon and Paul, thank you both for joining us. The floor is yours.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Thank you, Tom, and thank you to everyone joining today. Today, we're going to talk about a new challenge for healthcare organizations, making sure AI understands who you are and what care you provide. And this is about more than just showing up in search results. It's about being described accurately when patients ask AI tools for help. So, patients may use AI to ask where you go for a service, which provider offers treatment, or what hospital is right for their needs, but if the information AI finds is unclear. or inconsistent, it may give patients an incomplete or incorrect picture of your organization.

So, our goal today is to show you how to make your brand easier for AI to understand, trust, and communicate accurately. Our agency is on the front lines of doing this work right now, and if there are any questions or follow-ups, we'd love to have a conversation after today's session. So… To get started. Brandon, do you want to kind of walk through this ecosystem, and we can set the stage for everything that we'll go through?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): Absolutely. So, so far, we've done a couple of webinars with you folks, and we've tried to get you to start thinking in layers, and understanding the stack that's sitting in front of you. We've been going at this from, like, the bottom layer up, and today we're going to come from the top layer back down. So at the bottom, you have your retrievability.

Like, are you available when AI needs you and the patients are looking for you? That's your technical SEO, that's your server architecture, that's your schema on-site, that's the knowledge graph and the knowledge panels that appear inside of search engines, which is driven by your content. which is driven by your local SEO, including your reputation and trust and how you manage those signals, your digital PR, your off-site authority, and how all that levels up to your brand. And there can be slippages in each of these layers. And so today, we're gonna come back down from the concept of the brand, back down to those lower levels and what you can control.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): So The new healthcare brand problem is worth just commenting on. In the past, brand consistency mainly meant using the right logo, colors, tone of voice, messaging. And it's really important to note, those things still matter. They matter a lot. But today, there's another layer. The accuracy of the facts connected to your brand.

AI does not see your brand the same way a person does. It gathers information from many places and tries to connect the dots. A health system may look unified in an advertising campaign or in a brand guidelines book, but It might appear disconnected online because its names, its locations, its services, and provider information don't match up. So, basically, healthcare brands now need to be consistent, not just in appearance.

But in the information they make available everywhere. So, this strategic shift, I think, is worth outlining. The brand expression is what people experience directly. The stories, messages, visuals, and promises that an organization chooses to share through its formal brand, brand expression, and brand documentation. But brand context is what AI can verify, what services exist, where they're available, who provides them, and what evidence supports those claims. A strong campaign can make a memorable promise.

But AI needs more detail before it can safely repeat that promise to a patient. So, think of it this way. Brand expression tells the story, brand context provides the facts behind the story. So the opportunity is to make sure your marketing and your brand language and your factual information support each other.

So, we're gonna do a little gut check here. Think about all the names connected to your organization. The system, hospitals, clinics, departments, medical groups, service lines, acquired practices, maybe. Now consider whether an AI tool would recognize all of those as part of one connected organization.

And, I mean, there's no wrong answer here. The purpose is to understand where organizations are starting, so your responses will really help frame the rest of the conversation, and I think that Tom has initiated the first poll. So we'll come back to those results in a moment, but we're going to keep going in a moment. So, when we think of the framework that I've laid out, and the basics of how to think about brand and brand system, we have to talk about this Notion of the evidence environment.

AI does not rely on one source, and it does not begin by reading your brand guidelines. It may pull information from your website, provider profiles, maps, insurance directories, news stories, review sites, and older pages that are still online. That means that a former practice name or an incorrect location listing can still influence how your organization is represented. The challenge is not simply creating good content on your website, it's making sure the same core facts are clear across the wider digital environment. Every public mention of your organization becomes part of the evidence AI may use. That's the evidence environment.

So, okay, it does all of those things, but why does it matter? The truth is that patients often ask very practical questions. Specific questions, such as where they can get care, whether a hospital offers a specialty, or where a physician practices. To answer those questions well, AI needs specific details, not just broad brand statements. For example, a patient looking for orthopedic care needs to know which location offers the service. Which clinicians are available, and how to make an appointment.

When those details are scattered or inconsistent, patients may get incomplete answers or be directed somewhere else. Better brand context helps reduce confusion and makes it easier for patients to take the next step. So, let's talk about this idea of an AI-ready brand system. An AI-ready brand is not a one-time website project or a new brand messaging campaign. It's an ongoing system for managing the information that explains who you are or how your organization works. It includes your identity, your services, your locations, your providers, your proof points, and your presence across outside sources.

The goal is to make the right information easy to find. Easy to confirm, and easy to connect. When all of these elements work together, your organization becomes easier for both people and AI to understand. So… With everything that I've said so far, I just want to outline 3 basics of what we're hoping you take away from today's session.

So, by the end of this session, I'm really hoping that each of you are able to spot the main ways that healthcare brand information can become disconnected. I think we will look at how inconsistent names, service descriptions, locations, and proof points can create problems. We'll also introduce a practical way to review your organization's information across the patient journey. Most importantly, this session is focused on action, not just theory. I want everyone to be able to leave with a clearer idea of where to begin and what to prioritize first. So this framework of three things is a bit of a forecast for topics we'll get to.

And in particular, this second item, product, price, place, promotion, this framework we call the four P's, is worth noting in particular, because it really is a good foundation for understanding how this AI brand system can come together. So… With this new environment, The new strategic imperative. Is that healthcare organizations need to move from simply managing a brand to managing a full brand system. Identity answers the question, who are we?

Architecture explains how all the pieces fit together, such as hospitals, clinics, service lines, providers, and local locations. Evidence… Gives credibility to what you say, while presence ensures the information appears consistently wherever people and AI may look. When one of these things is weak, the overall brand can become harder to understand and trust. So… as we go through this process, it's worth evaluating, I think. how these elements can become fragmented.

So, I'm gonna list 5 fragmentation types Fragmentation simply means that the pieces of your organization don't clearly connect. This happens with names, especially after mergers, acquisitions, rebranding, or maybe even a slower-than-necessary transition over a year plus related to naming. Maybe there are local variations. But it can also happen when services, providers, locations. And patient needs are listed separately, but are clearly linked together. Another common issue is proof.

Claims may be vague, they may be outdated, or not supported by clear facts. Finally, the public information outside your website may tell a different story from the one you want patients to hear. So I'm going to break these down in a little more detail. Let's talk about identity fragmentation. So, identity fragmentation happens when people, and AI can't clearly tell how different parts of an organization are related.

Like I said, a patient may see a hospital name, a medical group name, and a specialty brand without knowing They all belong to the same system. This is very common, again, after acquisitions, or when long-standing local names may remain in use. If internal teams within your organization are unclear about the relationship between these brands, the public is certainly going to be unclear about the relationship between brands. So the simplest test is this.

Can someone easily follow the path from the parent organization to the local clinic, provider, service, and appointment option? What about capability fragmentation? This is important because a general service label is often not enough for patients or AI to understand what an organization actually offers. For example, cardiology may cover very different types of care, procedures, specialists. access options. But AI needs to understand the connection between the services the patient need, the clinical team, the location, and the next step. If those relationships are missing, an organization may appear to offer less than it really does.

All of that investment in the website architecture, the design, the content development, the advertising campaign can really go to waste in some ways if it's not connected. So the goal is to make each priority service a connected care story, rather than just a category on a website menu. Let's talk about proof fragmentation. This is one of the most important variables from an AI visibility standpoint. So broad claims, like world-class care or leading program, may sound strong, but they often don't tell patients or AI anything specific.

AI is more likely to use a claim when it's clear, factual, and connected to the right organization or program. Instead of making a general statement, maybe explain what care is available, who provides it, and where it's offered, and what makes it meaningful. Specificity does not make your brand language or your brand messaging any less compelling. It doesn't erode that personality, that tone, that voice. It makes it more credible. So the key is to turn general promises into useful, supportable information.

So, let's just do another quick check-in. I love this question. So, where do you see the greatest risk of inconsistent brand information today within your organization? So, the question really is asking where your organization sees risks, but some organizations struggle most with location and provider information, especially after changes in staffing, hours, or affiliations.

Others might struggle with service naming. brand hierarchy, keeping directories up to date. So you're all gonna have different answers, would love to hear from you. It's obviously really important, I think, to think about not just your corner of the organization, but also potentially areas that your colleagues manage. So please take a moment to choose the area that feels most urgent, and we'll revisit the poll results later.

In the fragmentation narrative, I want to close with A discussion around presence fragmentation. Presence fragmentation occurs when information about your organization is inconsistent across the public web. But a single outdated address, for example. Former employer name, incorrect office hours, can create confusion. So… The issues can also affect AI because it's trying to reconcile information from many sources at once.

Your website is really important, but it's only one part of the public information environment. So managing your presence means regularly checking and correcting the most important third-party sources that patients rely on. So. This leads us to, I think, a discussion and real detailing of what we call brand context optimization. And I'm going to turn things over to Brandon here, who will kind of walk through this in a little more detail.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): Sure. So most of you are already kind of up-to-date on how to use prompts, and how to deal with retrieval augmented generation, or RAG systems. But essentially, what we're looking at is your brand as a data set. And so, that data belongs both on-site, your third-party properties, like your Google business profiles, Apple, Bing, etc. But then there's also other third-party sites. There could be some mom blogging, you know, on a local street corner.

But each of these things all connect into a broader sense of context around the brand, and how you're situated in the neighborhood. So we want to think about things like, who's making the claims about your brand, what you're known for? What exactly is being offered, for what kind of audience, and for what need? Where and how is it available?

What provides that claim? Which related entities reinforce it? And entities is an important word. Most people that are used to SEO are used to thinking in keywords, but that That is not how these systems work, and haven't for at least a good decade. They're really trying to relate to something physical in the real world, an entity, a thing, a place, a person. And so, the more we can think in those ways, the more we can align the brand and its context to meet those needs.

So, just in the way that we learn language and we go to grammar school, we have to think in terms of subject, verb, object, at least in the English language. There are ways of building these sentences, and so every high-value claim is going to require about 5 components. It's gonna be the named entity, the person, place, or thing. A specific capability. that, you know, you offer. It's gonna require a view from the patient or the market context. It's going to require evidence, or a proof point.

And this is a case where we see a lot of healthcare and hospital systems struggle, is they're not surfacing enough of their internal messaging around specific outcomes. Data that is unique to you, that frames you up as an expert and an authority in the space. And then the fifth is, is sort of, what is the relationship, then, to the next step? We are moving into a web that is primarily Agentic now. Like. All the way above 50% of traffic on the web now is bots.

I can show you crawl logs and server log files that will show you that the bots are almost 20 times more aggressive than Googlebot or Bing Bot ever were. And that's just the reality we're living in. You're gonna have agents that are making appointments. But you still need to be sensible to them and the patient that they're representing. I think, Paul, you have a really good example from something local to you here.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Yeah, and this is just an example, but this paragraph at the bottom, I think, illustrates the framework that we're talking about. So, every high-value healthcare claim should include a few basic pieces of information. Start with the exact organization, program, or location involved. In this case, in, Longmont, Colorado. Be clear about the service or capability, not just the broad category. Explain the patient need. the relevant location and the people, or proof behind the claim. So a useful test is whether someone could read one paragraph like this by itself and still understand what is being offered and how to act on it.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): So, how do you turn this into… into practice? Think of it just like a form, right? You're a patient, you're filling out a form, look at your brand, and first think about your canonical entity name. In some cases, this can be different. You could have gone through mergers and acquisitions, and it's evolved, but you need to have a sense of, like, what that true north is. Then there's the entity type.

Okay, in this case, it's an orthopedic service line, you know, some sort of, you know, torn muscle. There may be a parent brand or relationship to a broader organization. You may be part of a nonprofit system, and there's a foundation sitting above you. You still need to be able to make that connection, on your site somewhere, whether it's in your schema markup or, in your About page. there's the actual locations and the market that you situate yourself in, the services that you're representing, what your priority audience is. Is it patient?

Is it, you know, other doctor referrals? Make that explicit, and make sure you're constantly thinking in that tone. There's your brand promise. What are you promising people?

Your proof points. This is your outcomes. This is something you can all lean in on, and it will make you more unique, and it's what these large language models are really hungry for. Then there's your related entities. These may be other providers, clinics, procedures, conditions, some sort of physical therapy. And then there's the big part, which is, who owns this?

Who's gonna be part of the review process? You're gonna need a team. You're gonna need a Tiger team to start working with this. Start small, start surgical.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): And again, this is just an example, but if we were to look at before and after language, this is a good framework.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): Yeah, exactly. So before, you know, as marketers, we're kind of like, you know, we provide compassionate cancer care, and we all love that. We all love some good bedside manner. But being more specific and connected. looks like, hey, this organization's cancer center provides medical oncology, radiation oncology, infusion therapy, nurse navigation, supportive services for patients with cancer at XYZ locations, is very specific, it's very connected. And so, just starting to unpack it and just start thinking in this way, are you writing your content in such a way That everyth… that each paragraph, each sentence, is a self-contained claim that can be validated at some other proof point. So, how do we do this?

We're going to talk about citation-ready messaging here, and it's preparing you to think in a very specific way, and to operate with extreme clarity. So name the organization, program, or location as your subject, state the relevant service, the specialty, the patient need. Include any other necessary context. Like, this is only offered at XYZ location, or XYZ campus. Avoid any unsupported superlatives. I know y'all love some listicles at this point, but those are not going to function very well, coming up.

There are already counteractions, from the latest GPT-5.6 release. There have been updates to Perplexity and Claude. Around this, Gemini has already sorted this out, because Google's gonna Google. So, the next thing you need to think about is how to connect it to the next step.

And this is going to require some collaboration with your devs, with your SEO, especially on the technical side, because we're all going to be figuring out the ins and outs of, enabling WebinCP, the A-to-A protocol, the agent-to-agent protocol that allows these AI agents to talk to each other. And we're gonna be, you know, figuring out how appointment booking works in this new world. But… think about how you can… how all this information can remain accurate if it's extracted outside of a full page. What we tend to find is that AI has gaps in its knowledge in the same way that search engines have gaps in its knowledge about the brand. In this day and age, we're not just operating at a URL or a page level, it's a passage. And so… How do we create the proper relations between passages on different versions of a page?

And that brings me to the next point, because most of you want to probably go run off right now and, like, paint the town red with all of your claims, but not every claim belongs in the same spot. So a clinical capability is really belonging on, like, a service line, a procedure, a provider, a location page. Your access, right, might belong on your insurance pages, your location pages, your appointment pages. Let them know that they're going to get the accurate thing. People are searching things like. you know, find me, a set of recommended substance use and behavioral health clinics that serve as complex PTSD within 25 mile radius, that accepts Aetna insurance. That's not a search, that's not a long-tail thing, that's a whole patient journey encapsulated in one single sentence.

That is what you need to be answering. Now, how AI retrieves this context is kind of tricky. First, it's going to look for authoritative sources, and truth be told, GPT has already made its decision before it goes and does its whole query fan-out based on that prompt. It already has a vector, it has a direction. So, if it can't find you as an authoritative source, or your site is too slow, it's gonna run out and grab from wherever it can as fast as possible.

There was an article floating around, I think I mentioned, about how Burger King is not the king of AI, because its website was so slow that the dad couldn't retrieve the menu in time, and so instead, AI ran off to, like, TikTok and Instacart and all sorts of other crazy places And said that the local Burger King was serving baby burgers. So if it's gonna do that to, like, a fast food place, imagine what it's gonna do to your hospital system. So, we need to think about the primary entities and the attributes, not full web pages. We're thinking about things in the real world and how we connect them. your organization, your service lines, your locations, your providers, the procedure. And if those important attributes aren't present, or they're absent, or they're inconsistent in some way, they're disconnected from your brand, then, you know, they're not going to be available when AI constructs that answer. And it's constructing these answers in milliseconds.

So… Think about that. Your context needs to be in as many places as you can, but in the right context of itself. So it's not just content. I want you to get out of thinking, like, you can just throw content people at the wall. This really has to do with identity alignment. I've seen cases where a brand's name has changed, like, 5 times.

Since the pandemic. And it's lost all its context, because that history is tied to a different version, with an apostrophe, without an apostrophe, with hospital in the name, without hospital in the name. You want your content and claims to align. That allows you to be citation ready. You need presence alignment, so that you're speaking with the same voice through all of your profiles, your directories, the physician platforms, the health plan sources, the social profiles, any sort of public or PR references that are floating around. And then, essentially, you also need to think about your authority alignment.

How much are you doing the work on public relations, interactions with your community, your media, your partnerships? Are you involving the accreditation systems, the quality recognition, the clinical expertise? How are you managing your reviews? How much thought leadership are you putting out there?

Is it just sitting in an archive paper? Because that's not enough. You really should be surfacing those outcomes in conversations in ways that patients can understand, and that will make you more understandable to the AI that's intermediating between you.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Thank you, Brandon. I think the brand context overview is really an important foundation. So, I'm gonna dive into this framework of the four P's that I talked about before. And by the way, we realize there's so much information here. We're very eager to continue the conversation with any of you, directly after this. Brandon and I will also be at SHSMD in Baltimore at the end of the month, so we'd love to meet you, and Let's… let's plan a discussion if we can, if you're curious.

But the 4P brand context audit really focuses on product, price, place, promotion. to properly diagnose where those fragmented signals undermine AI's confidence. And… You know, I think that those elements, the four P's, are certainly familiar to marketers, but here, they're used as more of an information quality checklist. So, for product, ask whether AI can clearly understand the services, specialties, procedures, capabilities you offer. For price, it's a matter of whether patients can find reliable information about insurance, financial help, referrals, access. For place, is your, or are your locations accurately described and connected to the services and the teams available there?

And on the promotion side. is… does your external presence reinforce your clinical strengths and brand promise? So that's where we're going, and it's really important, I think, when we look at this this framework, to break down each piece, because similar to, you know, some of the imperatives that we talked about earlier, when one of these is weak, it can undermine the confidence that AI feels for many of them. So let me dive into product first. This audit is really a matter of whether your clinical services are easy to understand and find. So, a patient should be able to move from a symptom or a condition to the right service, provider, location, next step, and priority services should use consistent names across the website.

Directories, provider bios, and other public sources. New services, acquisitions, expanded capabilities also need to be updated across the entire information system, not just one page. So the goal is to make your care offering clear enough That neither patients nor AI have to guess.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): And I want to pause there real quick, if you don't mind, Paul. Yeah. If we just go back a slide. This is actually the place where I see the most horror stories. Like, literal Cthulian, Lovecraftian horrors pop up. I have seen telepsychiatry clients, be confused with cardiology because the brand name was tied to some other service line.

I've seen emergency rooms confused with Chinese fashion scam sites. I've seen substance use and behavioral health clinics confused With a historic home that's been converted into a wedding venue in a completely different state. Pay attention to this step. This is probably the most important one.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): So, let's go through an example, and Brandon articulated it very well, but if you look at this… this framework, this table. it shows the difference between listing a service and explaining a connected care pathway, right? So, a generic orthopedic page may not help a patient understand where to go. who they'll see, or what happens next. And a stronger approach links specialty care to clinics. providers, imaging, procedures, rehabilitation, scheduling. It also makes clear which capabilities are available at which locations. So, the result is a more complete patient experience and a more accurate representation for AI.

Let's move to price. So, can AI responsibly understand access, value, and affordability? So, in healthcare, price is really about access and confidence, not just a dollar amount. Patients may need to know whether their insurance is accepted, whether a referral is required, or whether financial assistance is available. They may need practical guidance about telehealth. Urgent appointments, travel, care navigation.

If any of this information is missing, AI may not be able to direct someone safely or accurately, and clear access information helps patients take the next step Without creating false expectations about cost, coverage, or eligibility. And when you think about it, this is a really important emotional quality in terms of how someone views your brand. So, when we think about place, the next part of the framework, it's really about location. A location is not only an address on a map. Patients need to know what type of care is available there, where providers prac- which providers practice there, and how they can access services. So.

They may also need practical details, like parking, accessibility, hours, referral requirements, appointment instructions. Incorrect location information can create a real patient experience problem, and a brand problem, especially for urgent or specialty care. Every priority location should be treated as a complete care delivery experience, not just a pin on a map. So, promotion.

This is the last component. Promotion is the full set of signals people encounter beyond the main website. So this includes the advertising, it includes the provider biographies, press releases, the news coverage, digital PR, the review platforms, social profiles, directories, even community partnerships. Each of these sources can either reinforce or weaken the story you want to tell. So, the question isn't whether every source uses the exact same wording, it's whether the core facts and promises are consistent.

So strong promotion gives patients and AI repeated, credible reasons to understand and trust your organization. So… I'll give an inconsistency example for the 4P framework. A single patient question can reveal several different information gaps at the same time. So, in this example, a patient is looking for same-day orthopedic care nearby that accepts their insurance.

AI needs to understand the clinical service, the insurance and access details, the correct location, and the organization's local reputation. If any one of those areas is unclear, the answer may be incomplete, or point the patient toward a competitor. This is why AI readiness is not just a marketing issue. It touches operations, finance, access, data, and patient experience. So.

We'll talk about this in a moment, but operationalizing this framework, this new way of thinking about branding and brand systems is very important. It's not just for the marketers, it's something that's a shared collaborative task. And, you know, on that point, you know, I think that… The good news is that organizations don't need to fix every single page, right? Every listing, every data source all at once. In fact, the best approach is probably to start with the information that matters most to patients and the business. So, maybe focus first on high-priority services, locations, providers, access pathways. you know, create a repeatable process for finding and correcting issues over time. Because we all know, when people leave, or there's disconnected siloing within an organization, information that may be curated or managed by different domains is where that disconnection, that fragmentation occurs, and that's ultimately what is going to hurt you from an AI visibility standpoint for your brand.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): I would recommend to start… start small, to Paul's point. Start surgical. There are a lot of people that we see trying to approach this with, I'm going to go track 6,000 prompts. And then you just end up in noise. You don't get enough signal. So think about a simple thing, one service line.

Just start there. And you'll… you'll uncover pretty much everything you need under those four P's. So… That… that would be my, my recommendation. Get your Tiger team together. you know, build your confidence by fixing a couple of things. We at Healthcare Success have been able to see the needle move within about 2 to 4 weeks, which is faster than even SEO functions. So it is possible, and we have evidence of it.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Having an operational plan for a lot of what we're discussing today can really assist in making a large, complicated problem more of a manageable work solution with clear priorities. So, alright, the third poll we have here. Which outcome would be most valuable to improve through AI-Ready brand strategy. So, the question really helps identify the outcome that matters most to your organization.

We'd love to hear from you on this. So, some teams may be focused on becoming more visible in AI-powered search. Others may be more concerned about patient trust, accurate representation, or maybe even consistency across a complex system, depending on the size. The goals are really closely connected, though. Knowing the main priority helps shape where to begin. As Brandon said, start simply, modestly, but recognize how all of it fits together.

We'd love to hear from you on this front. Let's review poll results toward the end here. Just a few more slides from us, So, in choosing where to start, you know. We've talked a little bit about this, and Brandon certainly gave his two cents, but start with maybe a limited group of high-value entities, pages, rather than trying to address the entire digital ecosystem. It's too much, it's daunting, but maybe you have a work plan. A good starting point will include the parent brand, a flagship hospital, major growth service lines, priority locations, and high-traffic provider pages.

You can also choose a condition page, or maybe An urgent care pathway that drives significant patient demand, but prioritize it based on patient impact, your business value, risk, competition. And how difficult the issue might be to correct. So early improvements in a few important areas really do help create a useful model for the rest of the organization. Our team can be your partner in doing this. I just want to emphasize that. We are very good from the AI visibility standpoint and the brand development and brand architecture standpoint from from my side to lead this process.

So you're not alone, and we'd love conversations about next steps for any interested folks. The brand context audit, this is really bringing to life what Brandon articulated a few moments ago, but that audit really needs to start by creating an inventory of the information that matters the most. That includes names, services, locations, provider profiles, claims, external listings, proof points. And next, compare what you find across your owned channels, your third-party sources, and AI visible results. Then prioritize the gaps based on their impact on patients. Brand reputation to you, growth, operational risk.

And then the final step is… a practical correction plan with clear owners and actions. Again, it's probably not just the marketing team, it's probably a collaborative approach that… that you can initiate. And a big part of this is not just doing it. But… developing more of a governance model. And the work can't belong to marketing alone, as we said, because the information comes from many parts of the organization. It's not going to only happen once, it's not evergreen.

Clinical teams, for example. They help ensure that service, credential, and care information is accurate. Operations teams are essential for keeping location, schedules, referrals, and access details current. And digital IT data systems help structure the information so it works across websites and other systems, and obviously your legal Regulatory compliance, PR, comms teams help make sure claims are appropriate and supportable and reinforced in the marketplace. So… In many ways, I think that we have to consider a 90-day roadmap here.

The first 30 days might be about understanding the current situation, choosing where to focus. The next 30 days are about aligning information. Correcting key gaps, creating shared source of truth materials. The final 30 days are about publishing improvements, strengthening outside signals, and checking whether AI responses are becoming more accurate. I think the goal isn't perfection in 90 days, it's to create some momentum, to put systems and governance policies in place, to To prove the value, and establish a repeatable way of working to constantly maintain your brand presence from an AI standpoint. But the most important first step is bringing the right people together to agree on the organization's priority entities, the claims, and the facts.

So… in essence. thank you so much for hearing us out. I think we're passionate about this. It touches pretty much everything Brandon and I do on the architecture, content, brand development side of things. And… what we want to take away from this is AI will form an understanding of your organization, whether you actively manage that process or not. The question is whether that understanding will be clear, whether it'll be accurate and useful for patients. The path forward is to clarify who you are, connect that part of the care experience, and support overall claims with real evidence.

You have to start with information that matters most, and then build a governance model that allows it to keep everything accurate. When your organization is easy. easier for AI to understand, it's also easier for patients to find, trust, and choose. So… Thank you, everyone. I think that we'll look at poll results, and we'll allocate some time for questions here in the last section, but we hope the discussion made the concept of an AI-ready brand feel practical, achievable. And we'd be glad to answer questions, discuss challenges you have, and explore how they may apply to you. So, again, thank you for your time today.

Tom Bradach (SHSMD): All right, Paul and Brandon, thank you both so much. I'll give folks a chance here if you want to put any questions in the chat, but just, really quick, I will share the slides this afternoon along with the recording as well, which is as they complete a short survey, but the… Poll results are launched now, if you want to take a look at those, and like I said, feel free to put any questions in the chat. I know we have a… At least one here now.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): Yep, I'm, I'm answering Colleen's question. I'll just answer it out loud. She said, any advice if you're in the merger phase of organization and building a fresh brand, how can we manage that change to best help the AI understand what's happening? So there's a couple things you can do here.

One is, first, create a relationship between the legacy brand and the new brand. State it very clearly on the site, have a banner, Around that. Make clear on your homepage or your about page, or both, if there are service lines that are changing, you've, you're entering a new market, let's say you were… you know, first you're on urgent care, and now you're growing, and you're adding physical therapy, and you're adding dermatology, and you're adding telepsychiatry. Be explicit about those things, both in your on-site context, make sure you get proper press releases out. Do some digital PR surrounding the topic, pointing back to those pages, and then also add that into your schema. There's a way of doing what's called a disambiguation statement, and you can leverage that.

So if you go to schema.org, you can look up disambiguation, and you'll see what's there, and you can pass that to your developer. slides, yes, slides will be shared later, and I think, Tom is also recording this, and I think he shares that out afterwards. Cool, while we're waiting for more questions, why don't we, take a look at the poll here? So… So it looks like some of you are covering between, not confident at all, not very confident, and somewhat confident. So I'm hoping that at least what we've displayed to you today and walked you through at least gives you a framework, that you can, you know, begin to initiate internally.

I'll give you the advice that Timothy Leary gave to people when they finally got enlightened. His advice was, find the others. So find the others in your organization that are thinking like you. I've seen, sort of, two branches, over the past few years, where you have a bunch of people who are like, oh my god, we're being replaced, and they're terrified, and they want to hold on. And then there are the other people who are leaning in and saying, hey, we need to do something about this, I don't know what to do about it, but let's at least put our heads together. So hopefully what we presented to you today helps you, helps you at least a couple of steps on that, on that journey, and feel free to come talk to us at SHSMD, and, you know, we're happy to help you out.

Okay, let's see, where do you see the greatest risk of inconsistent brand information today? I think, I think we have some winners here. A lot of folks are looking at the third-party listings and directories. Yes. This is an incredibly difficult part of it, because in a lot of ways, you have to have all of your facts straight. And if they're not straight, you know, you're just giving the LLMs a system to wander around in, a bunch of empty space.

So… One thing you can do here is think about your year's cadence, and what kind of calendar you may need, and how many locations, how many directories are you looking at? Maybe peel it down to, like, a few priority ones. You know, okay, we've got your GBP, you've got your Apple, you've got your Bing, make sure those are on lockdown. Then maybe go, okay, great, who are our top providers?

What's their reputation? How can we help them shine? Especially when people are looking for specialists. You know, help them help you. Help provide that content calendar to them and say, hey, do you have a view on this?

Let's get a little short, you know, meet the clinician video out somewhere. Don't forget about YouTube. It's not just about search, it's not just about AI. Remember that YouTube is also, like, the second largest search engine, and you can use it. I know all of you have profiles there somewhere, but start using it. Start putting out little shorts, that'll really build momentum.

Okay, let's see, what's the next one? Which outcomes… would be most valuable to improve, through an AI-ready brand strategy. Let's say most of you are saying greater visibility and AI search, and then the second there looks like, better consistency across locations and channels, yes. Greater visibility and AI-powered search. I want to note something here. As you're doing, you know, you're looking at a consistent set of prompts and whatnot, even if it's sort of, like, local and you're saving it into a spreadsheet each month.

I would highly recommend that you think about it instead of the way we used to think about rank tracking, where you have a set of keywords and you just look at them all the time. Think about this as a snapshot of a conversation. You're walking through a crowded restaurant, you just overhear something. What you're doing is not watching for stability, what you're watching for is how the conversation is shifting over time. And that will… that and monitoring your sentiment will tell you more about how your audience is reacting and interacting, and themes in the marketplace that maybe you need to address better. Alright, I'm seeing another question from Colleen.

I've heard YouTube is a shortcut to getting on AI overviews in Google. I wouldn't look at it as a hack. I would look at it from the lens of what kind of signal is it sending out. Lots of you have heard about EEAT, so experience, expertise, authority, trust. Within that, there's another signal, which is called freshness. And a lot of these models have a recency bias.

So they're looking for the freshest information. So you're kind of operating on two different clocks. Clock 1 is the training data. How much information about your brand is already the training data, and has a bias already?

Then there's, what's new? What's new and fresh? And that is oftentimes what's going to surface in the grounding data, because it's the most recent. So these systems have a recency bias. So in that sense, Colleen, you're right, there's a little bit of a shortcut there, but we do know that YouTube is constantly being used as part of new training. So, yeah, if you do have a YouTube presence, definitely leverage that.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Vicki, it looks like you have your hand up. maybe we can come back to Vicki.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): Yeah, maybe I'm not saying it.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Okay. Any other questions about what we've shared? I know Tom has answered that we'll be providing today's webinar presentation, to each of you, and again, Brandon and I will be at SHSMD, later this month in Baltimore, and we'd love to meet you. So, if there's any opportunity for us to talk in advance around any specific challenges, or even if you'd like an audit. from us at a preliminary level, we'd love to talk in advance, and we could even use some of the time at the conference to talk. Otherwise, this has been great, and I love the comments, the questions. Each of you is… you're all probably on the front lines of much of this yourselves, and it's, I think, the collaborative approach that's sometimes the difficult part within a large health system, so…

Tom Bradach (SHSMD): Alright, well, Brandon and Paul, thank you both again so much. For your expertise and for being here with us today. And another thank you to Healthcare Success for sponsoring today's program. We really appreciate the support. For everyone on the call, please complete this short survey that will launch in your browser once this webinar closes. And I will reach out this evening or this afternoon with… via email with a recording of the webinar and the slides. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out, but that concludes today's presentation. Thank you all, and have a great afternoon.

Paul Knipe (Healthcare Success): Thank you, everyone.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success): Thanks.