Mount Sinai Creates High-Functioning MarCom Organization by Simplifying Structure
// By Sheryl S. Jackson //
As the marketing communications function has grown in health care over the years, many hospital systems find their MarCom organizations continually growing in responsibility and staff size, with no master plan for how everyone will work together.
David Feinberg, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer of Mount Sinai Health System
David Feinberg, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer of Mount Sinai Health System, and Karen Wish, vice president and chief marketing officer of Mount Sinai Hospitals Group and Network, described their journey to reorganize the Mount Sinai Health System’s marketing communication organization in “Creating a High-Performance MarCom Function,” a breakout session at the recent Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Virtual Summit.
With 42,000 employees, 7,200 physicians, eight hospitals, a medical school, 400 network outpatient practices, 4.1 million patient visits annually, and $8 billion in revenue annually, New York-based Mount Sinai Health System is a complex organization. In spite of that complexity, when Feinberg and Wish took steps to create a high-performance marketing communications function in the health system, they focused on simplicity.
When Feinberg and Wish arrived at Mount Sinai about 18 months ago, they found “a lot of good people doing a lot of great work” in the marketing communications department, but there were a lot of silos, says Feinberg: “The way it was working wasn’t quite right, which was nobody’s fault, but everyone was doing their thing in individual ways. There wasn’t a lot of coordination.”