Hint: The Secret to Transforming Health Care Is Hiding in Plain Sight
// By William Maples, M.D. //
Your marketing department relies on strong communication skills and effective message development to promote your services and draw more patients to your facility. But have you thought much about training the rest of your staff and clinicians to be effective communicators with one another and also with your target audience? If not, you could be missing some important opportunities to earn higher satisfaction ratings and better reimbursements as the health care field continues to evolve toward more value-based care.
Missing the Mark
Consider this. For more than a decade, the American health care system has been challenged to deliver timely, high-quality, safe, and compassionate care at a cost that is financially responsible and sustainable. Despite the repeated calls to re-engineer health care by investing billions of dollars in process-based Lean and Six Sigma approaches and whiz-bang technologies, real transformation has eluded us. Doing more of the same will not get us where our patients want and need us to go. This means marketing folks have a unique responsibility—and opportunity—to help direct their organizations in new, and more effective, ways.
Here’s the secret: transforming health care means training your clinical staff to turn to our patients and their families—who are your customers—to understand, from their perspective, what matters most, in addition to safe and desired outcomes, of course.