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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

At their most basic level, word clouds make text on a page look more exciting than, well, text on a page. You can use them to convey data and information in a way that breaks the mold of standard presentation formats like slides, spreadsheets and pie charts.

Looking for a creative way to share marketplace feedback to your executive and board leaders? Instead of a report with lengthy quotes and testimonials, consider presenting a word cloud that displays what consumers are saying in one quick, easily digestible image. Information that’s easy to absorb at a glance resonates more with readers.

Word clouds can also help you take a keen look at the content on your website, particularly if you’re not employing search engine optimization and marketing tactics. In seconds you’ll know exactly what words appear most frequently on key pages. You can use the results to assess whether or not you’re communicating what you want—and don’t want—to say. Try the same thing with key pages from your competitors’ sites to compare and contrast key messages.

And speaking of your Internet presence, do you know what’s being said about your organization online? Word clouds are a great way to determine if your online press is positive and aligns with your key messages. Google your organization or a specific topic, then enter text from the search results into a word cloud app. You’ll get an instant visual representation of your online image and what it says about you.

Your consumers and employees have suggestions for improvement – do you know what they are? Word clouds can help you figure it out. Just as they can be used to draw attention to your strengths, they can also uncover weaknesses. Without making it public, try making a word cloud to zero in on specific areas needing improvement.

There’s no shortage of word cloud generators available online. Look around on sites like Wordle, Tagxedo and Word It Out (to name just a few). Pick the app you like the most and discover what it can reveal about your marketing and communication efforts. Why not start right now? It’s easy, it’s creative, and it’s fun.

“Before starting any marketing effort, think about what patients will experience.”

This month’s newsletter explores patient-centered care. A movement toward treating hospital patients less like numbers and more like valued guests is growing in popularity due to its competitive advantage. “Advertising a hospital as ‘high tech’ or ‘high quality’ isn’t enough to stand out,” Crockett said. “Creating and promoting a better patient experience is what sets hospitals apart in a competitive market.”

The newsletter is already generating calls to our office and all sorts of buzz among healthcare marketing professionals.

You can read the full article here.

Number 28 in our deck of 52 healthcare marketing tips.

Challenge #1: Grow, all ye faithful

Tucked away in the Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, is a small organic not-for-profit farm used by urban farmers for educational research.  Here, each team fulfilled a KCCUA wish list which included storage containers and wheel barrows. It was our small way of contributing to a vital resource in the community. Donations like these help the farm operate year round. If you’d like to help, check out more information at http://www.kccua.org/.

Challenge #2: There once was a man from Nantucket…

A limerick. We’ve all heard them, right? But have you ever written one? It’s not as easy as it you might think! In true creative fashion, each team sat down at Harry’s Country Club in the River Market to share pomegranate martinis and write a catchy holiday rhyme. Allegedly healthy Pomegranate martinis, made with the antioxidant and cancer-preventing power of the pomegranate, are not only tasty but packed with essential nutrients.

Challenge #3: Get fit!

Staying fit and healthy during the holidays is a challenge many people face. Once you find an exercise that works for you it’s important to stick to a routine, even during the holidays. Since exercise can be a lot more fun with friends, our teams each developed a 20 minute group workout.

Challenge #4: Share a feast

Now that’s a donation!

In the final challenge, teams were tasked to find a healthy snack to enjoy and to give to someone in need. Each team donated cash, fruit, veggies (or a sandwich) to a worthy recipient; choices included a homeless man and a Salvation Army bell ringer. It was a healthy reminder of the reason for the season.

Our adventure was a fun way to give back to our community and remind ourselves what it means to have a healthy lifestyle. Happy New Year from everyone at Dobies Healthcare Group! And here’s to another healthy, successful year in 2011!