Hospital Marketing & the CEO Insights Behind Success

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Carol Dobies

Hospital Marketing: CEO Insights & Success Factors In a previous blog post, I discussed responsibilities associated with the evolving role of hospital marketers. Recently, after reviewing Thomson Reuters research involving 100 Top Hospitals® CEO Insights, it struck me how closely the top three hospital success factors align with the three primary marketing responsibilities I mentioned in my blog post. Let’s take a closer look.

According to “strong patterns in guiding philosophies” that emerged from CEO insights in the study, the top three hospital success factors are listed below, each accompanied by my own assessment of its application in marketing:

Unwavering Commitment to Quality. As top CEOs demonstrate a strong and clear commitment to quality, marketing staff must respond by becoming champions of transparency who communicate results and drive healthy patient experiences.

Making Great Relationships with Physicians. Top CEOs recognize that keeping physicians engaged, motivated and aligned is a key success factor. Unfortunately, many of today’s hospitals do not have a dedicated physician relations program. Instead that role is shared by the CEO and other hospital leaders. The future requires a data-inspired, fully committed approach to physician relations that offers support and direction to physicians. The hospital’s marketing officer should be integral to these efforts.

Ability to Overcome Today’s Greatest Challenges: Reform and Reimbursement Cuts. As hospital CEOs face unprecedented pressures to operationalize under health reform, marketing officers need to lead the charge with new business strategies that position the organization to compete more effectively. We see marketing leaders becoming much more focused on shorter-term scenario planning and research and development of new care management programs (e.g. CHF clinics, access strategies, medical home models, etc.) to help the organization excel in a value-based purchasing environment.

If you’re in hospital marketing, ask yourself: do your current responsibilities align with the top three hospital success factors, and therefore, your CEO’s expectations? If not, it’s time to rewrite your job description. Start by thinking practically about how you can drive your organization to greater success using the points above as your guide.

Hospital Community Relations Directors Evolve to Chief Marketing Officers

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Carol Dobies

With so many patient-facing changes in healthcare these days, it’s no surprise the role of the hospital community relations director is also changing. Once focused primarily on communications, advertising and outreach, today’s community relations directors now drive patient experience, hospital strategy and business development.

Maybe the person who manages community relations at your hospital has a new title, maybe not. Regardless, the purview of the position has expanded. At Dobies Healthcare Group, we see three core responsibilities for hospital marketing officers:

Drive the patient experience. Today’s hospital marketing officers own the patient experience. They take a lead role in creating loyalty and repositioning the patient at the center of the hospital’s delivery system.

Develop overall business strategy. In addition to increasing market share, hospital marketing officers are now responsible for new business and program development to enhance the hospital’s competitive advantage.

Nurture the system of care. Now more than ever, it’s important to be proactive rather than reactive in creating and nurturing an emerging system of care. Working with leadership on service line, physician engagement and system of care issues has become a routine function.

Even from this quick summary, it’s easy to see how the role of hospital community relations has evolved far beyond its more traditional PR/promotional functions. That’s why many hospital leaders turn to healthcare marketing specialists who can help them navigate these complexities and grow into the next generation of healthcare.

Healthcare Marketing Has Real Life Impact

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Carol Dobies

It’s easy to get wrapped up in ROI and profit-building strategies. After all, as healthcare marketers, that’s what we’re hired to do. We drive growth. We build brands. And when we do, we often save lives.

Every day I wake up thinking about the consequences of our work. If you’re the chief executive at a healthcare organization, you and I have that in common. In healthcare, we know far more is at stake than the bottom line. Real people are affected by what we do and say about your brand.

Just one short post may have been the most important thing I did the other day. I read a forum chat between two men who had testicular cancer—one a survivor and the other a young man searching for information about the best doctors, treatments and cancer centers. Armed with knowledge and confidence in the medical care at Indiana University, I inserted myself into the conversation and posted a recommendation. I connected the young man to an oncologist and researcher I was fortunate to meet in 2006 – the same physician who saved Lance Armstrong’s life a decade earlier.

Just a personal story? Not really. In many ways, this is what we do for our clients every day. We convince patients, patients-to-be, physicians, suppliers, manufacturers and healthcare organizations of all kinds to make better, more informed choices. We convince people to choose our clients’ brands. We encourage people to make connections that save lives. These are the consequences healthcare marketing.

Here’s what I mean:

When we promote cardiac care, we say the heart center can reliably and consistently open blocked arteries in notably less than the 90-minute national standard. As our clients know, we won’t execute a single ad until we absolutely, positively know the promise can be delivered. When we produce white papers, webinars and campaigns to convince pathology labs and blood banks to adopt new patient safety technologies, we know that patients can benefit. We also know failure to do so can have devastating consequences.

I could go on and on with examples like these, but the real bottom line is this: everyone deserves to make informed decisions about healthcare. That’s why Dobies Healthcare Group exists, and it’s why we are so passionate about everything we do for our clients. As a healthcare CEO, you deserve a marketing partner like us – experts who know how to drive new patient volume, sales, and market share, and who wake up every morning thinking about the consequences of what we do for your brand.

This One Is Just for Fun

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Carol Dobies

Given the nature of what we do, it’s no surprise that everyone at Dobies Healthcare Group has at least two personality traits in common: our penchants for creativity and our competitive spirits.

Both factored in during our fourth annual holiday scavenger hunt earlier this month, when we took half a day to “unleash our creative potential” – something we do at work every day, but this time we took it to the streets of Kansas City. Together with our associates at Group 3 Solutions, we ventured out in teams, each one armed with a camera, a charitable donation, and a healthy determination to have fun and finish first.

Task 1: Find your creative voice. To prepare the final touches for our annual white elephant gift exchange, team members were asked to create holiday cards with “sappy sentiments” and original artwork. It’s always fun to see the range of directions we take with an assignment like this, especially when we’re given crayons and construction paper as our art tools. Nothing helps ring in holiday cheer quite like the festive decor of Hallmark, so we tapped the talents of our inner children at “CC@CC” – the Crayola Cafe at Crown Center.
Task 2: Create a lifeline for those in need. At Dobies Healthcare Group, we believe it’s important to give back to the community all year long. But this time of year – when cold and loneliness have greater repercussions on the health and well-being of the less fortunate in our area – we like to create a special event for it. Teams were sent to Project Warmth KC headquarters and City Union Mission to drop off blankets and monetary donations. Although it may not provoke as many laughs, this is always our favorite part of the scavenger hunt.
Task 3: Explore the creative vision of an architectural icon. While some of us admired “the old” at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, others marveled at “the new” – the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. The latter recently changed our downtown skyline, and both buildings helped put Kansas City on Frommer’s Top 10 Destinations in 2012.
Task 4: Join in a creative holiday toast. It’s fun to break away into teams at the start, but it’s even more fun to come back together as a group for the end. To show our support for local small business, we capped off the festivities with some “artful frozen cocktails” and Snow & Co. in the Kansas City Crossroads District.

As always when we’re having a blast, time flew by and soon the day was done. Funny…the same thing happens every day at the office, too – just goes to show how much we love what we do here at Dobies Healthcare Group.

To view pictures from our scavenger hunt and more, visit us on facebook. Happy Holidays!

Engaging Patients through Social Media

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Carol Dobies

Later this week, I will moderate an interactive panel for Kansas City Healthcare Communicators Society.The topic: How to Deploy Social Media to Improve Patient Engagement. With expert input spanning a wide range of social networking tools and best practices from our healthcare marketing panelists, the session promises to provide an eye-opening look at what it takes to continuously engage patients online.

Here are highlights from colleagues in the healthcare social media field:

Two-fifths of adult internet users in the U.S. have read someone else’s online commentary about health. Many thanks to Susannah Fox and her colleagues at Pew Internet & American Life Project, who published a report earlier this year revealing that 80% of internet users search online for health information, and a growing number rely on the internet to connect peer-to-peer. Among the findings:

Symptoms and treatments dominate health searches (66% and 56% respectively).
44% of internet users look online for information about doctors or other health professionals.
25% of adult web users look online for people with a chronic illness.
24% have consulted online rankings of doctors and hospitals.
20% look online for people with similar health issues.

There are 140 uses for your 140 characters if your healthcare organization tweets. Phil Baumann, a social media strategist and advisory board member for Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, studied the challenges and opportunities available for providers via Twitter. In the end, he identified 140 different healthcare uses for Twitter – an oldie but goodie for those in need of ideas when it comes to tweeting for and about health.

More than 1,200 U.S. hospitals are now actively using social media sites. And that number is climbing every day. Thanks to Ed Bennett, web operations manager at the University of Maryland Medical Center (and also an advisory board member for Mayo Clinic social media), we have better insight into the scope of social media use among hospitals. Here’s the latest breakdown of the number of hospital accounts/pages per social networking site:

Facebook: 1,068
Foursquare: 946
Twitter: 814
YouTube: 575
LinkedIn: 566
Blogs: 149

If so many healthcare providers are putting it out there on so many sites, it must be simple, right? Wrong. We all know representing an organization via social media is much more complex than managing personal accounts, so it’s important to know what you’re doing behind the scenes. Fortunately, help is out there, like this list of 20 Excellent Social Media Networking Resources for Health Professionals, compiled recently by HealthWorks Collective.

I’m looking forward to a thought-provoking discussion by our panelists this week. We will update you with the biggest takeaways and lessons learned next week.

SHSMD Word Cloud Finds the Focus of Today’s Hospital Strategists and Marketers

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Carol Dobies

In our last post, we talked about word clouds and their practical uses beyond the blog. This week, we’ll continue that discussion in lieu of our recent discoveries at SHSMD Connections 2011, an annual conference hosted by the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development. The event was a meeting of the minds from all levels of hospital communications, and the word cloud was our way of learning more about what’s on their minds.

SHSMD attendees participated by entering today’s hot topics into our word cloud app. You can view the results here. But what do the results tell us about the directions and challenges hospital marketers face as we head into 2012?

The most commonly used phrase was “physician strategies,” with “social media” coming in close behind. Many hospital strategists are looking for effective ways to engage with physicians and patients. While social media continues to grow as a cost-effective way to expand reach and frequency, strategists are struggling with how to reconcile professional relationships with online social platforms—and even how to get people to “Like” or “Follow” their hospitals in the first place, let alone leverage that affinity. It’s a challenge many of today’s healthcare marketers must untangle, and clearly engagement is the name of the game.

Other issues taking center stage for healthcare marketers include:

• Direct marketing – promoting what works to grow market share.

• Brand building – on-target messaging in the midst of health reform and ACO debates.

• Market-driven plans (and plans that drives markets) – thinking strategically and delivering creatively.

• Better returns – demonstrating improved ROI and ROE as direct results of marketing efforts.

If your marketing initiatives don’t include solid strategic planning in the areas described above, you’re missing opportunities to enhance relationships, grow in volume, improve your brand and more.

What about you—what’s on your mind in healthcare marketing today? If you didn’t share with us at SHSMD, feel free to do so in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

Brand Audits Reveal What Healthcare Brands Are Really Saying

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Carol Dobies

Brand is about what you do, who you are. It’s your DNA.

Why is it then that so many still consider brand to be about the look, the feel, or the words on a page? Ask yourself this: The clothes you wear create an impression, but do they fundamentally change who you are? No. The same is true with brands.

At Dobies Healthcare Group, we are disappointed when we see companies invest tens of thousands of dollars, if not a hundred thousand or more, to create identity style guidelines without ever exploring the heart and soul of their brand.

Clearly, changing the brand is a lot harder than changing the message or the look and feel. That’s why we recommend starting the process by gathering evidence that will help convince executive leadership that change is necessary.

Brand audits do just that. They give the company a qualitative snapshot of how stakeholders perceive the company and its products and services. An audit is like peeling an onion one layer at a time to expose the core essence of the brand.

A brand audit systematically assesses the company’s brand from three vantage points:
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Do Patients Have the Right to Rant or Rave about Their Doctors Online?

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Carol Dobies

Transparency in quality reporting goes both ways. Good ratings – and bad – are posted every day for all kinds of products and services. When it comes to healthcare, I absolutely believe in transparency and public reporting of quality and patient safety measures. In fact, right now we’re in the process of creating a brand new “Quality Matters” microsite for one of our clients.

Recently, MSNBC reported that some physicians were having patients sign “gag order” waivers to prevent their ranting on review websites. Unbelievable. Would you trust a physician who required you to sign such a document? Allowing patients to review doctors on websites is not only is in the best interest of consumers and public health, but it is also a matter of freedom of speech. In fairness, however, I believe doctors should be exempt from federal privacy laws that prevent them from publicly responding to patients.

As healthcare marketers, we may not be able to change federal law, but we can help manage the reputation of our physician clients on these Web sites. Here’s how:

Use a username that clearly identifies you as a representative from the practice, such as OfficeMgr_SmithMedical, with proper contact information in the user profile.
Acknowledge comments with replies that let reviewers know you are listening (without, of course, acknowledging patient name or identification).
Direct patients to contact a specific person at the practice to voice concerns and resolve issues.
Encourage reviewers to continue the conversation with your practice.

Our Work Delivers.

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Carol Dobies

As a healthcare marketing firm, our clients count on us to produce creative ideas that engage patients, spread quality improvement and inspire new behaviors. We pride ourselves in coming up with campaigns that begin by improving patient experience and continue through traditional, social and viral media. We absolutely love what we do.

Most recently we put our marketing muscle into an award-winning maternity campaign that focused on the physician/hospital connection and the patient experience. Congrats to Janice, Denise, Randee and Kelley for bringing home a Platinum branding award from HealthLeaders, and two Emeralds and two certificates of merit from the Kansas Association of Health Care Communicators. More importantly, thanks for helping Lawrence Memorial Hospital deliver more babies despite the baby bust!

Stairway to Better Health

Posted on November 18, 2009 by Carol Dobies

When you see a really good idea, you absolutely have to share it with everyone you know. It used to be that we’d simply email a cool link to our friends and colleagues, but this one is worth talking about.

My hat is off to Volkswagen and thefuntheory.com. From pianos to pinball, they have collected some great ideas to inspire healthy behaviors.

For all of my clients with offices on the second floor or higher, let this be an inspiration to you to use the stairs. At a minimum, consider equipping your stairways to health to help fight obesity by giving it a fresh coat of paint. Hang some artwork, include an inspirational message or two. Maybe install Wii Fit stations on a landing, or wire up a video board so employees can compete with one another on the number of trips up the steps. Please add to the list of possibilities by posting a comment.

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