Promoting Your Hospital's HIT Capabilities, Creatively

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?