OhioHealth Perfects Practitioner Listings and Manages Events with Yext

OhioHealth is a healthcare system spanning the majority of Ohio. Its network consists of 29,000 associates, physicians, and volunteers; 11 hospitals; and more than 200 other health services, including ambulatory sites, hospice, home health, and medical equipment. "Our job is to make healthcare easy, accessible, and affordable," says Yvonne Rayburn, Digital Media Manager. "The team at OhioHealth is made up of great people who truly, truly care about making healthcare better for every single patient and customer that we encounter."

Rayburn introduced OhioHealth to Yext when she was working at the healthcare system's digital agency, and later joined OhioHealth full-time to manage a marketing stack of which Yext is a vital component.

OhioHealth first recognized their need for management, verification, and distribution of brand information in 2016.

"We have hundreds of facilities that include everything from hospitals to free-standing emergency departments, to urgent care, to rehabilitation clinics, to fitness centers, to physician practices. And in addition to that, we have several hundred physicians that are employed by OhioHealth," explains Rayburn.

Rayburn explained that if the public facts about each of these facilities and practitioners were not up to date and discoverable across search and listings services, then OhioHealth would be missing out on patients — and patients would not be able to find the care they needed.

"It was a challenge to make sure that the information for our brand, facilities, and physicians was easily accessible to people searching for us online. It's a very difficult job to keep all of that updated," explains Rayburn. "It was a very manual process. The majority of what we were managing was Google only. So all of the other publishers and listings out there weren't getting the proper level of attention from us."

After doing due diligence on a range of solutions, Yext emerged as Rayburn's top choice for OhioHealth. "Yext really understood the challenges in the healthcare space, and therefore, we felt that they were a really good partner to bring on board and to grow with us."

Yext was designed for the evolving digital patient journey and today's search experiences. Yext helps health systems keep their practitioner information accurate and discoverable on Google, Yelp, Vitals, Wellness.com, and more than 150 major multi-category sites.

The partnership between OhioHealth and Yext grew with the introduction of Yext for Events. OhioHealth managed a wide variety of events spanning the entire healthcare system, which translated into another challenge of managing event information.

"We manage over 200 events across many different teams with OhioHealth. So the idea of having one central hub where we could list all of our events was really attractive to us."

Rayburn chose to use Yext as her beta for a central source of truth for OhioHealth events — and for a way to increase the reach of event details. "A lot of our activities support the community, and so the more exposure that we can get to folks within the OhioHealth footprint, the better. We really want to be part of the communities that we're in. Trying to get across more event publishers to get more awareness of what we're offering is a great opportunity that Yext brings to the table."

Rayburn is now confident that OhioHealth's brand information is managed effectively and efficiently. "Until we partnered with Yext, it was a significant pain point. Now, if we have one physician practicing in three different locations, we're able to mark which is the primary, secondary, so on. It absolutely was something that did not happen until we had partnered with Yext. The results have been impressive." A custom API connects Yext with OhioHealth's credentialing system, ensuring that physician information is updated every 24 hours across about 4,600 listings.

Duplicate Suppression, which ensures that physicians and facilities do not have redundant or conflicting listings online, is another essential service Yext provides to OhioHealth. "We have a lot of physicians come to us from another private practice or from another health system. Being able to manage that information, and having an amazing account team at Yext, has helped minimize errors and headaches. Our brand information is so accurate."

"Being able to do a bulk upload of our events is really helpful. It definitely saves time. It's great to have an overview, inside our system and externally, of all the amazing things that we're doing to support our organization and the community."

Yext also allows Rayburn to create not just event detail pages on the OhioHealth domain, but event listings across sites like Facebook and Eventbrite, saving time and increasing awareness of the health system's events. "In 30 days, we had 800 people take action on event listings — that's 800 people that we would not have captured without the Yext partnership."