Physician Onboarding: Four Steps in One Process

Nancy Vessell profile pic

by Nancy Vessell With 40 to 60 new physicians arriving every year to serve an eight-hospital system and its medical group, where 40 people are involved in physician recruitment, onboarding, orientation, and retention, the opportunity for “dropped balls” measures in the tons. That’s according to Jim Zache, vice president of physician recruiting and physician relations Read More

What Happens to Marketing When the Boundaries Between a Medical Institution and an Insurer Blur?

by Peter Hochstein Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, more hospitals may begin offering health insurance, while insurance com­panies may increasingly supply some limited health care services. True, a few organizations, perhaps most notably Kaiser Permanente, have explicitly and extensively offered both health care and health insurance for years. And some health plans offer their Read More

Dedicated Men’s Health Programs Can Reach Reluctant Consumers

by Kris Rusch “When it comes to health,” asserts an article in Harvard Men’s Health Watch, “males are the weaker sex throughout life.” Com­pared with women, men on average have more chronic illnesses, die at higher rates from diseases, and have a lower life expectancy. Men also take more risks with their health. They use Read More

For This Virginia Hospital, Safety Is on the Daily Agenda

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by Nancy Vessell If the marketing director of the 445-bed Winchester (VA) Medical Center needs to track down the hospital’s busy medical directors, he knows where he can find them between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. each day. It’s a sure bet they will be in the Daily Safety Call. So ingrained is this daily Read More

A New Model Attempts to Give Health Care Wings

by Cheryl L. Serra Imagine bringing health care to patients instead of requiring patients to travel to health care. Ernie Clevenger, co-founder and president of CareHere, LLC, did just that. The result? His company has a health care clinic with a retail component, the CareHere Walk-In Clinic and Wellness Store, located in the Nashville International Read More

Centralized Marketing: Building an Effective Structure

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by Nancy Vessell Marketing functions within hospital systems have run the spectrum from fully centralized at the corporate level to mostly autonomous at the local level. But as more hospitals fold themselves into systems, marketing is increasingly shifting toward centralization. “A lot of it is being driven by this crazy world of mergers and acquisitions,” Read More

Fast Takes: News & Trend Lines, March 2014

Workplace programs cut chronic disease costs, but savings from lifestyle change efforts elusive According to a new Rand Corporation study, workplace wellness programs can lower costs for employees with chronic diseases, but components of the programs that encourage adoption of healthier lifestyles may not reduce health care costs or lead to lower net savings. Examining Read More

Hospital Rewards Patients Who Take Care of Themselves

Diane Atwood

by Diane Atwood A man walks out of his doctor’s office with prescriptions to lower his blood pressure and choles­terol. He has been told that if he doesn’t lose at least 25 pounds, stop smoking, and start exercising, he’ll be at great risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. The odds of the man accomplishing Read More

Fast Takes: News & Trend Lines, February 2014

Next CEOs may come from outside the industry According to a survey conducted for executive search firm Ferguson Partners, health care executives who were asked to name the top three outside industries likely to produce tomorrow’s health system leaders chose finance, (92 percent), hospitality (55 percent), investment (40 percent), and pharmaceutical (33 percent). Manufacturing, information Read More

Los Angeles Area Hospital Finds Benefit in Event with Worldwide Exposure

by Mark S. Gothberg Why would the City of Hope, a Los Angeles area research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases, participate in the 125th Rose Parade on New Year’s Day? For pretty much the same reasons it has been involved in this world-famous parade, held in Pasadena, CA, for the Read More

The Best Way to Be an Effective Storyteller in This Digital Age

by Dan Dunlop The best marketers have always been accomplished storytellers, and that is still the case today. The stories they craft are meaningful and connect with the audience in a manner that meets some fundamental need – educational, informational, emotional, or entertaining. The most effective stories allow the audience members to become part of Read More

KidzStuff: Much More Than Stuff for Children

by Diane Atwood How comfortable would you be clipping the nails of a fidgety two-year-old? This simple task makes many parents fairly anxious and has landed more than one child in the emergency room with a cut or infected nail bed. There had to be a safer and easier-to-use tool than regular nail clippers, thought Read More

The Health Care World Series

Ritch K. Eich, PhD

by Ritch K. Eich, PhD In the game of professional baseball there are two levels of contest and two levels of play: the World Series and everything else. This model translates now and again to organizational management – though hardly as often as business authors would like us to believe – and under extreme circumstances Read More

QR Codes Are Obsolete

Michele von Dambrowski

by Michele von Dambrowski Not only are Quick Response codes dead, they “should have never lived,” claims Dean Browell, PhD, execu­tive vice president for the social media strategy firm Feedback in Richmond, VA. Browell likens QR codes to the ill-fated CueCat, a cat-shaped code reader that plugged into a computer like a mouse. Wired and Read More

A Massive, Four-State Health System Rebranding Effort Leads to Simple, Informative, Cheerfully Straightforward Advertising

by Peter Hochstein So there it was, a sprawling health care behemoth, at first glance scarcely recognizable as a single entity. It was named Novant Health, created in 1997 by the merger of two North Carolina organizations, Carolina Medicorp and Presbyterian Healthcare, into a single system. Over time, other organizations joined Novant Health until the Read More

Are You Prepared for the Next Generation of Service Lines?

by Cecily Lohmar The last decade has seen con­siderable growth in health care service lines, most often with the objective of expanding the more profitable services. At the same time, there have been numerous market changes – with more to come. Service lines have been an effective model for im­proving quality and cost in the Read More

Ten Sites or Apps That Exemplify Good Use of Mobile Health Care

Michele von Dambrowski

by Michele von Dambrowski Everyone knows that mobile is hot, observes Christian Twiste, vice president of interactive services at BlueSpire Strategic Marketing. But what everyone struggles with, including large Internet companies, is how best to address the different ways that people interact with their mobile devices. “A lot of mobile users are either bored, busy, Read More