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Promoting Your Hospital's HIT Capabilities, Creatively

 |  By Marianne@example.com  
   March 07, 2012

Promoting your facility's health information technology capabilities to the general public can be daunting. Without a deft touch, HIT marketing can come off as complicated, stuffy, and confusing. For these reasons, a lot of healthcare marketers don't want to touch it.

But don't be intimidated. There are some real benefits to promoting HIT, specifically electronic health records.  EHR can be a real market differentiator and a way to solidify your organization as a cutting-edge hospital in the minds of consumers. 

Kaiser Permanente's "Thrive" campaign may be one of the reasons healthcare marketers are so intimidated of advertising HIT. Anyone who has seen the sleek "Connected" ad with its high production quality and special effects will agree: Who can compete with that?
Texas Health Resources can.

In 2006 the health system implemented an EHR system that is securely linked throughout all 13 wholly owned Texas Health hospitals. The health system invested more than $200 million in the system, which contains more than 4.7 million patient records.

The 13 linked hospitals have achieved Stage Six designation from HIMSS, and Texas Health was one of the first health systems nationwide to receive Medicare incentive payments for meeting first stage meaningful use criteria for implementation and use of its EHR.

But what good is all of that if Texas Health's patients and community members don't understand the benefits?

Promoting EHR with a microsite and social media

In the fall of 2010 Texas Health launched a microsite to inform the public about its EHR. The site was rolled out in conjunction with a system-wide branding initiative. It showcased five video vignettes featuring Ferdinand Velasco, MD, chief medical information officer, known as "Dr. V," a friendly physician explaining the benefits of the EHR.

"Because the EHR as a concept is a bit abstract, we used my 'Dr. V' character to show a real physician using the EHR, taking care of patients and interacting with other clinicians," Velasco says. "This helped show consumers how the EHR is impacting patient care."

In addition to embedding the videos on the microsite's homepage, Texas Health marketers uploaded them to the system's YouTube channel and referenced them on Facebook, Twitter, and in media releases.

"Texas Health leadership wanted to promote, not just through the media, but also directly to public, the system's investment in the EHR and how the technology was helping us advance our mission," Velasco says. "Until this time we had invested a lot of effort in engaging our medical staff physicians and staff on the EHR's benefits. The social media campaign enabled us to communicate directly to patients."

Helping patients relate to technology

Texas Health marketers and Velasco created the Dr. V character as a way to avoid creating the dreaded dry-and-technical HIT video.

"The videos introduced an element of whimsy," says Charlie Dierker, Texas Health's consumer portal manager. "They made the concept approachable, fun, and educational. They helped drive home the value proposition of why the EHR is important to the community and how it would help Texas Health accomplish our mission of taking care of people."

Texas Health has received an extremely positive response from the microsite and believes it has helped to establish the organization as a technology pioneer in its marketplace.

"The public is consciously and subconsciously internalizing the message that Texas Health is embracing technology, leading to improved patient safety and quality," Dierker says.

As an added bonus, the microsite and videos have helped to support Texas Health's physician communications.

"If patients are aware that EHRs are important and improve clinical outcomes, they will ask their physicians about them," Velasco says. "This helps us with the messaging we do for our physicians."

Texas Health's approach to promoting its EHR proves that you don't need to use an expensive ad agency to create a captivating 30-second spot in order to educate patients about the benefits of HIT. Even if your organization doesn't have a "Dr. V," with a little creative thinking you can craft an engaging strategy to promote even your most complicated HIT.

Marianne Aiello is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.

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