Category Archives: Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Our Work Delivers.

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Family Birthing Center at Lawrence Memorial HospitalAs 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!

Does Your Marketing Plan Connect?

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Connect the Dots with DobiesWe’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!

Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin Named Among the Best

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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.

Transparency is Key to Service Line Success

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Hospital Quality RatingsI’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 made sense for a long time, but with information about hospital outcomes, patient satisfaction and physician ratings now easily accessible online, strategists must 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.

Real Moms Text! (Or, if you can’t reach ‘em, text ‘em)

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We’re into social media here at Dobies. But unlike the cobbler’s kids who have no shoes, our kids are social media gurus. That’s why, when we recently dove into the world of moms and will-be-moms to research and write a marketing plan for a hospital client’s obstetrics department, I was able to passionately endorse the strategy that we reach new Gen-Y moms via text messaging. Because younger moms text. Heck, now even old moms text. Of course, I’m an old mom – my kids are teenagers and ‘young adults’ (it’s hard not to smirk at that description, but that’s another blog).

I’ve come a long way from the short, one-syllable words that beginners use like yes, no, huh? I’m even able to have complete arguments by text, a necessary line of communication with teenagers. I even have actual conversations with other grown adults about important stuff. For example, last week, Kelley (who works here at Dobies) and I discussed via text what newspaper ad to run for a client. I happened to be having lunch with this client at the time, so Kelley sent a text asking me to discuss this particular topic while we ate our chips and salsa. So, I did. Thirty seconds later, we were all content because we had checked something quickly and efficiently off our lists.

But compared to Generation Y women (those aged 9-31), my accomplishment is mundane. Our next generation of moms has been raised in a world of instant information and connection. To effectively reach these young women, we need to join their world, because they’ve left ours way behind. In this case, ‘joining’ means offering pregnancy and parenting information via opt-in text messaging. I haven’t felt this good about a communication strategy since I texted my daughter to ask her to text a friend to text her mother to ask if she was interested in car pooling. It worked.

Where Will You Emerge?

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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 make some plans. When the dust settles on this economic crisis, how will the healthcare market re-emerge? More importantly, how will your company or hospital re-emerge? 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. Sure, it doesn’t seem logical, but one of the most important things an organization can do during an economic downturn is strengthen its positioning. For my health’s sake and yours, I sure hope the best providers out there are doing just that.