by Barbara S. Long, APR For anyone involved in providing health care, having the roles reversed and becoming a patient or family member of a patient can be an eye-opening experience. Health care is not always a high-functioning, seamless system. In fact, at the bedside, you will experience cracks in the system that can make Read More
by Diane Atwood Akron General Health System shares the northeastern Ohio landscape with some big health care players, including Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals. Akron General Medical Center, a 532-bed teaching and research center, is one of several entities that make up the not-for-profit system. A major challenge, as it is for most marketers, is Read More
by Dan Fredricks Sour Grapes A hungry fox tried to reach some clusters of grapes that he saw hanging from a vine trained on a tree, but they were too high. So he went off and comforted himself by saying, “They weren’t ripe anyhow.” Moral: In the same way some men, when they fail through Read More
by Michele von Dambrowski A former marketing executive for Nike and Starbucks, Scott Bedbury entertained attendees of the 18th National Healthcare Marketing Strategies Summit with stories of the transformation of an elitist athletic shoe company and the reinvention of the coffee category. Author of A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in Read More
by Peter Hochstein In recent months, this column has discussed several hospital advertising campaigns whose creators would sooner impale themselves on a scalpel than show a piece of medical equipment or a doctor wearing scrubs or a white coat. A typical defense of their position is that one advertising campaign featuring doctors and equipment looks Read More
by Barbara S. Long, APR There is no doubt that “smart” is the latest buzzword in technology. Smartphones, and increasingly smartcars, are commonplace. It’s easy to foresee a time in the near future when we’ll all use smart technology to control our home, work, and leisure environments with the blink of an eye or a Read More
by Michele von Dambrowski Consider these statements made by two speakers at a session of the 18th National Healthcare Marketing Strategies Summit in Scottsdale, AZ, earlier this year: “The ROI on internal branding is significantly higher than what you might achieve with external communications for probably 30 percent of the spend.” – Rob Rosenberg, President, Read More
by Sheryl S. Jackson Only direct word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family beat online reviews as the most trusted source of information, according to a 2012 Pepperdine University study. Even after receiving a personal recommendation, 86 percent of survey respondents say they would also use an online source to research a business or professional before Read More
by Deborah Borfitz In May 2012, Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park, MD, joined a handful of hospitals testing WellTransitions, a post-discharge program being developed by Walgreens to help increase medication adherence and reduce preventable readmissions. More than a dozen hospitals were on board for the program’s rollout in October. Given outcomes to date, and Read More
by Deborah Borfitz Shared medical appointments have been heralded as a way to ease the primary care shortage, by having doctors see up to two dozen patients at once. As it turns out, these appointments not only can improve access to care, but also can improve care quality – at least for patients with chronic Read More
by Michele von Dambrowski How do you get twentysomethings to curb irresponsible alcoholic consumption and its unfortunate consequences? In two cases discussed at a session of the 18th National Healthcare Marketing Strategies Summit held in May, it was not the way that the state government agencies envisioned when they commissioned behavioral change (or social marketing) Read More
Consumer demand spurs urgent care center growth According to a new qualitative study conducted in six metropolitan areas by the Center for Studying Health System Change, the growth of urgent care centers is driven heavily by consumer demand for convenient access to care. At the same time, hospitals view owning urgent care centers as a Read More
by Sheryl S. Jackson While hospitals throughout the country look for ways to manage their online reputation on a wide range of review sites, an 86-bed rural community hospital invites patients to post reviews directly on the facility’s website. “We have always focused on patient-centered care and are constantly looking for feedback from our patients,” Read More
by Sheryl S. Jackson Online review sites provide opportunities for providers to respond quickly to individual complaints and compliments, as well as to identify overarching customer service issues that need to be addressed throughout the organization. Maintaining an online reputation requires the same thoughtful, strategic approach required for any marketing communications initiative, but the real-time Read More
by Deborah Borfitz Since 1992, 170 acute care hospitals have undergone rigorous evaluation and orientation exercises to become affiliated with the Planetree network. Thirty-eight facilities have attained formal Planetree designation, available since 2008, which requires passionate and systemwide support of the Planetree care model and holds hospitals to measurable standards for high-quality, compassionate care. The Read More
by Peter Hochstein You may think of the remote control that operates your TV as a useful device. Peter Connolly, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Saint Peter’s Healthcare System in New Brunswick, NJ, regards it a landmine. “Probably the most powerful tool out there is the remote control,” Connolly says, clearly respectful Read More
by Nancy Vessell When Alegent Creighton Health introduced the first online calculator enabling consumers to find their out-of-pocket costs for many procedures, the novelty attracted national attention to this Omaha, NE, innovator. Some 20,000 people logged on in 2007 to see what they would be billed to have a baby or a nose job or Read More
// By Nancy Vessell // For the past decade, David Marlowe, principal of Strategic Marketing Concepts, based in Ellicott City, MD, has encouraged health care providers to consider pricing their services more strategically in order to gain market share. Here he answers questions about the latest in strategic pricing. First, what is strategic pricing, as Read More
by Michele von Dambrowski “ROI should always be tied to dollars,” Chris Boyer, AVP of digital strategy for North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, NY, points out. “If you don’t measure ROI, don’t worry – your successor will,” quips Boyer, who also serves as an external advisory board member for the Mayo Clinic Center Read More
by Diane Atwood Tamara Green still remembers a client she saw when she was a health educator fresh out of college. “All the information I had,” she recalls, “was that she was 32 years old, weighed 350 pounds, and had cholesterol issues and diabetes.” The first time they met, Green asked the woman about her Read More
by Michele von Dambrowski “We had relatively low patient engagement … outside of the clinic setting,” says Mark Rothwell, vice president of marketing and communications for Dean Clinic, giving one reason why the 107-year-old Madison, WI, organization began an online patient community. Patient engagement, including a two-way dialogue, is critical to Dean Clinic’s brand value, Read More
by Peter Hochstein If you read between the lines of what Wayne Clark says, you might conclude that when he arrived as vice president of community relations and marketing at Legacy Health in 2008, the most prominent local candidate for life support was the system’s branding. Clark commissioned a perception research study for the Portland, Read More
// By Deborah Borfitz // A report from the Center for Studying Health System Change, published in the April edition of Health Affairs, concludes that hospitals are shifting their competitive focus to strategies that will give them a foothold in new geographic areas with well-insured populations. Under debate is how the employed strategies, ranging from Read More
by Sheryl S. Jackson Twenty years ago, industry-sponsored clinical trials were conducted through academic medical centers. As pharmaceutical, device, and biotech companies pushed to get products through testing phases and onto the market, the value of opening trial participation to physicians at community hospitals became clear. “Today, nearly 70 percent of pharmaceutical- and device-sponsored clinical Read More
by Peter Hochstein The big idea happened because Rick Ender sometimes takes his work home. One evening Ender, the creative director at Atlanta advertising agency Frederick Swanston, was working on concepts for a new campaign for Kosair Children’s Hospital in Louisville, KY. Meanwhile, his kids were watching “American Idol” on television. “Just then,” recalls Ender, Read More