All Entries in the "service lines" Category

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: Abington Memorial Asks ‘What If?’

When marketers at Abington (PA) Memorial Hospital discovered that their community didn’t fully understand the benefits of receiving cancer treatment at a full-service hospital rather than a dedicated cancer center, they knew it was time for an attention-grabbing campaign. So Abington enlisted Wilmington, DE ad agency Aloysius Butler & Clark to craft creative that would make patients and physicians take notice.

The resulting campaign was called “What If” and ran print, radio, and transit ads from June 2008–March 2009. Each ad emphasized all of the oncology and emergent services that Abington could provide.

“‘What If’ was born because we learned there was an opportunity in their market to distinguish Abington by asking the question ‘What if?’, as if we were the cancer patient—and that Abington provides the solution,” says Lynda Rudolph, creative director at AB&C.

Read more about Abington’s questioning campaign here.

Campaign Spotlight: Children’s Hospital Design Not Childsplay

The outlines of two glowing blue children—Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin’s logo—stand atop the hospital’s new west tower expansion and illuminate the Milwaukee skyline. The new building’s walls are covered in over 800 pieces of the hospital’s patients’ artwork, but that’s not where the young patients’ influence ends. Every detail of the new wing was designed with its pediatric patients’ health, safety, and happiness in mind.

“Children’s Hospital’s new west tower utilizes principles of evidence-based health care design, which means creating environments that are therapeutic, supportive of family involvement, efficient for staff performance and restorative for workers under stress,” Children’s Hospital stated in a press release. “The goal is to achieve the best possible results for patients, families and staff while improving utilization of resources. The physical environment represents a key component in providing family centered care in pediatric settings.”

Read more about Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin’s new wing here.

Leftover Thoughts on Physician Relations, Marketing Obstetrics

In each edition of Healthcare Marketing Advisor (HMA), a monthly four-color newsletter, I ask its advisory board members an important question relevant to the issue’s theme. Sometimes I get so many great responses back I don’t have enough space to include them all in the Ask the Advisors section of the newsletter.

A few months ago I posted some Leftover Thoughts on the Patient Experience. Today I’m posting two insightful responses from the May and June issues. Below, Gary Adamson, the Starizon CEO who plays a prominent role in our Marketing Experience event, voices his thoughts on physician relations and Jamie Haeuser, senior vice president of Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, LA, shares some tips on marketing obstetrics services.

In the May HMA I asked advisors: Should marketers change the way they approach physician relations in the current economic climate?

Gary Adamson, CEO, Starizon

I think the problem with many physician relations programs today is not what is going on in the world of 2008 -2009, but rather in 1984-1985. Sonia Rhodes from Sharp Healthcare and I were commissioned by a client to examine the state-of-the-art of physicians relations programs and propose something new-to-the-world.

After pouring over reports, articles, books, and interviews we came to a number of conclusions, but the most disheartening was that very little had changed in this area since the mid-eighties. Sure there were more joint ventures but they effected a relatively small number of doctors on any medical staff. Yes, there were some pendulum swings of things coming in, going out and then coming back in again—like buying physician practices. But for the most part there has been little movement in 25 years! [more]

Campaign Spotlight: Bills Lineman Tackles Cardiac PR

Derrick Dockery, a 330-pound offensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills football team, stands dressed in full uniform holding his helmet under one arm. But instead of wearing his usual game-face grimace, Dockery is smiling. Next to his image, the ad reads, “I protect the quarterback . . . you protect your heart!”

The ad promotes Buffalo (NY) General Hospital’s Chest Pain Center, a program Dockery has promoted since December 2008. The hospital has been marketing partners with the Bills for three years, and its marketers knew they needed a noteworthy player to represent the hospital’s heart services in 2009.

“I wanted someone who could speak from the heart, no pun intended, about cardiac awareness,” says Michael Hughes, vice president of public relations at Kaleida Health, Buffalo General’s health system. “We wanted someone who could legitimately talk about the importance of heart health and cardiac awareness.”

Read more about this awareness campaign here.

Guest Post: The Relationship Between Brands and Service-Lines

Service line marketing allows hospitals to be fact-based and intellectual with their messaging. While there still has to be a consumer-minded benefit, consumers do want to know what makes your service line unique and special.

Physician expertise, technology, outcomes, and quality rankings are all attributes which can be used in a service line campaign to differentiate your program. In terms of advertising, this doesn’t necessarily have to translate to dull. Your story–and these attributes–can be told in a variety of ways, from the proven patient testimonial approach to something a bit more hard-hitting.

Consider the ad below for a leading rural hospital surrounded by smaller, community hospitals. The cardiac campaign challenges consumers to do their homework and “read between the lines” when choosing a hospital for heart care.

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