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.

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!

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 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.

So how do you determine what your brand is really saying?  Two words: Brand audit.

A brand audit systematically assesses the company’s brand from three vantage points:

1. Communications: How authentically the company appears in documents, proposals, advertising, Web sites and other venues
2. Internal: What employees think
3. External: What the customer believes

An audit is like peeling an onion one layer at a time to expose the core essence of the brand, and reviewing these three areas can help leadership understand how well the brand aligns with the organization’s strategic priorities and core values. Plus, it creates a road map for both marketers and executives to use in improving the brand’s overall authenticity. 

To learn more, check out my article on brand audits and take the first steps toward truly living your brand.

Recently, MSNBC reported that some physicians were having patients sign “gag order” waivers to prevent their ranting on review Web sites. Unbelievable.  Would you trust a physician who required you to sign such a document? Allowing patients to review doctors on Web sites 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:

1. 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.
2. Acknowledge comments with replies that let reviewers know you are listening (without, of course, acknowledging patient name or identification).
3. Direct patients to contact a specific person at the practice to voice concerns and resolve issues.
4. Encourage reviewers to continue the conversation with your practice.

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!

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.

Successful marketing leaders connect their efforts to their hospital’s strategic priorities by ensuring that marketing dollars are allocated to support and meet specific objectives of the strategic plan.  They not only illustrate that research findings support their creative execution; they take operational readiness, competitive reactions, contingencies and performance metrics into account, too.

In other words, they make sure that the brand new Emergency Department – or service line of choice  – is operating like a well-greased machine, that measurement systems are in place to track the three R’s, and that patients are raving fans BEFORE the first commercial airs.

That may seem like good ol’ common sense, but we’re amazed how frequently creative campaigns are crafted before the strategic marketing plan…or worse, in lieu of one.  We wish these marketers would come to us first so we could help them align their efforts with the hospital’s strategic goals. That’s the better way to create a healthier company and connect with executive, board and physician leadership.

On a lighter note, connecting the dots is what many of you did when you joined us in Orlando at the 2009 SHSMD Annual Conference. Nearly 150 attendees stopped by our booth to connect magnetic marbles and guess the linear footage of marbles in a jar. Our game of “connect the dots” unleashed a competitive frenzy, with folks stopping back multiple times to refine their guesses.

Congratulations to Gina Kalwa from Montgomery General Hospital and Kim Winker from University Physicians Healthcare for guessing the closest distance and winning a Garmin nüvi GPS Navigator!  The actual measurement was 31 feet 2 inches. Thanks to everyone who participated in connecting the dots with Dobies!

For example, a recent McKinsey report found that an aortic valve replacement that costs $100,000 at a U.S. hospital would run about $12,000 at an equally qualified and credentialed hospital in Asia. Wow!  But how do you know if you can trust these hospitals from a quality of care perspective?  

I’m a big fan of choosing hospitals that can demonstrate their quality of care. So, in addition to making sure that the hospital is accredited by the Joint Commission International (JCI) and International Standards Organization (ISO), look for the hospital that openly and transparently reports its clinical outcomes. 

For example, take a look at National University Hospital.  It’s a good start, though not comparative and somewhat complicated for the uninformed reader.  Do your research by comparing those outcomes to your American counterparts.  And if the clinical indicators are not posted on the Web site – ask!