Episode 109: Building a Great Healthcare Brand Via Consistent Experience

Gail is passionate about fostering awareness and helping Canadians feel educated and empowered to take control of their health. She is driven to connect more people with high-quality healthcare because she wholeheartedly believes that proactive and preventive actions lead to better health outcomes. To this end, she is always seeking new opportunities and innovative methods to share Harrison’s clinical knowledge and expertise, ensuring as many people as possible feel informed and supported.

Her professional background is enriched by a variety of experiences, including roles in marketing agencies, consulting, and in-house positions with several notable brands. Over her career, she has contributed to projects for the Province of British Columbia, Vancity Credit Union, Hootsuite, Haribo, and Best Buy, among others. Her portfolio also includes managing the Robson Square Celebration Site during the 2010 Olympics, along with extensive expertise in experiential marketing and brand management. She transitioned to marketing in the healthcare space in 2017, and this diverse background has enabled Gail to excel at creating polished, memorable experiences throughout a client’s journey to improving their health and wellness.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

Why brand is more about the experience and what you feel rather than visuals or what you say—and how to stay consistent across locations.
How Harrison healthcare is redefining primary care with longer appointments and full care teams with its team-based, preventative care designed to remove the mental load for patients.
What makes Harrison Healthcare’s model stand out in Canada’s healthcare landscape.
The challenge of marketing something people don't think they need–until they do.
Why private healthcare in Canada requires education, trust, and a clear value proposition.
What client feedback reveals about the gaps in perceived proactivity, and how marketing is addressing it.
The driver behind high retention: outcomes, relationships, and consistent experience.
Where AI is improving speed in healthcare marketing, and why human oversight is essential to maintain brand voice and trust.
How Harrison translates “peace of mind” into a tangible, proactive care experience through ongoing communication.

Additional resources:

Transcript

Josh Dougherty:
Welcome to A Brave New Podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing in the healthcare space. But more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm thrilled to have you along with me today. And today, we're going to explore something a little bit different. We're going to talk about healthcare and, specifically, private healthcare in the Canadian context. I have with me Gail Findlay-Shirras, the Senior Director of Marketing & Communications for Harrison Healthcare.

And I love her perspective that she brings to building a holistic brand that fulfills on the promises it makes to its patients, to its clients, and how that can filter out into creating an amazing experience for anyone who engages with her brand, anyone who comes in and gets healthcare at one of their clinics. Harrison Healthcare is originally from British Columbia, from Vancouver, but has clinics in Calgary and out in Toronto. And so, I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation and find a ton of applicability back to the work that you're doing. So, without further ado, I want to welcome Gail into the show. Hi, Gail. Welcome to the show today.

Gail Findlay:
Thank you so much for having me.

Josh Dougherty:
Awesome. Well, as we dive in, I'd love to have you share your story a little bit. Can you tell a little bit about your career path and where it's taking you, so our audience can get to know you a little bit before we dive into the core of the conversation?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. Interestingly, I started my career over in Ireland when I first graduated university. But in 2010, there were a lot of things going on in the world, and it forced me to come back home, and I got to work on the Olympic Games, which were in my hometown of Vancouver, Canada. And just all through that time, and for many years after that, I worked really a lot in traditional marketing and brand management and, in particular, with experiential, doing a lot of events and conferences and award shows and things like that. And what I learned there is just the value of a quality experience.

And building relationships between customers and the brands and trying to create something that's a little more special than just what you can see on the shelves or in magazines or TVs or podcasts or wherever it is. And so, it's all very relationship-driven and experience-driven. And in 2017, I saw the writing on the wall, digital marketing. I didn't have enough experience there. It was going to be hard to expand my career without a good knowledge base. So, I went back to school, full-time for three months. And when I came out of that, I got an amazing job in healthcare.

And it's just, I've been doing this ever since. So passionate about working in the healthcare space. And funny enough, I'm the daughter of a doctor and a sister of a doctor and daughter of a physiotherapist. So, it feels right at home to be working in healthcare.

Josh Dougherty:
It was in your DNA in some ways, right?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, totally.

Josh Dougherty:
Well, cool. I'd love to zero in a little bit on what you're doing. So, obviously, you're the Senior Director of Marketing & Communications at Harrison Healthcare. I'd love for you to share a little bit with me about what Harrison's all about and what you're focused on today with them.

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. So, Harrison Healthcare, we're a private primary care business in Canada, and we're on a mission to optimize the health and well-being of all Canadians through really individualized care plans. We are highly focused on prevention, personalization, and delivering a high-quality service, not a rush-in, rush-out, six-minutes-with-your-family-doctor type thing. So, along with your family doctor, we have registered nurses, dieticians, exercise physiologists, mental health experts, genetic counseling, nurse practitioners, and just lots of administrative staff, care coordinators, we call them. They're like our MOAs, referral specialists, everything to smooth that experience and make it go a little easier for people.

And I think the biggest thing we're trying to do is take the mental load off of our clients when it comes to healthcare and be that quarterback where they can trust that we're going to take care of everything before they've even thought of it.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love that. I think there's really, although different ... Part of the reason I'm excited about this conversation is because although it's very different, I think of advanced primary care providers in the United States who are maybe learning something from the model that you're piloting of trying to say, "Okay, if the overall healthcare system isn't serving someone exactly as it could be, how could we reimagine that experience?" It sounds like you're doing something similar up in Canada.

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, yeah. There's so much more. And I really believe that anyone who works in healthcare gets into it for a very altruistic reason. They want to take care of people, they want to do something special. And the system just, sometimes, doesn't allow that. And that could be true anywhere. It doesn't matter if you're in a private system or a public system. Sometimes, it just doesn't make it easy to do the job you want to do. And so, we're really trying to change that and give people the time and space that they need to be the best dietician, physician, nurse, whatever role they have, the best job that they can do.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love that. As you think about that, all those things add up to a brand, right?

Gail Findlay:
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Josh Dougherty:
And so, I'd love to hear about how you think of brand or branding at Harrison. Like, what is the ... How do you define it?

Gail Findlay:
Well, I mean, I'm sure anyone listening to your podcast can agree. It's not the logo and it's not your colors or fonts. To me, it's that consistent impression that people have of the brand. And maybe this is going back to my time in experiential, where I really believe how you experience a brand is how you feel about a brand. And to me, that is what it is. And so, we're really driven by our core values, which are compassion, innovation, and excellence. And I want people to feel those values when they walk through the door. They are not just words that we put on our website to make us feel good about ourselves. They truly are how we deliver care. And we want people to feel like they're being treated like they’re family.

And so, throughout those experiences, wherever possible, where we can go above and beyond, where we can give them that extra attention, they walk in the door, and the lady at the front desk knows that they were just on holiday in Mexico and asks how it was. Someone asks how their kid did, their kid just graduated high school, "How is that going? How's the transition?" We know so much more than just whatever ailment they're coming in for. And our ability to deliver on that promise to our clients, that, to me, is an effective brand.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And it's interesting because it's like the ability to deliver on that but with consistency over time as well. So, it's like you're building trust over time through that experience.

Gail Findlay:
For sure. And we do have centers in Vancouver, Calgary, and just recently added Toronto to the mix out east. And we want that experience to be consistent from center to center. So, all five locations have a familiar look and feel. It's like the McDonald's of this. It's like, you know what you're going to get when you walk through the door. And it's a good thing when it feels familiar and when you can count on that experience. And so, to make sure that that brand works out west, where I'm located, as well as out east, that's a really interesting challenge because people are different across the two sides of the country, not unlike the United States.

Josh Dougherty:
Totally. And I think I love using the term "the McDonald's of it," because thinking about the juxtaposition of how do you create consistency and quality or consistency while also maintaining a really premium quality is fascinating. Probably a whole conversation-

Gail Findlay:
But it takes a lot of effort.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah.

Gail Findlay:
A lot of intention and a lot of effort. And we sit around our teams-based boardroom as a leadership group and talk about, "How are we making sure that we're consistent? What is working in one center, in one province, and how can we make it work everywhere else?" And yeah, that consistent elevation of experience is what people can rely on. And it's what I hope that they're telling their friends about.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Well, a lot of this is all about connecting with patients, right? And building true authentic relationships with them? So, obviously, I think you'll share a little bit about your context because that's your experience. But could you tell me a little bit about what major trends you're tracking, and how to build those authentic connections with patients to make sure that they're seen, heard, and feel like active participants in their own care?

Gail Findlay:
100%. Yeah. And the answer's in your question. It's connections, right? Building a really reliable connection. And we talk a lot about the relationship between a doctor and their patient as being so important. The way primary care is going, I can't speak to what it's like in the States, but it's a lot of walk-in clinics and a lot of five-minute appointments. You come in, you have a skin condition, you want some antibiotic cream or something, and out the door you go. There's no relationship built. No one knows that that might be related to stress in your life. And then, actually dealing with the mental health behind it or the diet that goes behind it because it's something you ate last week.

And so, we're all about building that connection and making sure that the care team around you is focused and centered on you. And so, the doctor knows what the dietician's doing with you, knows what the exercise physiologist is working, and the nurse ... And so, they, together, can create that relationship, and you know that they have the full picture of your life. And so, when you can walk into your healthcare center and trust that your care team has that picture of your life, you know you're not going to necessarily second guess the advice that they're giving, because they have the context and they have that picture. And it really helps when you trust your physician, when you trust the advice that they're going to give is really ... It's evidence-based and it's grounded in something that will work for you.

There's no point in making ... This is the clinical guideline and this is what we should do in this case because you've presented this way. It's like, "Well, I know that you travel for work three days a week, every week, and that's never going to work for your lifestyle. So, let's come up with something different."

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, makes so much sense. And I think one thing I know about your model is there's this idea of extended time with a physician?

Gail Findlay:
Mm-hmm, yeah.

Josh Dougherty:
And can you share a little bit about the relationship between that knowledge and trust and the extended time that people have with their physician?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, definitely. One thing we're very fortunate to have at Harrison Healthcare is 30-minute appointments with our team. Once a year, you get a full hour with your family physician and all the other members of your care team, but all your other episodic appointments, they're booked at 30 minutes. And on top of that, you can access your physician for quick phone appointments and, sometimes, through email as much as possible, when it's secure. But those 30-minute appointments give you the time to come in with that skin condition and say, "How can we fix this?" And the doctor will then have time to ask the questions like, "How did it start? When did it start?"

And it's not that someone at a walk-in clinic or who has never met you isn't going to try and go through that, but your doctor at Harrison is going to have that history. They're going to know, "This has never happened before. It has happened before." Maybe we've done a pharmacogenetic test on you and we know that this medicine isn't going to work on you because of how you metabolize certain things. We have a really comprehensive picture of you that is going to make that 30 minutes so much more valuable. And when you have the time, you can get into the mental health stuff, which maybe people are a little more reluctant to talk about and just doesn't come up in six minutes. A lot of our clients are families. So, your spouse, your children, your parents may all also be here.

And so, stuff can come up, and we certainly don't break any patient confidentiality. But if something's going on in the family, then the care team can bring that to other relationships that they have.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that connection, it's all about carving out that time to get to know each person personally. So, I love this model. I love the intentionality behind it. I think some of our listeners, most of our listeners are in the United States, so they may not understand the unique space that you operate in the Canadian system. Probably, I think, most of us in the United States understand broadly how our healthcare systems are different. But I would be interested in hearing how you think brand building differs between the US. And you maybe can only talk about the Canadian perspective, which is totally fine, but I'd love to hear what that looks like.

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. I think it was very different. If we had had this conversation when Harrison first was created under a different brand back in 2006, it was a very different conversation. People weren't as open to the concept of private healthcare. We have a lot easier time of it these days. People are looking for better health outcomes. They're interested in longevity. They understand that what the public system provides isn't fully comprehensive. And we're very, very fortunate in Canada to have a public system. And it is an amazing system at Harrison. We're friends of the healthcare system, and we are just looking to focus more on prevention.

And what we need to do, as a brand, is educate Canadians, potential clients, about what the difference is between what the healthcare system does cover and what is extra and over and above. And as an example, Canadians are used to paying for their dentists, they're used to paying for physiotherapy. Both of which are technically healthcare. And in our model, the family doctor is supported by so much else, and that's what people cover. And so, when I build a brand for Harrison, it is all about explaining all that other stuff that you are paying for.

It is preventive-based. It is talking to a dietician about your diabetes, talking to your exercise physiologist to help recover from injury, prevent falls if you're a senior. It's talking to mental health support. And so, things like that, we have to create a really memorable brand that looks trustworthy, that shows the clinical excellence that we have, but that people see value in investing in that. People are often interested in paying for personal trainers. They're interested in paying for supplements. You're not going to convince them to go to a dentist. They're going to pay for it because it's what you should do, but they need to see the value in what all this other stuff is, that we have bundled together into what we call the Premier program at Harrison.

And these days, I don't have a hard time convincing people. Once you have 30 seconds with them, and you explain all the other things and how they can take care of you, whether you're managing chronic disease or just looking to enhance longevity or performance, stay healthy if you currently are. People are like, "Yeah, I want someone to help me do that. Instead of the $5,000 a year I could put into personal training, I could put that here in primary care."

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I think, in some ways, you're benefiting from this really increased hyper awareness across culture that staying healthier longer improves quality of life. And so, why wouldn't I want to invest in that?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, yeah. And we talk a lot about the health span instead of the lifespan. And you want to, essentially in your life, it could be like not a bell curve, but whatever that curve looks like. Your health deteriorates over time, slowly until you get to your last day. But wouldn't it be great if you kept your health at peak until your last day, and then it just dropped-

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Gail Findlay:
... off at the end? And so, how do you push out that curve to make you live at the top level of your potential for as long as possible? And I don't have to convince people of that these days. They have goals. They want to have healthy retirements. They want to have long lives. They want to see their grandkids get married and grow up. And so, whatever their health goal is, we clue into that and we make sure that they feel good about achieving that health goal.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I mean, I love that. It's something that is big and achievable and something that all of us want. We want to have those long, active, meaningful lives. And I'm really interested in the juxtaposition between that. And then, you also have this brand promise of seeing a doctor within five minutes and securing next day access. So, it's like selling or branding, sharing the big idea with also this really tangible, measurable, easily conceivable idea of getting in quickly when you need care. Can you share about how you ensure that your branding of those more tangible, immediate things doesn't outpace the operational reality?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. Well, and I'll be the first to admit it's difficult, and we haven't got it right all the time, but we work really hard to do it. And with a retention rate over 90%, I think we're doing a pretty good job of it, but there's always room for improvement. And I'm very fortunate. We're still a smaller company when you compare yourself to maybe an American healthcare company size, but I have a very close relationship with all the leadership counterparts across the country. And when I talk to the operational leaders, what is the change or the challenge that they're facing? Do I need to change something on the website, just reword something so it's better expressed?

Or do we need to talk to the people and culture team to hire an additional exercise physiologist, because it's too long to get that next appointment? We really want to make sure that the brand promise is being delivered. And the worst thing that we could do for our brand, and I'm sure your listeners know, you don't want to overpromise and underdeliver. And so, we just are in close contact between ops and marketing and the business development team and the people and culture team to make sure that what we say, what we put out there, is what is possible in the centers.

And little things like, I have monthly updates to the entire company once a month just talking about, "What's going on in the field? What have we changed? What's new out there? And make sure that the staff and the team are educated on programs and services as much as what we're saying to the clients. So, no client is ever going to come in and say, "I read about this," or, "I heard this," and the team member is going to say, "What are you talking about?" That would break our brand. And so, making sure that communication is frequent and often and that both myself and the operations leaders are on the same page all the time, so important.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love this, that you're focusing so deeply on the brand experience. And this may come out of your experiential marketing too. You know that anything immediately breaks down if it's just marketing, and then it comes down and the experience is completely different. But I also love the tension of saying it's not just about marketing changing, but it's about challenging the notions of like, "How do we solve this problem? And it may be a culture-"

Gail Findlay:
Sometime, it's-

Josh Dougherty:
"... or capacity problem."

Gail Findlay:
... changing the word “dedicated” to “committed.” It just has this big semantic. To me, I'm like, "Okay, if that's what works better." We're still promising a highly receptive care coordinator at the other end of the phone, but if dedicated felt like the wrong word for some reason, "Okay." And so, that's easy for us to do, but it is because of those open lines of conversation that I have-

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Gail Findlay:
... with operational teams. And I think ... It's easier said than done, particularly as you get bigger, but I'm in a fortunate position, where ... Convincing someone to join Harrison is quite easy, in the West in particular, where we have almost 20 years-

Josh Dougherty:
Of course.

Gail Findlay:
... of history. So, when there's a space, particularly in our Vancouver clinic, there's a long list.

Josh Dougherty:
You're going to fill it, right?

Gail Findlay:
I don't have to spend as much time on marketing and advertising and promotions. So, I do get to spend more time in brand and client experience, and making sure that our operational team, the people who face the clients every day, they have all the tools and resources they have, they need, to do their job properly, from handouts, scripts, FAQs—whatever it is—because the dream is not spending a penny on paid ads, right?

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Gail Findlay:
The dream is your business grows from word of mouth, that's free. And so, where does word of mouth come from? It comes from great experiences, and that's delivered at the clinic level.

Josh Dougherty:
100%. So, I'm going to go off script a little bit, but I'm interested to hear you have lots of history in Vancouver, right? And people choose you because you've done the work to build the brand foundation. But as you think about Toronto where you're newer, what are some of the things beyond providing this great experience that you're doing to try to accelerate that building of the brand affinity with the population you're trying to reach?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, it's very different in Toronto. It's a definite challenge for us because we don't have that brand recognition. So, we really do feel like a little bit like we did in 2005 and '06 when we first entered the market in Vancouver, trying to explain what the service is. Because it's a unique service, the people in Toronto aren't familiar with it. They're very familiar with executive health assessments, which I think Americans are also quite familiar with. You come in once a year, you have a huge battery of very detailed tests, super interesting report, really engaged, long appointments. So, it's a super interesting output, but it doesn't have ongoing care. You don't get that output, and then have help to keep it going. "How to execute on this care plan that I've just been given?" And that's what we offer.

And so, we're going back into that education phase of trying to ... We do a ton more advertising and a ton more promotions now, and we're open houses and direct mails and everything. Going back to my traditional marketing roots, everything under the sun, just to try and have people see our brand and associate it with ongoing care. Because right now, they see a private healthcare brand and they think executive health. And so, it's a lot of reeducation in Toronto. And interestingly, we ran a campaign with our Vancouver and Calgary clients to say, "If you've got friends in Toronto, refer us, you get a gift, and we'll give them a big deep discount on their first-year fees," and it's delivered a lot of results. So, again, word of mouth is what works.

Josh Dougherty:
It is. It's always what works. It's why I like brand so much, because it's a chance to create something people want to believe in and be a part of, right, at the end of the day?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, yeah. And I'm fortunate that the brand is just so strong, that we do deliver what we say we're going to deliver, and that it is a refreshing healthcare experience. People say going to the lab doesn't feel like such a scary experience. And who wants to go have blood drawn? But coming to our lab is peaceful, it's relaxed, there's not a long line of people, and you get time with your lab tech, and you get to know them because they're the same person every time. So, it's little moments like that where it's just q five-minute blood draw but a totally different experience.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. So, obviously, going back, you talked a little bit about executive healthcare being very familiar to people. And then, earlier in our conversation, you talked about this idea of being the healthcare quarterback, which is what you're, I think, trying to teach people or get them to understand like, "We are here to help you navigate this complex system." Can you share a little bit more about what that navigation looks like and how you support people in that?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. We're very fortunate that we have a one-to-one ratio in our centers, where one care coordinator, which is, again, what we call a medical office assistant, is paired with one physician, pretty much, and they're there to extra handhold. They're there to help them with their referrals. And we have an entire team of referral coordinators who can go and say, "Okay, your family doctor says you need to see a cardiologist. Here are the five cardiologists we've got in the area. And we'll help you navigate the options available to you, find the right therapeutic fit for you, and try to make that a little more seamless.

And what happens in Canada, unfortunately, is you go to your doctor, you get your referral, and then you just sit in this abyss of wondering, "When am I going to get my appointment? When will this get taken care of?" And if you want to take a holiday to go somewhere for a month, it's like, "Well, can I go? I'm waiting on this specialist. Should I?" And having the peace of mind, that there's a team of people following up with that specialist to make sure your appointment is going to be booked as soon as possible, making sure that your referral paperwork is all done correctly and all put together. We have a lot more time to create a very detailed referral note from our care teams to specialists. And so, just the quality of the referral is improved.

And when clients are needing additional services outside of what we provide, they can just rely on us. And I think it's that peace of mind that they're getting from us that adds a tremendous amount of value through the Premier program. The other thing being, you don't have to remember when you're due for your next mammogram or colonoscopy. You don't have to remember when it's time for your next set of vaccines for your young kids. We are taking care of it. We're calling you before you've even thought of it, to book those appointments in. And so, not just externally, but even within Harrison, we're taking care of all the primary care so that you don't have to think about it until you show up.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, that's amazing. I think all of us, I listen to what you’re explaining in your healthcare and I'm like, "Man, maybe I should move to Vancouver and try to get on your wait list to get into your healthcare. It sounds great."

Gail Findlay:
Join the wait list, yeah.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, exactly. So, I'm interested ... I want to talk a little bit about two areas where maybe we can explore a little bit, like when the feedback you're getting from someone maybe doesn't match up with a promise as much, or there's some surprising feedback. How do you tackle that? Because everything you're describing to me sounds super proactive, "Set up here, helping people navigate through." But then, I know you did some recent research and you scored highly in a bunch of areas, but then lower on what is termed proactivity. And so, when you get feedback like that, what do you do to make sure you're evolving the brand to address that perception?

Gail Findlay:
100%, yeah. We did a big survey. This was going back to April 2024, we started the survey with all our clients because it was time to check in and see how we were doing. And the feedback was so overwhelmingly positive.

We were so glad that before we expanded to our third, fourth, and fifth centers, that we had some really good intelligence telling us what we were doing well, but I'm very much a former athlete and want to fix anything that's less than perfect. And so, our scores on, "How proactive do you feel Harrison Healthcare is for you?" We're hovering in the 80s, as opposed to the 90s like the rest of our marks. And it's like "Well-"

Josh Dougherty:
You're like, "We're getting a B, we need an A," right?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, we need an A. And people expect us to have an A. So, it came down to understanding that patients didn't understand what being proactive meant. And the other example was the referral coordinators. People understood we had them, but they didn't understand how they were used. And so, we actually just went through an education campaign and made sure that clients understood what the service was or how we were being proactive. I started this tagline like, "We're talking about you behind your back." And it's this idea that the care team ... The core care team is the nurse, the doctor, and the care coordinator. Three of them meet once a week, with most of our care teams, to talk about the patient roster.

And so, "Who's coming up for their annual? Who's been in a lot recently and is managing a difficult new diagnosis?" or something like that. And, "Who's on our radar for somebody to talk about?" And they are planning out, "What are their next steps? Who's going to take control?" "Do we need to loop in a dietician? They haven't talked to them in a while." "Yeah, maybe we should reintroduce their dietician so that their diabetes is under more control." "Their A1C is peaking, so let's chat to the expert, right?" And so, we needed to tell patients that this was happening instead of just doing it behind their back. And so, we interviewed all our referral coordinators and talked to them about why they loved their job so much and what they were doing.

And we're able to use storytelling to help show the value that they brought to the team, and how that process worked and how ... We're not jumping queues in Canada. We very much operate within the system here, but this is what we do to speed the process up and add that layer of peace of mind. And when it comes to being proactive, these are the things we are thinking about and we are being alerted to about your health without you even being aware. So, when we call you, it's because we've been thinking about you, and that's gone a long way. So, now that we've got five centers, it'll be interesting to redo that survey. We're talking about maybe in the next 6 to 12 months of checking back in.

But I think one of the important things, I'm sure most people, most marketers think about this, it's not about a point-in-time marketing survey. It's not about a client assessment just in spring of 2024. We then implemented a smaller-scale, just on our own, using Microsoft Forms-

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Gail Findlay:
... And just a simple survey that goes out to people right around their renewal. And "How have we been doing?" And we ask a lot of the same questions. And so, we've been able to track, at a smaller scale, that things are getting better.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. I love how it's, too ... You're using the research to identify a new communication opportunity. It doesn't even require operational change. It's just-

Gail Findlay:
No, they were all communications.

Josh Dougherty:
Just talk differently about what we do, yeah.

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. All communications. And that's the cool thing about marketing at Harrison, is just how much we've been able to influence client experience and support it.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. And that communication ... Obviously, other things have contributed to a retention rate that's pretty amazing. You have a 93 to 94% retention rate with your members, a really loyal base. What role do you think marketing plays in maintaining those numbers year after year?

Gail Findlay:
I think I said this to you once before. I don't want to take credit for that because it really comes down to the clinical team delivering on the client promise. So, I can help communicate what we do, but if we don't deliver it, then that's where it comes from. So, I think we can talk about being healthier, but until they actually see that in themselves, they can-

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Gail Findlay:
Weight loss is an easy one to grasp at, but to see their A1C come down, to see their cholesterol improve, whatever that looks like, the proof is in the pudding. And we're doing our best now to become a lot more data-driven. And so, looking at our patient panels and saying, "Physician, here are all your clients that are currently managing diabetes, how are we trending to our targets and how many more patients are coming down?" And so, trying to be very clinical and specific about improving people's health and not just saying we're going to do it. And I think people feel it. So, it's a good news story for sure.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you for zooming in so deeply into what you do, how you tell your story, all those sorts of things. I'd like to step back out and ask a question that's maybe more aspirational. As you look forward a year from now—or maybe a couple years, you can decide the timeframe you want—what do you want Harrison Healthcare to be remembered for by the people who interact with you?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, I think it really comes down to our core values, that I talked about off the top, like compassion, innovation, and excellence. They're so important to us and it's how we ground our work. We want to deliver healthcare in a compassionate, caring, empathetic way. We want to show that we're listening and show that we're hearing them. And for people to walk away and say that, "I feel seen, I feel heard. I was involved in my care plan and I got to help make the decisions," that engagement, that also leads to a healthier patient at the end of the day. And so, I want people to feel like the compassion really shines. And compassion really supports the other two values, which are innovation and excellence. We want to be a thought leader. We want to be seen as an expert in all of Canada in what we're doing.

And eventually, in North America too, to be this organization that is really making a difference, not just in assessment, but in delivering optimal outcomes over time. And so, yeah, I think compassion, innovation, and excellence being … just delivering on what we say we're going to do. Clinical excellence isn't just one person being excellent, it's the whole team. So, if we keep doing what we're doing as we grow, I think we're all going to be happy at the table at Harrison.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I love that. My final question is really zooming out from Harrison and more thinking about marketing and trends. I think one of the things that we always have to do around healthcare or marketing, generally, is keep in mind how things are changing because they constantly are. So, what do you think is the current trend that's going to be the most practical reality for healthcare marketers 12 months from now? What's on top of your mind?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, well-

Josh Dougherty:
I can probably guess, but I'd love to hear you talk about it.

Gail Findlay:
If anyone doesn't say AI, then I don't know what they're doing in marketing.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, exactly.

Gail Findlay:
But I'm fortunate to have a CEO who really believes that we need to be playing in the space. We don't have to have the answers. We don't need to know what the best solution is, but we need to be exploring it, using it, integrating it, and finding ways. And in marketing, it's been very easy to lean on AI to brainstorm, create drafts, edit drafts, all that good content, like writing content creation. But where I'm hoping to move in the nearer future is to have it integrate a little more into processes, so that you're not just copy and pasting from here to there. And you're not just one-off asking for certain tasks to happen, that it can become a little more of a strategic partner. And maybe some of your listeners have that answer and I would love to hear from them.

So, for me, integrating AI in a way that really protects our patient's privacy. So, finding a way to integrate it into our systems and tools without overlapping anything in the EMR, for example, but being able to leverage it, help our writing, help our outputs, scale it, and make things of a higher quality, but finding the process and the systems that can really optimize the marketing team. We're a small, scrappy group over here at Harrison, so we need all the help we can get.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I think most of us are. I've been encouraged, like playing with it especially ... We use Claude a lot internally, so we've been playing with that. The latest versions of its ability to do deeper thinking is really valuable, right? Because at the end of the day, I think I land on the same place as you. Writing things, better, faster is great, but I've also got to safeguard the brands that we're working with, or our brand, as we're thinking about A Brave New. And so, if it can help me do some deeper thinking that can inform the quality of what we're producing at the end of the day, it's going to be a huge boon to what we're doing.

Gail Findlay:
Yeah. I think I'm actually quite fortunate not to have access to the EMR, which, every once in a while, they're like, "Oh, just go look at this patient's information." And I'm like, "I don't have it. You're going to have to give it to me." But I have Claude on my desktop and I'm just like, "How can I integrate this with all the different things, with WordPress and HubSpot and Dropbox and all the different little things I'm using? Can I leverage it?" But I'm, yeah, still playing, still playing in the sandbox.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, I think the same is true with ... You mentioned HubSpot, another tool, we use that deeply as well. And I'm so interested by all the different agents that we're putting in, and we're trying to pilot them, but I think it's a work in progress to figure out how to leverage them all together as the orchestrator of all the agents.

Gail Findlay:
Exactly. Yeah. And it's funny. Maybe you feel this way too, but it's like, "I have all these tools," and it's like, "I just want 30 minutes to think about this before I do the integration and try. I wish I had more thinking time before I could jump in, but there's never thinking time."

Josh Dougherty:
Totally.

Gail Findlay:
We're just so busy. So, it's like, you just need to turn it on, just start trying.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Turn it on and figure out, "How do you constrain its access to data enough that it's not going to hurt anything-"

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, exactly.

Josh Dougherty:
"... when you get going?" Sweet. Well, thank you so much for the time. As we close out, I'd love to ask how people can connect with you. What's the best way for them to follow around along with the work that you're doing?

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, we've got social channels on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can look for Harrison Healthcare Canada and you can find me, Gail Findlay-Shirras on LinkedIn. But yeah, the website's constantly evolving. We're constantly doing stuff. And so, I'd love the support and the encouragement from my American counterparts. We're doing something pretty special and unique up here in Canada. And I come to you guys a lot for ideas, because you're being pushed to think outside the box to make a difference in your markets. And you have to make an impact with lots more competitors than I do. So yeah, I'd love to take your lessons as well.

Josh Dougherty:
Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing your lessons. I think it's inspirational to hear about the commitment that you have to building a brand. And I know it's also hard to find this time to put aside to have a conversation this in depth. So, I appreciate you coming on and sharing all your expertise and the thoughtfulness you put into building your brand.

Gail Findlay:
Yeah, thank you so much. It was a lot of fun. Easier than I thought, as you said. But it's been fun talking to you and getting to know you.

Josh Dougherty:
Great. Thank you.

Gail Findlay:
Thanks. Bye.

Josh Dougherty:
Bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New Podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New Podcast, wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New Podcast is created by A Brave New, a branding agency in Seattle, Washington, that crafts bold and memorable healthcare brands. Our producer is Rob Gregerson.