In this episode of The Visibility Brief, Yext SVP of Marketing Rebecca Colwell sits down with Scott Orstad, Vice President, Marketing at Catholic Health, to explore a surprising idea: the organizations best positioned to succeed in AI search just might be the ones that have spent years operating under the strictest constraints.
That might sound counterintuitive, but regulated industries have long been forced to solve a unique set of problems: accuracy, trust, governance, data quality, and compliance.
Now, those same disciplines become the foundation of AI visibility.
Drawing on more than 25 years of healthcare marketing experience, Scott shares how Catholic Health is approaching content, provider data, reputation management, and digital experience in a world where AI is becoming part of the customer journey — and why those lessons apply far beyond healthcare.
The episode breaks down:
Why AI search is changing how consumers research important decisions
Why accurate data matters more than ever
How expert-led content helps organizations build trust while improving visibility in both traditional and AI search.
Why organizations need subject matter experts and content teams working together to make complex topics understandable.
The value of reviews and customer feedback as signals to AI systems
What marketers should focus on instead of chasing every AI trend
If you're a marketing leader trying to navigate the rapid changes happening in AI search, this episode offers a valuable reminder: the brands that win won't necessarily be the ones moving the fastest. They'll be the ones with the strongest foundations.
Episode Links
Transcript
Rebecca Colwell (00:03.089) I am joined today by Scott Orstad who leads marketing at Catholic Health. Catholic Health is a health system with six hospitals and dozens of outpatient locations. And he is here to share with us today how his team is operating and in an entirely new world where patients are getting answers from AI long before they ever visit the website. Scott, welcome to the visibility brief.
Scott Orstad (00:26.52) Great to be here, Rebecca.
Rebecca Colwell (00:28.259) I'm so excited to chat today. I have many, many questions, but before we dive in, I'm very curious about the function of healthcare marketing. So tell us a little bit about how you got into your role.
Scott Orstad (00:40.718) Sure. I got into healthcare marketing about 25 years ago, starting on the communication side, because I really loved telling stories and educating people about how to stay healthy. And over time, you know, I became more excited and interested in the marketing side of the function, both from a branding and digital marketing as all of that grew. And now as I've been in the industry for a while, it's kind of like it's come full circle, because in some ways,
A lot of what we do in marketing now is that storytelling aspect as well too, through the different channels that we use to share information with the public. So it's been a really fun journey.
Rebecca Colwell (01:21.739) It's amazing. I'm sure you have seen so much change over the past 25 years. I know I have.
Scott Orstad (01:27.598) Absolutely the types of tactics we're using now, some of them weren't even invented back then yet. And some of them are definitely influencing things in a much different way than they were even just five and 10 years ago.
Rebecca Colwell (01:40.455) Absolutely.
Yext just conducted a global consumer research study. And one of the things that we found is that for people who are using LLMs for research, 44 % of them are using them for healthcare research, diagnosing conditions, finding providers. I imagine that is having a huge impact on your marketing strategy. And I would love to dig into that. So I first wanted to just think, are you seeing that play out in your marketing? Are patients conducting research on AI before they come to see
Scott Orstad (02:13.496) Yeah, we're definitely hearing anecdotally from our physicians and other providers that patients are doing research online and particularly with AI search tools. think everyone's always curious about what their condition might be, get a little more knowledge before going into the doctor's office. And I think we all like to play doctor a little bit and diagnose ourselves anyway. There's that curiosity factor there. So we are hearing anecdotally that it is something that they're starting to see more.
Rebecca Colwell (02:35.647) Thank
Scott Orstad (02:42.38) In some cases, it's definitely helpful because patients come in more educated and prepared, and sometimes it can also not always be the best scenario as well. It kind of works in both cases.
Rebecca Colwell (02:54.571) Well, I imagine, I mean, if I'm going in to buy a car, can conduct all of the research that I want. And if I'm incorrect about something, it's not a life or death situation. Health care can be very different. So I'm curious, the costs of getting it wrong are pretty high. So how are you thinking about getting, you know, accurate trusted information out to the LLMs?
Scott Orstad (03:19.118) Sure, know, making sure there is that trusted information is one of the reasons why we've really developed a strong content strategy over the last year. You know, we felt like adding more content about different types of treatments and conditions and just general health information was really important to help educate the audiences in our areas where our hospitals and outpatient centers are, thus using our physicians as those trusted sources to be cited.
And just knowing as well too that the more frequently a website is updated that the the LLMs are seeing them as a trusted resource for content and information.
Rebecca Colwell (04:01.98) It's interesting that you're tapping into your subject matter experts. That's fantastic. I try to do the same thing, but I imagine it's a bit easier for me to get a subject matter expert at Yax on the line than it is for you to connect with a busy physician. So how do you do it? Like content marketers everywhere are probably begging to understand how you get their time.
Scott Orstad (04:12.962) Thank
Scott Orstad (04:21.55) Well, it's a combination of two things. Sometimes our team is doing interviews early in the morning or late in the afternoon to accommodate the physician's schedules. Sometimes, too, if it's a more generalized topic, we'll do some research with reputable sources and kind of put together a first draft for them to react to, to kind of give us feedback. So we work with the physicians based on what the topic is. If it's more generalized, we'll kind of do the research first and do that first choice.
you know, for some of the more specialized procedures, it's really important to hear from the physician firsthand their knowledge in order to craft the story correctly.
Rebecca Colwell (05:00.873) Are you writing the stories in plain English or are you using medical terminology?
Scott Orstad (05:07.32) We're trying really hard to use as much plain English as possible because we want the stories to be as digestible and understandable for the consumer reading the story because we really see our patients as consumers who have choice. And we also feel by using that more plain language approach that it helps with just building overall higher visibility both from a traditional search standpoint as well as from an AI search standpoint as these different resources are
looking for sites to source for information.
Rebecca Colwell (05:39.445) Are your content marketers medical experts themselves?
Scott Orstad (05:45.677) Not specifically, they all have a curiosity and have different levels of medical acumen. But I think it's that ability to ask the question and understand, which really helps. Because I think if they had too much knowledge, they might be a little too close to the situation and may not be able to really do the plain English language that we're looking for justice. Because we want to make sure it is understandable as possible so it can be as beneficial to the consumers reading the content.
Rebecca Colwell (06:15.071) that makes perfect sense. When we bring the curse of knowledge to our content, it makes sense to us. Are there topics that are more likely to be researched? mean, specialties where you're seeing more questions being asked?
Scott Orstad (06:32.526) You know, we see a variety, we see common things that, you know, see a lot of search visibility. For example, we recently did a story about the importance of the annual blood work that patients have during a physical, and that's scored very well and showed up in an AI search for us. And then there are other times too, we'll see, for example, when a, you know, maybe a patient gets a referral from their primary care doctor to see a particular type of specialist.
and it may be an area they have never heard of such as a thoracic surgeon who deals with lung conditions and they may wanna go search out what does a thoracic surgeon do and what type of treatments do they provide and help with. So, I think it kind of comes down to both from that curiosity standpoint, from an education standpoint to learn about a particular type of medicine or just to see.
to get more knowledge on some of the more common areas of medicine as well too.
Rebecca Colwell (07:35.509) Well, now I know what a thoracic surgeon does. Thank you. I actually had no idea. That's great. So I love that you are out there creating plain language content to help people with some of their common questions. But there's this whole other category of information that people are using LLMs to find. And that is when they do need treatment or a diagnosis, they're using LLMs to find local.
providers, map those to insurance companies, know, that sort of thing. So I'm curious how you think about that part of your content marketing challenge. How are you getting detailed information about your healthcare facilities, providers out into the world?
Scott Orstad (08:18.744) Sure, know, one of the most important things we did several years ago is really kind of do an audit of all of the information out there. And we worked with the X to help get us consistent information about our different centers as well as our physicians consistently because we realize in many cases, as much as we want everybody to come to our website to get that information, as they're doing that search as many times,
the information they're looking for, whether it be a location, a phone number, they can obtain just in that actual search, especially from a Google business listing. So we knew it was really important to have accurate information online and consistently throughout the different resources that people may be looking at. So kind of making sure that our foundational information was accurate and correct was something that we just knew we needed to do.
And one of the other things we're looking to do now is make sure that as some of our specialty physicians may have two or three locations, we're making sure we're having specific location information about each of those and not just the primary location, knowing that as search is getting more specialized with closer and smaller geographic distances, we wanna make sure that our physicians show up in any of the locations they may be at, not just that primary.
Rebecca Colwell (09:41.867) Scott, I'm curious, what other kinds of information are you managing? Aside from location, phone numbers, specialties, I imagine the corpus of data is just getting larger and larger for what people want to know.
Scott Orstad (09:56.751) Sure, I think one of the other key pieces of information that people are looking for is the insurance that that particular physician participates in because that's an important decision for someone. Obviously they want a high quality physician who is skilled at what they're doing, but they also want to make sure they're finding someone who participates in their insurance plan to help keep their costs under control. so providing that...
The information about participating plans is a critically important piece that we work on collaboratively with our digital technology colleagues as they populate that information, whether it be in the Find a Physician profiles or the other information that we share out to the other publishers because we want to make sure that we are providing as much information as possible about our physicians
so that the consumer searching for them will ultimately select them.
Rebecca Colwell (10:56.747) Can you tell me a little bit more about how you're managing this? So you've got your digital team. I understand you've got a data warehouse of a sort that is collecting all this information. how are you, tell me if that's right. And then how are you connecting that to Yaks and then publishing that out to the broader world?
Scott Orstad (11:14.104) That's correct. Our digital technology services team has created this tremendous warehouse resource of information, whereas we have a number of different data sources within the organization. They aggregate all the information together to make sure we're sending out that correct information through the various different digital platforms, from the website to a daily feed with Yex to make sure all the different.
publisher networks have the right information to our Find a Doctor tool. So we have a great relationship with our DTS counterparts to ensure that our online presence is accurate and correct for each of our locations and most importantly for our physicians.
Rebecca Colwell (11:56.843) You mentioned Find a Doc. Do you have local pages for your providers and locations?
Scott Orstad (12:03.426) We do, we think it's really important to make sure that each of those specific locations where the specialists do have that local connection to them. And so that is something that we have started to add as part of the overall mix as far as making sure we have that accurate information.
Rebecca Colwell (12:21.397) Excellent. And I know on the healthcare front, reputation is really, important. And it's often, I remember when I had, needed a, my gallbladder removed and I got a recommendation and I was like, well, I don't know anything about picking a great gallbladder surgeon, by the way, or even whether or not, right? So I am curious how you think about managing your reputation and especially across so many different providers and locations.
Scott Orstad (12:48.846) Sure, it is something that we are rethinking our strategy with right now. We do routinely ask our patients for feedback for surveys and that information is shared in our find a doctor tool. But what we also realize is that information right now is only available right there. So we are looking at getting that information populated out because we recognize that one of the...
the sources of information that the AI searches are starting to favor as much as well now too is online reviews. And so we are looking at increasing that for our different locations as well as our providers with a proactive strategy so that it's not just those who may have had a positive or negative experience and are controlling the narrative because we're not being proactive because we know from past experience with our urgent care centers when you.
proactively ask patients about their experience, the vast majority of them are positive experiences and tell a better story about what's really going on. And so we are looking to enhance what we are doing for that online reputation piece, because first it's the right thing to do as far, and we know consumers are looking for, but we also know that the AI searches value this information as well. And so that's also why we're looking to
add that to our digital foot.
Rebecca Colwell (14:13.931) there any internal metrics that you're reporting across the organization for providers or facilities that are performing well from a reputation perspective?
Scott Orstad (14:26.872) Sure, we regularly monitor what the current online presence is for different providers as well as locations so that we can keep a snapshot on it. We work very closely with our patient experience team with regard to that and our partnering with them on those next steps on how to take that experience piece to the next level. So everyone has line of sight as to which providers are getting favorable reviews.
as well as which locations are getting favorable and those where there may need to be some areas of improvement.
Rebecca Colwell (15:01.727) That's great. Well, Scott, think one of the biggest things that organizations are struggling with is actually monitoring their visibility and their sentiment and just understanding how am I showing up across the board, especially at the scale that you're operating at. So I'm really curious, what tools are you using to monitor your visibility right now and what are you learning?
Scott Orstad (15:25.742) Sure. It's an exciting time right now to figure out what's going on in the AI space. We have partnered with Yext on the Scout tool to get a sense on where we kind of stand. We found some really helpful information. There were a lot of little quick win things from an information and a visual standpoint that we were able to make some impact on. But there some other things that are to be a little bit more of a longer haul, such as the online reputation piece and having a more proactive strategy with that.
We felt it was important to see because the way in which AI search is evaluated online is different than traditional search. And we needed to make sure we had a mechanism to measure both so that we could be visible in both areas.
Rebecca Colwell (16:13.173) Brilliant. It's time for our final section. This is my favorite section every time, puts people on the spot. But when you're thinking about healthcare marketing and everything that has changed, what is one thing that you think marketers should start doing?
Scott Orstad (16:17.283) You
Scott Orstad (16:32.12) think one of the things they need to start doing right now, if they're not already doing, is making sure they have that sense of what's going on from a data standpoint to make sure everything is accurate and correct and really relook at, in partnership with that, their content strategy. Content has kind of become king again in its importance. Four or five years ago, I think some of the flashy type of visual graphics and video content were
and video content is still very important. We still invest heavily into it, but I think plain English has become even more important again because of AI Search. So I think getting back to the basics and making sure that you're focusing on content and making sure your data is correct is really what people can best do right now to help be successful in the new world of online search.
Rebecca Colwell (17:25.589) basics. What should we stop doing?
Scott Orstad (17:29.742) I think the one thing everyone should stop doing is trying to react on a weekly basis to the latest news about AI. think you can kind of send yourself a bit into a tizzy. I think the one thing we all used to try to do maybe a few years ago was buy our way into the results with paid search. And now I think that's kind of been replaced by trying to react to every pivot we're seeing and just realize that some of the things are going to work and some of them are, but we've just got to wait a little bit and be patient and see which ones
really kind of stick.
Rebecca Colwell (18:00.797) God, you're speaking my language today. It does feel like every day there's something new and we're just really trying to stay on top of all of it and pivot. that great foundational advice about the basics, getting the fundamentals right. Is there anything we should just be rethinking entirely?
Scott Orstad (18:03.79) you
Scott Orstad (18:23.438) You know, I think what we need to be really rethinking is about how, is thinking more about the consumer experience and how they really are looking for information and are craving. And I think at times, especially in healthcare marketing, we still utilize some tactics that have been kind of old tried and trues and we still want them to work. And they sometimes can be effective, but the online presence and being a source of information is just so important. And we need to make...
that digital experience is frictionless as possible for our consumers and patients, that we need to be part of the solution along with our operations and our IT peers, because that's really where the future I think is going to be. And for organizations who make that online digital experience frictionless, both in their own environment, their own websites and tools and information in third party sources, whether it be AI or Google will ultimately win the game because they're making it easier.
the consumer to select.
Rebecca Colwell (19:24.917) Amazing. Scott, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask one more question. didn't prep for this, but I think we could work it into this. As a content marketer within the health care system, you've got this added layer of complexity around compliance and ensuring that you are adhering to all of the complex rules out there. So tell me a little bit more about how you manage that and what the relationship looks like with your compliance group.
Scott Orstad (19:53.295) Sure, compliance is an important part of the mix within healthcare. We're a very highly regulated organization. It's a bit more challenging for us to show the impact that we have ultimately on the...
on the bottom line, we do as far as getting patients to schedule and fulfill appointments and the money value that has. But the real key is having that open and transparent relationship with them. I think it's critical that compliance is aware of all of the different marketing.
tools and functions that you're using and you bring them in from the very beginning and get them comfortable with the process because it really needs to be a strong relationship and a team approach because when you do have that, it makes for things, it makes for more successful relationship.
Rebecca Colwell (20:42.133) Do you find that being in the space that you're in limits your ability to adopt AI tools yourself? Agentech execution or any of these, know, cutting edge tools?
Scott Orstad (20:57.122) I don't think it necessarily inhibits us. What it may do is we may not be able to be the first ones to try it. We may let others work out some of the kinks. But I think there's definitely a desire because there are tools where you even from an operational standpoint, the organization has adopted to make basic routine things like resetting passwords and things like that for patients and consumers easier by simply using AI tools.
we need sometimes the appointment reminders as well too. So we're trying to make things as easy and frictionless as possible for our patients. So there's the opportunity where AI can play a great benefit in those areas and others as well too, that there's definitely a willingness to embrace it, but it just needs the appropriate vetting so that it can be utilized appropriately and correctly. Because first and foremost, patient privacy is of our utmost.
importance to us and we just want to make sure that we're able to uphold that in a way that helps to benefit them as well too from an AI tool.
Rebecca Colwell (22:02.143) Scott, this was a fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed connecting with you today and we'd love to have you back again soon.
Scott Orstad (22:11.31) would love to be back, Rebecca. I enjoyed our conversation and I hope that you found some helpful information from it.
Rebecca Colwell (22:17.961) And if you found some information that was helpful today, fine, share with friends and join us again next week for the Visibility Brief. I will re-record that last section. Scott, you did great.
