// By Lindsay R. Resnick // The new year is just around the corner and with it comes many challenges, along with many opportunities, for health care marketers. If what we’ve seen over the past year is any indication, 2017 won’t be for the faint of heart. Combine the dynamics of socioeconomic-political tensions with the Read More
“As the health sciences have advanced, pressure to see more patients in less time has also grown. Little wonder that doctor-patient relationships often seem less personal—and consequently less satisfying—than they once were,” notes veteran copywriter and regular SHCM columnist Peter Hochstein. “It was just this kind of society-wide malaise that provided a branding opportunity for Read More
“The concept of measuring the metrics associated with health care marketing and communications efforts is far from new,” notes David Marlowe, Principal of Strategic Marketing Concepts in Ellicott City, Maryland (and member of the Strategic Health Care Marketing Editorial Advisory Board). “When I entered the field in 1980, one of the first questions asked by Read More
“As a health care marketer or leader, you know your health care system doesn’t specialize in everything,” Keith Schneider notes. “By pairing the needs of your market with your unique differentiators, your team has chosen its investments wisely. “This intelligent approach allows you to focus on excellence. Yet you might be surprised that, despite service Read More
Notable Health Care Advertising // By Peter Hochstein // As the health sciences have advanced, pressure to see more patients in less time has also grown. Little wonder that doctor-patient relationships often seem less personal—and consequently less satisfying—than they once were. It was just this kind of society-wide malaise that provided a branding opportunity for Read More
// By David Marlowe // Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying “everything that can be counted does not necessarily count and everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted”—probably an apt philosophy for the challenges facing marketers in health care provider settings relative to the area of “metrics.” These days we often refer to these Read More
// By Keith Schneider // As a health care marketer or leader, you know your health care system doesn’t specialize in everything. By pairing the needs of your market with your unique differentiators, your team has chosen its investments wisely. This intelligent approach allows you to focus on excellence. Yet you might be surprised that, Read More
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. Rather, the savviest organizations are Read More
When new CEO David Feinberg, M.D., arrived at Geisinger Health System in May 2015, he saw a large system with a great reputation for medical innovation and outcomes. “But its reputation among its patients based on their hospital experiences? Not so great,” says copywriter and regular SHCM contributor Peter Hochstein. Hochstein notes that the hospital regularly surveys employees, patients, Read More
// 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
// 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
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
// 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
Want to connect with your target audience on a more powerful level and motivate behavior change? Denise Aube, Executive Vice President and Healthcare Practice Leader at Crosby Marketing Communications, suggests turning to the principles of behavioral science to make your efforts more effective. “The challenge is how do we engage patients and motivate healthy behavior. It’s Read More
“The key to successful health care marketing is being able to anticipate how patients will react to and engage with the messages you are putting out,” says Kirstan Cecil, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer at Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, which is part of the Ascension Health System. Saint Agnes Hospital is a 276-bed, Read More
// By Lisa D. Ellis // Want to connect with your target audience on a more powerful level and motivate behavior change? Denise Aube, Executive Vice President and Healthcare Practice Leader at Crosby Marketing Communications, works with Saint Agnes Hospital to help develop the creative marketing solutions for both the bariatric and cardiovascular campaigns. Read Read More
// By Lisa D. Ellis // Every day, people make an array of decisions, from deciding what time to leave for work to determining what route they will take to get there, often without even realizing what factors are influencing their choices. But for health care marketers, an understanding of how the subconscious affects people’s Read More
// By Lisa D. Ellis // One size fits all. That’s the concept Kaiser Permanente is embracing these days when it comes to shaping marketing messages that will resonate with its diverse target audience. While the idea is obviously appealing—after all, one universal marketing campaign is always easier than many nuanced ones—finding just the one Read More
Neuroscientific research is helping marketers better understand how to reach the inner recess of our audience’s brain, which, because it has been evolving for millennia, still makes decisions better suited for survival on the savannas of Africa than in today’s world of modern health care, according to health care marketing consultant Dan Fredricks. Understanding the Read More
Neuroscientific research is helping marketers better understand how to reach the inner recess of our audience’s brain, which, because it has been evolving for millennia, still makes decisions better suited for survival on the savannas of Africa than in today’s world of modern health care. Understanding the subtle nuances of neuroscience—and the evolutionary-biased brain—will provide Read More
“The consumerization of health care means your customer is now in control,” notes Lindsay Resnick, Chief Marketing Officer of KBM Group: Health Services. “They are comparing prices, quality, convenience, and outcomes as they post reviews; and, refer friends and family—one way or the other. And a constant stream of technology innovation makes it easier and easier Read More
Back in 2008, Saginaw, Michigan-based Covenant HealthCare saw an opportunity to “own the robotic surgery market in the region,” says Larry Daly, Director of Planning and Business Development at Covenant HealthCare. The specific focus was da Vinci Surgical System robots, high-tech devices increasingly used in minimally invasive surgery. “Our strategy was to purchase the latest Read More
Advertising Worth Noting By Peter Hochstein This tale begins in 2008, when the people running things at Covenant HealthCare, today a 643-bed multiple facility institution with campuses in and around Saginaw, Michigan, began hearing rumors about robots. Well, not just any robots. These were da Vinci Surgical System robots, those high-tech devices increasingly used in Read More
Fresh Care. Delivered Daily. The concept is simple, yet this hand-picked brand message represents Columbia Memorial Health (CMH) perfectly. It also hits home on many levels for the hospital’s target area, which consists of Greene and Columbia counties of upstate New York. The CMH network has a total of 120 individual multi-specialty practitioners, a hospital, Read More
by Ansuya Bijur In a memorable scene in the best-selling novel Cutting for Stone, a doctor asks his medical students, “What treatment is offered by ear in an emergency?” One of the students replies, “Words of comfort, sir.” Most often, patients meet clinicians under extremely difficult circumstances. Typically clinicians treat a disease—what ails the body. Read More