It’s a Strategic Plan, Not a Shelf Decoration: Why Healthcare Marketers Should Revisit Plans Regularly

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Karen Otto

Healthcare Marketing: Connecting the Dots Between Planning, Execution & Results On our new website, we promise to help clients connect the dots through careful research and informed strategic planning. But then what? Even after a marketing plan is signed, sealed and delivered, the work is far from over, and execution is only part of what remains. Revisiting your marketing imperatives to monitor, measure and sometimes modify is a critical success factor.

In other words, as you execute your strategic plan over time, make it a priority to assess the current landscape against your long-term marketing goals. What’s at stake if you don’t? Shelving your strategic plan means missing out on regular opportunities to:

Conduct a historical review. Compare marketing imperatives against new data, and pay keen attention to key benchmarks that align with your plan. For example, hospital marketers should look at measurements like outmigration trends, physician referral patterns, clinical quality measures, patient satisfaction scores and so on.

Uncover new opportunities. Looking at fresh market data through the lens of your long-term strategic plan enables timelier decisions that help you meet market demand and gain competitive advantages.

Forecast what lies ahead. Being forward-thinking and adaptable to an evolving landscape is important for marketing plans to be both efficient and effective.

Identify emerging challenges or limitations early on. It’s important to pinpoint where operations are poorly aligned with strategic priorities and to respond swiftly when local, regional and national healthcare developments affect your organization. Regular strategic plan reviews help with that.

Inform key players of progress and lessons learned. Marketing departments lead marketing plans, but when patient-facing and decision-making personnel are not engaged and aware of the objectives, success will be out of reach.

At Dobies Healthcare Group, we encourage and often lead quarterly strategic plan reviews with clients. There’s no better way to make sure actions continuously align with the objectives that inspired them in the first place. Give yourself the insight you need to make better decisions and revitalize your marketing strategy today.

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.

In-Depth Interviews (IDIs): Exploring the Hearts and Minds of Healthcare Consumers

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Karen Otto

Recently, I heard some compelling stories about a client’s brand. My colleagues and I were conducting consumer in-depth interviews (IDIs) to better understand how people make personal healthcare decisions, as well as their perceptions of our client’s brand.

As I listened, I was impressed by the passion and honesty each participant shared—a benefit that’s relatively unique to IDIs. Focus groups, on the other hand, tend to be dominated by a handful of participants, which can skew results. By eliminating the drawbacks of “group think,” IDIs enabled us to garner consumer input that was not affected by the views of other participants.

Other advantages of IDIs include:

They allow us to investigate not only perceptions, but also individual thought processes. Because consumer feedback is solicited and given in a one-on-one dialogue, IDIs help shed light on differences that exist within each target segment.
By design, IDIs give the interviewee significantly more “floor” time, meaning the consumer will speak for approximately 80 percent of the interview. By contrast, focus groups require more speaking and facilitating by the moderator, which leaves less time overall for consumer responses.
IDIs can be adapted to other settings as well, including online and phone interviews.

We value IDIs for all these reasons and more. By taking group bias and external influence out of the equation, we can gather insightful information for our client that may not have surfaced as clearly in a focus group or survey. Probing the hearts and minds of healthcare consumers as individuals enabled us to draw several informed conclusions and build them into our client’s strategic plan. We are confident tomorrow’s consumers will like what they see from this client in the coming years because it will be, by and large, exactly what they said they want and need.

Brand Promises in Healthcare: How to Deliver through Patient Touch Points

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Diane Morgan

Healthcare consumers are more empowered than ever to choose according to their perceptions, and they know it. As health plans get more flexible in letting people pick providers – and online platforms enable word-of-mouth to cover more ground at faster speeds – the competition to be anyone’s provider of choice is fierce.

Which brings me to the importance of patient touch points—those many opportunities for healthcare providers to ‘live their brand’ by enhancing patient experiences. Every interaction counts, whether direct or indirect, clinical or non-clinical.

In a sea of how-to’s and must-do’s surrounding social media and health information technology, it’s important to keep more conventional methods in our strategies as well. With today’s patients empowered to think and act like retail consumers, providers are wise to take pages from consumer-oriented business models to elevate service levels and deliver fully satisfying experiences at the point of care. Think Disney, Zappos and Nordstrom.

Here are three great places to start:

Personalize Care. People love it when they feel camaraderie with their care team, and they respond with loyalty when they believe you know them as individuals. Introduce yourself, call patients by name and look them in the eye. Also, be mindful that your presence in the community is making impressions on people even before they become your patients, so find ways to customize every encounter.
Be Responsive. It goes without saying that patients are happier when healthcare providers eliminate wait times. Go beyond the obvious. Ask patients about their expectations and respond to their personal needs. Unanticipated opportunities to show extraordinary service go a long way toward improving the patient experience.
Keep Patients Informed. Whether it’s about medications or when the doctors are likely to make their rounds, keep patients informed. Explain tests, treatments and procedures; describe the technology you use. Include patients (and if appropriate, their families) in decision-making.

At Dobies Healthcare Group, we encourage healthcare marketers to champion the notion that brand is what you do. It is not a logo or tagline—a brand is something that lives in people’s hearts and minds. It’s defined by expectations developed over time through your communications and more importantly, your actions.

In other words, when you make a brand promise related to patient experience, you need to know you can keep it. You also need to continually strengthen the promise by identifying and translating consumer expectations into touch points that matter most to patients.

Real-Life Lessons in Social Media and Healthcare

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Karen Otto

Last week I attended a social media panel discussion moderated by Carol Dobies at the KCHCS Fall Conference. The three panelists, who represented two hospitals and a local firm that monitors, measures and analyzes digital content, shared their experiences and expertise with online patient interaction. Together they provided some important takeaways for healthcare organizations looking to expand their online presence. Highlights include:

Listening should be a key part of your social media strategy, and your efforts should go beyond the content you generate. It’s easy to know what people say directly to you online, but are you also watching what they say about you? “Sites like Facebook and Twitter are great for engagement, but that’s not where Google searches send people,” according to panelist Aaron Weber of Spiral16. “It’s critical to know where people land and what language they encounter when you come up in a search.” A valid point, considering 92% of adults online use search engines, and nearly 60% report using them daily, according to recent research by Pew Internet.

Healthcare-specialized SEO and marketing firms understand that patients search and read content from multiple sources (Yelp, YellowPages.com, Wikipedia, etc.) in addition to the messages you’re putting out there. The key to establishing meaningful patient engagement online is an effective mix of SEO tactics, highly targeted direct marketing and social media strategies that encompass your entire digital presence. Read more about the importance of listening to patient comments from HealthLeaders.

Back up your strategy with social media policies. Social media policies govern your use of social media, from employee access to procedures for triaging patient comments (negative and positive). Front-line employees are the face of your organization, so if you’re comfortable letting them post and interact with patients online, it’s your choice to allow it. In order to protect your brand image and ensure total compliance with all patient-privacy laws, however, usage policies should be clearly articulated and enforced.

In fact, panelist Shawn Arni of Children’s Mercy Hospital advises two separate policy documents: one for page admins/hospital use and another for employee use. For example, staff members are not allowed to post or share anything during work hours. Regardless of how well-intended any given post may be, if it’s made by patient-facing staff in the middle of a shift, it can be perceived as interfering with patient care.

Needless to say, there are many factors to consider when developing social media use policies, but having the right rules in place is well worth the effort. Panelist Belinda Rehmer of Lawrence Memorial Hospital (LMH), agrees. As the hospital’s Community Relations Social Media Lead, she speaks from experience, and LMH’s social media policy has been used as a best practice example by many other hospitals in Kansas.

Studies show that people with the low levels of social interaction have high rates of mortality. With so many networking tools now available online, the obvious question for healthcare providers is how can we use social media to engage patients in ways that improve health? We welcome all input on the topic, so if you have insight to share about patient engagement and social media, let us hear from you!

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.

Dobies Healthcare Group Facilitates Strategic Planning for NATCO

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Diane Morgan

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The North American Transplant Coordinators Organization (NATCO) engaged Dobies Healthcare Group to conduct a brand audit earlier this year. The strategic healthcare marketing and branding experts at Dobies performed a systematic, board-directed review of the company’s branding efforts, which included a communications audit, an internal audit and an external audit. After presenting key findings from the brand audit to NATCO leadership, Dobies Healthcare Group facilitated a two-day strategic planning session earlier this month to convert data-driven recommendations into strategies and tactics.

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.

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