At Dobies Healthcare Group, we believe a brand is only as strong as the connection between the organization’s actions and its messages. After all, your brand is more than what you say – it’s what you do.

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.

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 health care, 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 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.

Any healthcare marketer worth her salt knows that women are the primary healthcare decision makers in America (although, with the current economy, some suspect the tide might be turning).  So when I saw an article on how to market to women on Facebook, I couldn’t help but be interested.  Because women make up more than 56% of the overall Facebook population, it’s a great place for your hospital or physician practice to connect with its core audience.  But how do you keep these decision makers engaged? 

A couple of my favorite tips from Mashable:

• Quality Counts:  Annoy your female fans with spammy updates and be prepared to face the wrath of the “hide” button.  Remember, they can remove your marketing messages from their news feeds with the simple click of a mouse.  And, of course, out of sight = out of mind.
• Provide Utility:  Give your fans something to look forward to on a daily or weekly basis by regularly posting helpful tips or practical ideas that can improve their health or lifestyle.
• Give Fans a Voice:  Make your fans feel involved by creating a two-way conversation and asking their opinion.  Bonus: You have an instant focus group at your fingertips.
• Keep Your Fans in the Loop:  Update your fans about current goings-on, good and even bad.  With the rise of transparency in healthcare, Facebook can be a great venue to help address negative news before it gets out of hand.

How does your organization use Facebook to engage its female audience? Please post your ideas in a comment below!

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!

We’ve built our reputation on helping our hospital clients “connect the dots.” What do we mean by that?

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!

At Dobies Healthcare Group, we are proud to work with some of the finest hospitals in the country. So we weren’t surprised to hear that U.S. News Media Group recently ranked our client Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin among America’s best children’s hospitals for 2009. Eight specialties at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin placed within the top 30 of the 160 hospitals considered. The specialties earning top honors are:

#8 — Heart and Heart Surgery
#9 — Digestive Disorders including pediatric inflammatory bowel disease
#20 — Urology
#25 — Respiratory Disorders
#28 — Cancer including Ewing sarcoma and Hodgkin’s lymphoma
#29 — Neonatal Care
#29 — Neurology and Neurosurgery including epilepsy and pediatric spina bifida surgery
#30 — Kidney Disorders

The rankings will be featured in the August issue of U.S. News & World Report.

About Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin:
As a member of the Children’s Hospital and Health System, Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee provides premier services, treatment and specialties to the children of Wisconsin, Northern Illinois, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and beyond. Visit their blog to learn more.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much transparency can impact the success of a clinical program and how it transforms the way hospitals conduct strategic planning for a service line. It used to be that hospitals prioritized strategic initiatives based on clinical strength, community need, profitability, technical capability and volume forecasts. That approach used to make sense, but now that information about hospital outcomes, patient satisfaction and physician ratings are easily available online, strategic initiatives have to focus on providing value for patients. Think about it. Patients are starting to demand value. They are making decisions based on value, especially if they have a consumer driven health plan with high deductibles and co-payments.

You can ensure your strategic plan is centered on providing value by incorporating the principles of value-based competition into your service line development. Here they are:

• The focus should be on value for patients, not just lowering costs.
• Competition must be based on results.
• Competition should center on medical conditions over the full cycle of care.
• In the end, high-quality care should be less costly.
• Value must be driven by provider experience, scale, and learning at the medical condition level.
• Competition should be regional and national, not just local.
• Results information to support value-based competition must be widely available.
• Innovations that increase value must be strongly rewarded.

If anyone reading this has first-hand success using this approach, please share your experiences with our readers.

Is the recession reshaping your organization’s thinking? I hope so. I read an article recently that said recessions are an important time to pull your head up and say this is a good time for planning efforts. When the dust settles on this economic crisis, how will the healthcare market reemerge? More importantly, how will your company or hospital reemerge? How will it be positioned? What will be its niche?

Analysts are predicting that 2009 will be a year when strong hospitals get stronger and weak hospitals get weaker and/or die. Sure, it doesn’t seem logical, but one of the most important things an organization can do during an economic downturn is to strengthen its positioning. For my health’s sake, I sure hope the best providers out there are doing that.