Mount Sinai Goes Back To Basics With New Definition of MarCom

David Feinberg, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer of Mount Sinai Health System

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, and Karen Wish, vice president and chief marketing officer of Mount Sinai Hospitals Group and Network, recently described their journey to reorganize the Mount Sinai Health System’s marketing communication organization.

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.

Feinberg and Wish discovered that marketing was not seen strategically throughout the organization, and there was misunderstanding of marketing’s role within the organization. “A lot of people thought of marketing as advertising,” Feinberg explains. “It wasn’t looked at as a coordinated, integrated function that helps advance health system strategies, goals, and objectives.”

The first step taken to reorganize the marketing communications organization was to define “marketing,” says Feinberg. Because of the variety of target audiences, the definition needed to apply to medical school students, potential students, patients, community, doctors, staff, influencers, donors, and the general public.

After researching a number of sources to find a good definition for the MarCom role at Mount Sinai and not finding any that fit, Mount Sinai created its own specific definition. Read the full story now to learn what it was:

Mount Sinai Creates High-Functioning MarCom Organization by Simplifying Structure

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