Steward Health Care Partners With Yext to Improve Customer Engagement

Steward Health Care is a community-based healthcare organisation headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 2.2 million patients, 37 hospital campuses and 25 affiliated urgent care provider locations, the company provides access to both primary care physicians and a full range of specialists who are committed to meeting the needs of local patients. As an integrated, cost-effective, accountable care organisation (ACO), Steward is committed to providing the highest quality of patient care in the communities where patients actually live. Steward is widely recognised as a national leader in implementing a new model of integrated healthcare delivery and its model takes care of patients from wellness and care management, all the way through their end of life.

"We are the second largest healthcare provider in New England, by size and we are the fifth-largest employer in the state of Massachusetts," states Brian Carty, Chief Marketing Officer. "We have 3,500 doctors treating three million patients a year. People know what we stand for and that we are an alternative to the old model of delivering healthcare.

"When we founded Steward, there was room — if not a requirement — for a new model of actually delivering healthcare," explains Carty. "The old model of delivering healthcare with an academically-orientated hospital as the hub or focus, we think, is an antiquated model in terms of clinical delivery, in terms of economics, and in terms of patient convenience. Our hospitals can deliver 80–90% of what gets delivered at academic medical centres. It's the same quality but 20% cheaper."

Carty is keenly aware of the correlation between the experience Steward delivers online and overall patient satisfaction. "Being able to answer patients' questions online is key," he states, "for both our doctors and our patients." Patients today ask more questions when seeking medical care, and the questions are often more complex. Natural language queries like "doctor near me available now who takes Cigna" are on the rise. As a result, it becomes all the more critical for healthcare systems to make sure that they are able to provide accurate answers everywhere patients might be searching.

With locations serving more than 185 Massachusetts cities and towns, Steward needed a better way to connect patients with physicians who could actually serve their needs in their area. With Yext, Steward is able to update its consistently evolving physician and location information seamlessly — as well as to create individual intent pages for different facilities and physicians. This helps to make sure that patients find the right information wherever they search and that they can easily access the care they need in critical moments.

Yext enables healthcare systems such as Steward to manage the public facts about their physicians and facilities across their websites, internal systems and more than 150 maps, apps, search engines and social networks including Google, Apple, Amazon Alexa and Bing — which patients use to search for providers in critical moments of need. With 73% of high-intent traffic going to new services, Steward can make sure that its information is comprehensive and correct on both its website and across key third-party sites, helping it to surface in searches made across digital services.

Steward has also leveraged Yext to create and manage individual pages for physicians and facilities. This has had a major impact on search views. By creating local landing pages with structured data and linking third-party listings to those pages, search engines can associate all of that content on the page with Steward's corresponding listing. This boosts brand visibility and helps patients in need find relevant information they can act on — contributing to an increase in appointments booked with Steward physicians.

Steward has seen significant growth in brand visibility, web traffic and patient engagement since launching with Yext. With more than 1,600 physicians live on GMB in the first 4 months of 2019, the health organisation has seen 119% growth in Google search views compared to the same period in 2017 (the year that all locations were first fully launched on GMB). Steward has also seen 111% growth in website clicks and 74% growth in clicks-to-call over the same period.

With 270+ facilities live on GMB, Steward has experienced a 50% increase in clicks for directions — showing a direct link between patients finding Steward in an online search and actual intent to visit a Steward facility. And after launching the Yext Doctor Finder in January 2018, Steward's volume of requested appointments grew from an average of 290 per month, to 963 per month by April 2019 — an increase of 232%.

"It has been fantastic," says Colleen Walsh, Manager of Digital Communications at Steward. "Yext goes above and beyond. It's more than just a tool that provides listings. Yext is a platform that provides insight. We have clearly shown Steward can expand the top of its marketing funnel with Yext and we are now getting many more qualified leads for appointments."