A Children’s Hospital in Boston Pulls Out All the Emotional Stops. Result: Striking Increases in Web Traffic, Enhanced Staff Enthusiasm, and a Powerful Brand Image

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // In most other markets, the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center would be in the catbird seat. The 94-bed hospital is part of a larger teaching hospital. It’s connected to a prestigious medical school. And it has won its fair share of awards and Read More

New Online Billing/Payment System Pays Off for Patients and Staff at a Pennsylvania Health System

// By Lisa Ellis // It’s common today for people to buy their food and clothing online, and to arrange their travel reservations through web-based services. Now many health systems also allow patients to view and pay their health care bills online. But this process can be complicated if it isn’t managed well, and can Read More

7 Messages Gleaned from Uber (and Life) That Can Help Drive Health Care Marketing Efforts to Hispanic Consumers

// By Dirk G. Schroeder, ScD, MPH // Nowadays, when I travel for a conference or meeting, I don’t rent a car, preferring just to jump in an “Uber.” I often end up with a Hispanic driver and use the ride to conduct an informal, in-depth interview about the U.S. health care system. This can Read More

How One Health Care Organization Uses Predictive Analytics to Avoid Growing Pains

// By Lisa Ellis // Placing your service lines, retail clinics, and outpatient facilities in optimal locations may mean the difference between success and failure in today’s competitive marketplace. These days, it’s no longer enough to make decisions about where to locate new offerings based on available sites or what an organization “thinks” might work. Read More

How to Dispel Stereotypes in Health Care Marketing

In the wake of the Orlando tragedy, it’s more important than ever for health care organizations to keep their messages all-inclusive. Here’s how. // By Sara Tack // Hospitals and health systems are responsible for taking care of anyone and everyone regardless of race, religion, gender orientation, or age. That’s the nature of health care: Read More

Embracing Collective Differences to Build One Cohesive Health Care Brand

// By Daniel P. Stevens, DMD, PhD, MBA // Health care is changing—and so are health care brand campaigns. Building a strong health care brand in an environment that is undergoing drastic change is challenging: the switch from fee for service to value-based care; the emergence of accountable care organizations; the consolidation of hospitals—the list Read More

Advertising—and a Revolutionary Refund Policy—Help to Change the Brand Experience at Geisinger Health System

Notable Health Care Advertising  // By Peter Hochstein // How fast can you turn a ship around—a really big ship? Here’s what happened at Geisinger Health System, with 12 hospital campuses; 1,472 licensed beds combined; over 2.6 million outpatient visits annually; two research centers; 30,000 employees; 1,600 employed physicians; plus a 510,000-member health plan. All Read More

How to Find Value in Personas for Health Care Marketing

From Research to Personas in 3 Steps // By Matt Hummel // A recent Accenture report found a significant correlation between superior patient experiences and higher margins for hospitals of every type and size. In an increasingly choice-driven health care industry, it’s no wonder that “patient-centricity” is a buzzing topic for a variety of stakeholders—from Read More

Making That Sale: Taking a Retail Approach to Health Care

// By Lisa D. Ellis // It used to be that if you built a good health system, people would come. But in today’s hectic world, many organizations find it necessary to extend their services to places their patients frequent instead. In fact, these days, organizations providing the highest-quality care are a given, but how that Read More

Par for the Course: Why Rightsizing Your Operations to Fit the Level of Reimbursement Can Help You Earn The Best Score

// By Dennis Knox // As any golfer knows, even the most powerful swing won’t get your ball where it needs to go if you don’t follow through on the backswing. This premise also holds true off the golf course. In fact, health care organizations today need to keep the idea of follow-through in mind Read More

How One Children’s Hospital Doctored Its Employee Newsletter Back to Health

Plus 6 Tips for Success with Your Organization’s Newsletter // By Lisa D. Ellis // What’s the best way to nurse an ailing employee newsletter back to health? For Miami Children’s Health System (MCHS), the solution to overhaul an existing internal publication in dire need of an update was to use an updated software solution Read More

The Power of Hard-to-Ignore Photography Drives Just About Everything in a Successful Traffic-Building Campaign for One Chicago Hospital

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // What’s the most important part of a print ad? The headline? The story it tells? The news it contains? The offer it makes, if it makes one? A unique selling proposition? A few years back, the Little Company of Mary Hospital, a 298-bed institution on the Read More

Realizing Vision Through Research: How Lawrence General Hospital Used Research to Help Elevate Its Brand

// By Jill McDonald Halsey, APR; Dan Dunlop; and Jeff Steblea // “City of the Damned.” That’s the magazine headline that greeted Jill McDonald Halsey when she arrived as the new Chief Marketing & Communication Officer for Lawrence General Hospital in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city of Lawrence had been dealing with a variety of challenges, Read More

Marketing to Health Care Marketers and Providers: 5 Steps to Help Get Your Foot in the Door (and Hopefully Keep It There!)

// By Jeannie Lewis // If you’re a medical supply company, compliance software manufacturer, or other provider of health care products or services targeted to hospitals, health care organizations, long-term facilities, or other types of care providers, it’s important to understand the current realities of the marketplace so you can position yourself in the best Read More

Put Your Health Care Organization’s Stamp on Direct Mail Marketing

// By Ritch K. Eich // One way to put a personal stamp on your marketing efforts is by using direct mail in the most strategic way. Direct mail allows health care organizations to target and reach a defined audience in a service area or community. A hybrid of publicity and advertising, it is one Read More

An Elephant, The Turtles, Emotional vs. Rational Advertising—and a Hospital Marketing Success Story in Georgia

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // I usually try to interview hospital marketing departments and their advertising agencies for this column. And I often ask them identical questions. I justify this with an analogy concerning two people viewing an elephant from opposite ends. One party tells you the animal’s most notable feature Read More

How One Health System Puts Affordable Care to Work for Small-Business Employees

// By Lisa D. Ellis // Piedmont Health Services really means business, especially when it comes to protecting the health of the community. Back in 2009, it started a unique partnership with Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce to provide access to more affordable health services for employees of small businesses and their families. Since the Read More

Read All About It: Sharp HealthCare Ventures Into the News Business

// By Lisa D. Ellis // What happens to medical supplies and equipment once the items expire? How can you mix medications and supplements safely? What are some healthful and quick lunch recipes? These are just a few of the timely topics covered on Sharp Health News, a new website run by Sharp HealthCare, a Read More

Does Your Health Care Brand Need a Facelift?

6 Ways to Make a Good Thing Even Better // By Lisa D. Ellis // How do you handle the pressures of marketing your health care organization’s products and services in 2016? With the growing emphasis on digital storytelling, social media efforts, inbound marketing, and patient-centered care all competing for your limited attention, you and Read More

From Urgent Care, to Managed Care, to “Thought Leadership,” Crystal Run Health Keeps Its Corner of the World Covered

Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // This somewhat complicated story starts, at least for me, with a clever graphic trick on a highway billboard. The billboard displays the word “OOPS?” in an upward-slanted, rounded rectangle. And then the word “OUCH!” in a similar but downward-slanted rectangle. Adjacent to OOPS? and OUCH! is Read More

Covering New Ground: How Access Health CT Carved Inroads in Uncharted Territory

// By Lisa D. Ellis // Health care marketers often look to their peers for examples to help guide their efforts to bring people in to access their programs or services. But when Access Health CT (Connecticut’s state-run health exchange) came into being in 2012 to serve as a statewide exchange making affordable health care Read More

7 Tips to Improve Patient Experience Through Life Stories

You can help your patients become authors of their own life stories. These tips from Beth Sanders, BA, Founder and CEO of LifeBio and Dr. Daniel C. Potts, FAAN, Founder and President of the Cognitive Dynamics Foundation will help get you started and guide your efforts:

Why Engaging Patients to Tell Their Life Stories Can Lead to Happier Endings

// By Lisa D. Ellis // How much do you really know about your patients? If you and your staff haven’t asked the people you treat to talk about their personal experiences, their families, their careers, and the things they care about, you could be missing a valuable opportunity to connect with them on a Read More

Create a Health Care Culture That Bridges the Physician-Administration Divide

// By Lisa D. Ellis // Dr. David Birdsall, Vice President of CEP America: When is the last time your C-suite reached out to your medical staff to find out what they want and need? If the answer is “never” (or at least not anytime recently that you can remember), you could be missing out Read More

Racing to Wellness [Special Report]

Mastering the Role of Marketing in a Changing Health Care Environment

An Exclusive Report from Strategic Health Care Marketing

// By Susan Dubuque //

These days, says health care marketing expert Susan Dubuque, health care organizations across the country are racing to stake their claims as champions of wellness:

They shout, “We are no longer dedicated to treating you when you’re sick or injured. Now we are committed to keeping you well—and out of the hospital.” The unspoken words: Like our financial lives depend on it.

What is the best approach for health care marketers to calm the frenzy, she asks, and help their organizations remain focused and smart?

In this exclusive report, Dubuque, a nationally recognized expert in health care marketing and a member of the Strategic Health Care Marketing Editorial Advisory Board, deftly examines this question in three thoughtful chapters. We know you will appreciate her take on what “wellness” means to health care consumers these days, how to align wellness with
your strategic goals, and more.

Read More »