Subtopics: Thought Leadership, Market and Regulatory Landscape, etc.
by Nancy Vessell The key to spotting and stemming leakage of physician referrals at Texas Health Resources (THR) doesn’t hinge on expensive data collection. Certainly, data showing where patients are going in the large north Texas market is helpful to this health system of 25 hospitals and 5,500 affiliated physicians. But the data only serves Read More
by Derek Mabie The online realm is heavily integrated with everyone’s daily life. Society now relies on search engines and website functionality to add convenience, control, and precision to completing tasks – whether paying a bill or researching a brand. Today, consumers are searching online before making health-related decisions. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & Read More
Brands still struggle with Twitter as a marketing tool According to a survey conducted in March by Social Media Marketing University, 45 percent of brands report that measuring results and ascertaining an ROI is the biggest challenge when using Twitter for marketing. Other significant challenges are building an audience (42 percent), engagement (37 percent), learning Read More
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
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
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
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
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
by Michele von Dambrowski “The big bad wolf is accountable care and it makes … your primary care practices more important than they ever have been in the past,” points out Phyllis Marino, vice president of integrated marketing for University Hospitals in Cleveland. “The bottom line for us as marketers,” Marino told attendees of the Read More
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
by Cheryl L. Serra Members of the Spirit of Women in Springfield, MA, recently had the opportunity to see and hear humorist and work-life balance expert Juliet Funt, daughter of Allen Funt, host of the 1970s TV show “Candid Camera.” They may also take advantage of a discount on the cost of mini-med school, an Read More
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
Survey: Cost transparency major factor in provider and plan choice A survey of insured health care consumers released last month by TransUnion, a credit information and information management services company, reveals that 55 percent of consumers have started paying more attention to the details of their medical bills during the past year. Two-thirds (67 percent) Read More
Price and Quality Transparency to Gain Importance in Coming Years by Sheryl S. Jackson For almost seven years, the television show “Marcus Welby, MD,” featured a veteran general practitioner who focused on patients as people in an era when specialized medicine and technology were growing in importance. Many storylines had Dr. Welby listening to patients Read More
by Jane Weber Brubaker A helicopter hovers over a concrete embankment, floodwaters rising rapidly around the target of the rescue operation, a black lab, alone and struggling to keep his head above water. “Does everyone matter?” asks the TV commercial. The chopper drops a line and a rescue worker lifts the dog to safety. “Yes” Read More
by Joyce Miller, Jaren Wilson, and Beverly Schulman In recent years, the volume and variety of health care data has grown exponentially to the point that the term “big data” has become part of our vocabulary. Big data refers to data sets so large and complex that they are difficult to process. In short, big Read More
Wide disparities in access and quality by state Access to affordable health care and the quality of care provided vary greatly for low-income people ($47,000 a year for a family of four) based on the state in which they live, according to a new report from the Commonwealth Fund. Geographic differences also extend to people 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 Susan Dubuque // This article is the third in a series on the role of marketing in the face of a changing health care environment. Health care marketers are being swept along in the frenzy of wellness and health promotion. But for most marketers, the concept is still ill-defined and a bit fuzzy Read More