Anatomy of a Campaign is a Freshpaint series that takes you inside real healthcare marketing campaigns – breaking down the strategy, execution, and measurement behind what made them work. In each edition, we deconstruct a real-world campaign so you can:

• Understand the strategic thinking behind it
• See how it was activated
• Learn how performance was measured
• Walk away with practical, transferable insights for your own campaigns

OU Health is Oklahoma's only academic health system — the state's sole NCI-designated cancer center, only freestanding children's hospital, and the institution that trains nearly 80% of the state's physicians.

Heather Linder, VP of Brand and Growth Marketing, arrived from Chicago in fall 2024. She found a system with extraordinary clinical capabilities that most of the state didn't fully know — or trust.

Her team launched a CRM-led precision marketing program targeting cancer screenings: reactivating lapsed patients, reaching high-risk consumers who'd never touched the system, and routing mobile screening units to rural communities — while building the measurement infrastructure to trace every tactic to downstream revenue.

This is the anatomy of that campaign — and what academic health system marketers can learn from it.

Anatomy of the Campaign

The Market Context

Location: Statewide — Oklahoma City and rural communities across a highly dispersed state

Practice Type: Academic health system and NCI-designated cancer center

Challenge: Reaching a rural, Medicaid-heavy population skeptical of a system they've historically associated with safety-net care — and proving marketing's value in dollars, not impressions.

Inside the Campaign's Growth Engine:

• The CRM segmented patients by relationship stage — existing, lapsed, and never-touched
• Mobile screening units brought low-dose CT and mammography to communities hours from the nearest facility
• Community partnerships with tribal nations and employers extended reach beyond digital channels
• Risk and propensity scoring identified high-risk consumers before they ever became patients
• Marketing tied its value directly to downstream revenue, not clicks

1. Campaign Objective: Change Cancer Outcomes by Getting People Screened Earlier

Oklahoma residents have been presenting with stage four lung cancer — inoperable, often untreatable — because they didn't know a chronic cough or a 20-year smoking history was an indication of a serious disease.

The Stephenson Cancer Center was founded by state mandate in 2001 with a charge to serve all of Oklahoma and achieve NCI comprehensive designation. That mission gave the campaign its north star: get the right people screened before disease advances, not after it's too late to act.

Some patients needed a scheduling nudge. Others needed years of trust-building first. The campaign had to accommodate both.

2. Audience Strategy: Segment by Relationship Stage, Not Just Demographics

Heather's team broke the audience into three distinct segments — each requiring a different intervention.

1. Existing patients with gaps in preventive care: Women over 40 who'd never had a mammogram and were already in Epic, already consented. A CRM-driven multi-touch journey converted them at near-zero cost — the highest-ROI segment in the program.
2. Lapsed patients: People who'd used OU Health for a complex episode years ago and hadn't returned. Reactivation here meant surfacing services newly relevant to their age or condition — a reminder of trust already earned.
3. Unconverted consumers: People with no system relationship at all. Heather's team layered third-party claims data and propensity modeling onto first-party EMR data — de-identified and re-identified behind OU Health's firewall, compliantly — to reach high-risk consumers with messages calibrated to actual health risk, not demographic guesswork.

The segmentation logic had to be settled before a single message was written to ensure target audiences found the outreach relevant and directly actionable. 

3. Infrastructure Strategy: Bring Screening to Where Patients Live

Expecting rural Oklahomans — some two and a half hours from the nearest OU Health facility — to drive in for a screening wasn't a viable demand to make. The campaign embedded a different assumption: move the system to meet people.

The Stephenson Cancer Center's mobile units — coach-converted vehicles with low-dose CT scanners and mammography technology — became the physical backbone of the campaign. Geo-targeted digital outreach told communities when and where units would arrive. Employer partnerships put units in front of workforces. Tribal health networks brought screening into communities with their own established care relationships.

"We're not asking people to drive to Oklahoma City if you're up in the panhandle and it's two and a half hours for you," Heather says. "That's not realistic, and I'd rather you get screened close to home."

Awareness tied to a specific time, place, and access point is a fundamentally different campaign than awareness alone.

4. Data Orchestration: Govern the Signal Chain from Risk to Appointment

The campaign runs on a three-layer data stack — first-party EMR data, third-party claims data, and machine learning-driven risk scoring — connected through a CRM that writes back to Epic.

1. First-party EMR data powers reactivation: who's been seen, for which symptoms or conditions, and when.
2. Third-party claims data reaches consumers outside the system whose insurance history suggests an intersecting health trajectory.
3. Risk scoring predicts who's approaching a threshold — surfacing the right outreach before someone arrives in a late-stage crisis.

The data stack is also a trust-protection mechanism. "The trust is the glass jar of marbles," Heather says. "You spend years dropping marbles in — then you send one wrong email and the whole thing shatters." Knowing not to send a medical weight loss email to someone who didn't ask for it matters as much as knowing who to target.

5. Measurement: Trace Every Tactic to Downstream Revenue

Most healthcare marketing measures at the top of the funnel — clicks, form fills, time on page. Heather's team measures at the bottom: appointments created, revenue generated, and the delta between projected and actual collections.

Because the CRM connects to Epic, the team can trace a specific tactic to an appointment to a downstream revenue figure. Not just "this campaign worked" — but this tactic drove these appointments.

"I have always known this has been valuable," Heather says, "but I can tell you exactly how many dollars worth this work is."

That granularity enables real-time optimization — underperforming tactics get cut three weeks in, not six months later. In a margin-pressured environment where Medicaid cuts are looming, it's also what keeps marketing at the table when budgets tighten.

What This Campaign Proves

The question every healthcare marketer needs to ask isn't just, "how do we reach this audience?" It's: "how do we make care findable, trustworthy, and proximate for the people who most need it?"

Precision and empathy aren't opposing forces here. The infrastructure that prevents a mistargeted email is the same infrastructure that routes a mobile CT unit to within range of a 55-year-old smoker who doesn't know he qualifies for a free lung screening. Precision serves the mission.

From this campaign, Heather distills 5 principles that health system marketers can apply in any market.

Heather's five tactical takeaways are:

1. Start with patients you already have — reactivation is the highest-ROI move available to most health systems.
2. Segment by relationship stage, not demographics — a lapsed patient and an unconverted consumer need fundamentally different interventions.
3. Match channel to the nature of the message — clinical communication belongs in clinical tools; marketing belongs in marketing platforms.
4. Connect your CRM to your EMR — clicks don't tell you what screenings you generated.
5. Prove downstream revenue, not impressions — the budget conversations ahead require you to speak in dollars.

Together, these principles can turn marketing from a cost center defending its existence into a revenue function that earns its own reinvestment.

Ready to build the measurement infrastructure that compliantly ties your campaigns to revenue?

Healthcare marketing teams are being asked to do more with less — and to prove, precisely, that what they're doing works. Book a demo to see how health systems are using Freshpaint to connect campaign-level data to downstream revenue and protect the data relationships that make precision patient marketing possible.