The One Thing About Healthcare Marketing Is …

Today I started my weekly healthcare marketing column with the phrase “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” It’s a bit of a cliche, I know. But it’s also appropriate. The column is a collection of some of the responses I’ve gotten over the years to my typical interview-closing question: “If you could tell the CEO one thing about this story’s topic (be it marketing your hospital’s quality rankings, competing against big brand-name organizations, or investing time and money in social media), what would it be?” So many of the quotes in answer to that question still resonate today.

But it’s also appropriate to mention change because this week’s column is my last as senior editor for marketing. Starting next week, my colleague Marianne Aiello will be covering marketing in the magazine and online and I’m moving to the technology beat. Marianne has already been covering marketing, contributing to the MarketShare blog, writing the weekly Campaign Spotlight feature, creating the multimedia healthcare marketing newsletter, Healthcare Marketing Advisor, writing marketing stories for our magazine and online, and much more. I know that the marketing audience is in good hands. I will continue to contribute occasionally to the MarketShare blog and I’ll continue to tweet about marketing and technology at www.twitter.com/gienna, so I hope to stay in touch with all the wonderful people I’ve met over the past few years.

Check out this week’s column and please share with us your words of wisdom by leaving a comment below: If You Could Tell the CEO One Thing About Marketing, What Would it Be?

Campaign Spotlight: Build It, Advertise It, and They Will Come

When North Oaks Health System added seven new clinics over the past few years, leaders there quickly realized there was a problem—the number of employed physicians was rising, but the number of patients weren’t. Patient services were expanding rapidly, but many clinics were not able to meet their budgeted revenue. So North Oaks launched a print campaign to educate consumers on all the new clinic locations and unify all clinics under the corporate brand. The effort won the Hammond, LA, health system a silver award in the service line category at the 2009 HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards.

“With a limited budget, we implemented a campaign strategy to formally introduce our clinic and its physicians to our community through print advertisements focusing on authenticity regarding the North Oaks clinic experience,” marketers wrote in their award entry form. “Because of the growth of our clinic network, many clinics were not meeting their budgeted numbers for the current fiscal years. So our goal was to increase patient visits to meet or exceed budgeted numbers for each clinic.”

The North Oaks marketing team produced 22 print pieces featuring physicians and patients. The testimonial-style ads aimed to communicate the physicians’ passion for what they do and share successful patient experiences.

Read more about North Oaks’ campaign here.

Campaign Spotlight: Heart Hospital Celebrates Victories

Physicians and staff at OSF Saint Francis Heart Hospital saw every patient who recovered after a life-threatening heart disorder as a victory, and they wanted their community to know it. The 107-bed, Peoria, IL, hospital launched an integrated campaign to do just that.

“When we sat down to talk with OSF Saint Francis Heart Hospital, one thing that impressed us was a shared feeling from their caregivers—that every person who walked out of their hospital after a life-threatening heart disorder was a ‘victory,’” says Shan Neely, creative director for Muller Bressler Brown, Saint Francis’ Kansas City, MO, creative agency. “A victory over a lifestyle choice or a family history or, more often than not, time itself. That same sense of victory was even evident in the mountain of letters we read from grateful patients.”

The agency worked with Saint Francis marketers to create a campaign using print, outdoor, direct mail, and radio advertising. They also launched an internal microsite where Saint Francis team members could share stories about how fellow staff members contributed to their many victories.

Read more about OSF Saint Francis’ campaign here.

Did Ads Make the Difference In Massachusetts Senate Race?

In this week’s column I wrote about the campaign ads in the recent Massachusetts U.S. Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown. Check out the following videos: Did these ads impact the outcome of the race?

Here’s the “Different People, Same Message” ad I mentioned, in which Brown took advantage of Coakley’s weeklong hiatus from the campaign trail to compare himself to the late Ted Kennedy:

Coakley responded with a series of ads that many considered negative, including the “Lockstep” ad below. Love the narrator’s deep voice and the scary background music. Plus they spelled “Massachusetts” wrong in the final frames. Yes, really.

Finally, in the ad below, Brown opens with the line “By now, you’ve probably seen the negative ads launched by Martha Coakley and her supporters.” A safe assumption: The TV ads from both candidates ran nonstop on local stations, especially in the final week of the campaign. Often, Brown’s “By now you’ve probably seen the negative ads” ad ran immediately following Coakley’s “lockstep” ad.

Check out this week’s column, Coakley’s Failed Senate Bid: Four Lessons for Healthcare Marketers for more on Coakley’s communications strategy (or lack thereof) and get some ideas on how you can avoid making the same mistakes she did in your own healthcare marketing campaigns.

Campaign Spotlight: Old Hospital, New Image

Riverview Hospital has served its community for a century, but recently new hospitals have been encroaching on the Noblesville, IN, hospital’s long-established turf. So the organization launched a branding campaign to promote the hospital and its latest technology—something the competing organizations advertise. The effort received a gold award for branding among medium hospitals at the 2009 HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards.

“Riverview Hospital’s ‘Welcome Home to World-Class Care” campaign was designed to debunk the myth that a community hospital isn’t capable of matching the level of care of privately funded ‘big city’ hospitals,” the organization wrote in its award entry form. “The campaign was specifically designed to have a sophisticated, high-tech look, and clear, consistent messaging.”

The campaign aimed to inform straying patients that they don’t have to look or travel far for world-class care, and to “preach to the choir” by emphasizing the importance of its exceptional services to internal audiences.

Read more about Riverview Hospital’s campaign here.

Campaign Spotlight: USC Hospitals’ Campaign ‘Fights On’

The latest branding campaign for two University of Southern California (USC) hospitals evokes passionate determination by using the school’s athletic rallying cry: “Fight On.” Marketers hope the campaign will boost awareness and preference for University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital, two private hospitals USC acquired from Tenet Health in April. The campaign launched in Los Angeles on January 6.

“USC University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital are two of the best kept secrets in Los Angeles,” Mitchell R. Creem, chief executive officer of both hospitals, said in a release. “While our physicians and clinical expertise are well-known in medical circles across the country and even internationally, consumer research suggests that the greater L.A. community is largely unfamiliar with these two excellent patient care facilities. We’re making a long-term commitment to market the hospitals and to enhance USC’s reputation in key centers of excellence.”

The ads consist of documentary-style photographs depicting USC physicians and staff caring for patients. Marketers hope the “Fight On” tagline will convey the organization’s culture of doctors and staff fighting for their patients’ wellbeing.

Read more about USC’s branding campaign here.

Campaign Spotlight: More Than a Community Hospital

Several ads from Danbury (CT) Hospital’s “A Higher Level of Care” campaign feature people with portions of their body seen through X-ray film. In addition to making for intriguing images, these ads are also a metaphor for the campaign goal: convincing consumers to look past their preconceptions and see Danbury as a center for high-level care.

Marketers at Danbury worked with SPM Marketing & Communications to create the campaign, which won a platinum award at this year’s HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards in the branding category. Danbury leadership decided an image campaign was crucial after its 2008 brand monitoring study showed that most locals viewed the organization as a community hospital that they would only go to for run-of-the-mill ailments.

“When it came to more specialized care, even specialized care they did very well, they were losing market share and suffered from diminished consumer preference to local and New York competitors,” wrote SPM on the award entry form. “They were influenced by a somewhat unfavorable perception of the town of Danbury itself and consumer biases regarding of the limitations of a ‘community hospital.’”

Read more about Danbury Hospital’s image campaign here.

Campaign Spotlight: TV News Spot Increases Volume

If you ever happen to be watching the local news on a Wednesday evening in the Atlanta suburbs, keep an eye out for Southern Regional Health System’s “Healthbreak.” The 90-second spot isn’t a commercial—it’s a sponsored educational health news piece featuring physicians from the Riverdale, GA, health system that blends seamlessly with the newscast.

“The genesis of the campaign was to really figure out a way to feature our physicians in a prominent way—not only to their peers but to the community,” says Marcus Gordon, strategic marketing manager at SRHS. “About 95% of our physicians are affiliate physicians to the hospital, so we wanted to cover a wide variety of topical areas that have relevance to the services that we provide and what the physicians provide in the specialty areas.”

The “Healthbreak” spots are supported by a Facebook page, which has 97 fans, and a YouTube channel, which has more than 1,400 channel views. The two-facility health system launched the campaign in May and plans to run it for one year.

Read more about Southern Regional Health System’s “Healthbreak” campaign here.

Find Time to Read About Thinking (Worry About Finding Time to Think Later)

I recently received in the mail a copy of the book “How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life.” My initial witty reaction was “I don’t have time to think, let alone to read about thinking!”

But I can scan, and after a flip-through I settled on the chapter about strategic thinking, a topic healthcare marketers should be thinking about. But strategic thinking, writes author John C. Maxwell, is not just about marketing plans that will turn your organization around. “Strategic thinking can make a positive impact on any area of life,” he writes.

Some of the tips that resonated with me (sorry, Mr. Maxwell, but there’s no way I’m capable of planning my life, hour by hour, for 40-day chunks of time as you suggest at the start of the chapter):

• Create a system (or strategy) for filing quotes, stories, and other materials that can help you when you need to prepare a presentation or are looking for inspiration.
• Ask questions to break down complex issues, such as “what should we do next?” and “Why?” In fact, you should ask “why?” before you ask “how,” he writes. “Asking why helps you think about all the reasons for decisions. It helps you to open your mind to the possibilities and opportunities.”
• And a tactic that I think is too often overlooked: Include your team as part of your strategic thinking. Why? Well, duh: Who do you think is going to implement all your strategery? “Before you can implement your plan, you must make sure you have the right people in place,” Maxwell writes. “Even the best strategic thinking won’t help if you don’t take into account the people part of the equation.”

Though short on detail and specifics (the 6×5 inch book is just 124 pages long) there are some gems in here–so maybe I will find time to read it after all. Or maybe I’ll get the audiobook version.

(Thanks to the folks at Barlow/McCarthy, for sending me the book.)

Celebrating Those Who’ve Made a Difference in Healthcare

The annual HealthLeaders magazine “20 People Who Make Healthcare Better” issue has arrived in print and the expanded version is now online–it features a range of people who’ve made a difference, including Atul Gawande, MD, whose New Yorker article, The Cost Conundrum, was required reading for anyone who wanted to better understand healthcare costs and reform.

There are also some names on the list that are less well-known–but no less notable. I interviewed two of the top 20: patient engagement advocate Dave deBronkart and his primary care physician, Daniel Sands, MD, an early advocate of patient engagement and using technology to improve the patient experience.

Patient/physician relations: Dave deBronkart (left) and his physician, Daniel Sands, MD. (Photograph courtesy Dave deBronkart and BIDMC.)

I spoke to deBronkart and Sands together for the HealthLeaders 20 issue and it was clear that their relationship was much more evolved than the stereotypical paternalistic physician and passive patient. They are more like partners–sharing information with each other and spreading their passion for patient engagement to others as well. In fact, there were times during the interview that they finished each others’ sentences. I think you get a sense of their relationship and how they interact from the photo on the left, taken at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where Sands practices.

There are expanded articles about each of the “HealthLeaders 20” in the online version of the feature. Among them: an inventor, a volunteer pilot who transports patients to and from medical appointments, a green CEO, and an advocate for patient-centered care.