Prioritizing Empathy Helps Health Systems Communicate More Effectively with Patients
Ethnographic research starts with the assumption that consumers are experts on themselves. Beebe Healthcare and Baylor Scott & White Health use this approach to gain deeper understanding of patients and their context.
// By Ron Shinkman //
Empathizing with patients is a better way to connect with and market to them. That was the primary takeaway from “Fuel Marketing Impact Using Mapping, Personas & Patient Understanding,” a presentation at the Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit 2023 in Austin in April.
Christina Deidesheimer, chief marketing communications officer for Beebe Healthcare
Christina Deidesheimer, chief marketing communications officer for Beebe Healthcare, a two-hospital system in Delaware, observes the juggling act that health care marketing entails. Providers want to communicate to potential customers about new doctors, new technologies, and new procedures. But patients may want to hear about something else.
“To do the best thing for our patients is to understand them as people, with full lives outside our health system. What are their needs, wants, feelings?” Deidesheimer asks. “And that’s really where empathy and understanding enhance a traditional marketing approach.”
Co-presenter Jordis Rosenquest, vice president of brand development and planning at Baylor Scott & White Health, heartily concurs. “When we think of our patients more holistically — beyond their diagnosis, for example — we better understand how to talk about health care in the context of their lives and what’s most important to them.”