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This article was written for Greystone.Net by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer and event strategist. 

A lot of times, we associate the word “innovative” with technology and/or doing something that nobody else has done before.

But Linda Ho, who spent twenty-eight years at UCLA Health and two years at UCSF Health, has proven that innovation is often about seeing an old problem more clearly than everyone else. This year, she was nominated into The Healthcare Internet Hall of Fame (HIHOF) as an Innovative Individual.

This award honors people who have been in the industry for at least ten years, served as leaders and brought significant change and contributions to the industry.

“Linda is the consummate professional who brings structure, smarts and kindness to any role she is in,” says Ahava Leibtag, Founder and CEO of Ahava Media and chair of HIHOF. “She always looks to uplevel talent and grow the future skills necessary for a marketing technologist in healthcare marketing. Anyone who has worked with her can see the magic she inspires.”

Ho, the Director, Marketing Technology, Operations & Analytics at UCSF Health, hasn’t needed a bigger budget or a brand-new tool to make her mark. She asks questions no one else bothers to ask (like, “After a new mom gets discharged from the hospital, why doesn’t she hear from her care team again?”), studies the budget cycle carefully and directly links her marketing efforts to hospital revenue.

Tanya Andreadis, a former CMO at UCLA Health, and now SVP and Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at University of Miami, says that Ho’s recognition is well-deserved.

“Linda led all of marketing technology on my team at UCLA Health, and she was always a problem solver who would keep working until she found the answer,” Andreadis says. “She sees the problem clearly, builds the solution and shows the results.”

For the next generation of healthcare marketers, Ho shared a few tips on embracing an innovative mindset.

Show and tell how you’re spending your budget

Ho says it’s important to show how your marketing dollars are spent. If you don’t, you won’t be able to prove why you need more capital dollars to support new patient volume and service lines.

At UCLA Health, she and her team built a live Tableau dashboard tracking new patient volume by source: website traffic, campaign clicks and QR codes scanned at Dodgers games. The dashboard was consistently updated and C-suite leaders could look at it at any time. The dashboard tied everything back to revenue.

“For example, with the dashboard, it made it easier for our marketing team to say, ‘We brought in $45 million in new patient revenue,’” Ho says. “Many times, people don’t know all the work your team is doing and this dashboard was just a way to show how our work is bringing revenue into the hospital.”

Another budgeting tip: Pay attention to the budget cycle. She says her biggest marketing projects didn’t start with dedicated funding, but with leftover money. At UCLA Health, the fiscal year ran from July through June. She paid attention to final few months, to see what money was left unspent.

“You need to be in tune with your budget, year-over-year, and figure out the best time to get extra money for testing, launching a pilot or trying something new,” Ho says.

Let the data make your case for more funding

A pilot turns into a bigger program if you can prove it worked.

“How do you know that your website did well or your CRM campaign did well?” Ho says. “It always has to go back to what we measured and how did the data prove it.”

For example, at UCLA Health, she created a maternity-focused marketing automation program after winning internal seed funding through a Shark Tank–style employee innovation challenge contest.

She used existing clinical data (discharge status, delivery type, breastfeeding plans) to trigger personalized follow-up content automatically. For example, a healthy mom and baby discharged the next day would get a congratulations message paired with a list of four nearby UCLA Health pediatricians (each with an online scheduling link). Moms got messages on how to feed their baby. C-section patients got different recovery guidance than those who delivered vaginally.

“The campaign was effective because I could tie every touchpoint back to measurable engagement and show how many new moms transitioned to establish primary care with UCLA Health from the messages,” Ho says.

Fix problems nobody else thinks about

When she arrived at UCSF Health, the provider directory was updated manually. New doctors were waiting up to three months to appear online. She’d already automated the same process at UCLA Health more than a decade earlier, so she wanted to check it off the list immediately.

“I introduced automation, like pulling data on a regular feed from a source of truth, which  automates out on a new doctor,” Ho says. “If they’re starting tomorrow, they’re on the website tomorrow.”

Recently, her UCSF Health team used AI to figure out what conditions a specialist treats, without relying on doctors to self-report. By analyzing the most recent year of de-identified clinical notes against a standardized medical language system, her team can determine that a neurosurgeon treats pituitary tumors 90% of the time versus another condition 60% of the time. Then, they can put those on the provider’s web profile.

“Patients are searching on ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity,” Ho says. “A patient is going to search, ‘pituitary tumors’ and you want to make sure the right doctor is flagged for that expertise.”

Let patients point you toward your next idea

Ho says she’s most inspired by hearing patient perspectives. At UCLA Health, they had a PFAC (Patient Family Advisory Council), where she’d frequently ask the group questions about a new app they were going to roll out or pain points in their MyChart account.

At UCLA Health, she helped build a consolidated feedback form for C-suite leaders to look at. It pulled in patient feedback from the website, Yelp, Google and social media. Every night, the report would go out to the C-suite.

“When I review patient feedback, I always think, ‘Do we have a solution to solve their problem?’” Ho says. “But you can’t hear about these problems, if you aren’t asking.”

Pattie Cuen, a former CMO at UCLA Health, and now the SVP at Jarrard, Inc., says that what makes Ho stand out is the empathy she brings to every project she works on.

“She understand patients not as customers, but as people who are navigating vulnerable and difficult moments in their lives,” Cuen says. “This is at the core of Linda’s values as a person, colleague and leader. Linda’s empathy drives her to find solutions that make the patient journey compassionate, connected and human.”