SSM Health Care to Drop 'Care,' Focus on Health

The gradual rebranding "is consistent with where we have been moving as an organization in the last two or three years as a single corporation delivering care in four states, and not [as] a confederacy of 19 hospitals," says the CEO of SSM Health Care.

What's in a word?

I wondered about that after SSM Health Care this month announced that it is changing its name to SSM Health at its 19 hospitals and more than 60 outpatient facilities in four Midwestern states.

At first blush, dropping "care" from a name brand doesn't seem like a big deal. That one little four-letter word, however, has become freighted in the healthcare industry. It has come to suggest, ever so subtly, that the services provided are reactive rather than proactive; that the focus is on delivering sick care instead of emphasizing health and prevention.

The rebranding will be gradual, starting at SSM Health hospitals in mid-Missouri and expanding from there. The process expected to be completed by 2016.

William P. Thompson, president and CEO of SSM Health Care, spoke with me about the name change, what prompted it, and what it signifies. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

HLM: What prompted this name change?

WPT: Like every other healthcare system we have been challenging ourselves as to what does the future of healthcare really mean. We've talked about this transition from volume to value.

We recognized about three or four years ago that we were going to have to transform ourselves from being strictly an acute-care, hospital-based, episodic care[-focused], sickness system to a system that was truly an integrated delivery network fully capable of assuming responsibility both clinically and financially for the health of the population.

We recognized that we were going to have to do a better job of connecting with patients and we were going to have to do a better job of assuming risk. We made significant investments in information systems, medical records systems, other infrastructure improvements. We made a significant investment last year to acquire the Dean Health System and Dean Health Plan and to add additional capabilities to our system.

CEO Exchange: Preparing for Population Health

We also had an interesting conversation with some fairly sophisticated healthcare purchasers, large employers and insurers, who told us we were one of the best kept secrets in our communities.

We looked at our various markets and had something like over 100 different names and logos and looks to our identity. When you looked at that, you realized we really are a best-kept secret because the exceptional things we are doing in one of our hospitals or facilities really wasn't transferring to the benefits of the others and we had to change that.

We also recognized that we had to prepare for a more retail- or consumer-oriented business orientation with the growth of high-deductible health plans, defined contributions health plans, and the emergence of public and private exchanges.

Individual people, patients, beneficiaries, customers are going to make more and more of the decisions as to where they were going to receive their care.

HLM: The name change will happen gradually over the next two years. Why not do it all at once?

WPT: It's the old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

It is a matter of doing it well in one market and rolling it out to the next. We may find that we can speed up the process after we have done it a while, but it is a fairly substantial endeavor to change the signage on our facilities, and change the stationery, [and] all of the existing pieces that are out there.

A lot structural things have to be changed. There are a lot of communications, paid advertising, and other kinds of communications that we are going to have to do.

We also want to make sure we bring our employees along. Part of this transformation we are in is to be much more patient- [and] customer-centric than we have ever been in the past. So we are engaging our employees today in what will probably be a six-month process through a series of meetings and focus groups and conversations.

If you were the patient how would you want to be treated? What would be important to you? We have done a ton of research on branding and identity, but in the future we have to be able to deliver a physician visit virtually. We have to be able to open up some technological portals that allow patients to contact us through their smart phones or iPads, the ability to communicate through our patient portals that we haven't done in the past, recognizing patients want immediate access to a provider. How do we set up same day appointments?

How do we ensure that we have extended hours? How do we facilitate the admission of patients or facilitate a patient's visit in a clinic or office setting? Can we eliminate waiting times in the waiting rooms? Can we eliminated waiting in the exam room?

Those are the questions we are asking to ensure that we can deliver on this promise of "experience exceptional." We want to roll this out having fully engaged our employees and making sure they understand what we are trying to accomplish, but also solicit their help to assure that we can actually accomplish what we are promising.

HLM: What else will the rebranding involve?

WPT: The logo will change slightly. It will be very representative of what we have had traditionally. We are going to use the tagline of "experience exceptional." That will become part of the brand rollout. That is what we want to have a lot of conversations about.

What does that really mean in this new world of retail/consumer orientation where we have to be competitive in an environment where patients are going to act like—it's not the best analogy —people making value decisions about where they buy hamburgers?

They are going to make value decisions about where they buy healthcare and how they want that healthcare. Do they want it in a traditional face-to-face meeting? Do they want a telephone visit or a video visit? We have to be prepared to meet the patients where the patients are, not where we think they should be going, which is the tradition of healthcare.

HLM: Do you see any potential savings in this name change?

WPT: I don't know how much we could save, but the fact is we can now use a single promotional piece across our entire system with very minor changes. We can use some common advertising, common production of both print and television and other media ads, making it easier to transfer that across the entire system.

There are some significant [potential] savings, but that is consistent with where we have been moving as an organization in the last two or three years as a single corporation delivering care in four states, and not [as] a confederacy of 19 hospitals.