American Hospital Association President Richard J. Umbdenstock told President Obama this week that U.S. hospitals will answer his call for "shared responsibility" to help the nation's fiscal future, as long as everybody else does, too.
"We believe we have to be part of the solution, but so do vendors, suppliers, other providers, employers, and consumers themselves. It's not going to be solved by any one approach or putting it on the shoulders of any one stakeholder," Umbdenstock says in an interview with HealthLeaders Media.
"Hospitals are the ones that hold this somewhat broken and disjointed system together on Main Street day in and day out for America's communities and patients in need," he says. "We are calling for reform, but not just in the form of short-term payment cuts and reductions, that will just force the system to get more out of kilter and out of balance than it already is."
Umbdenstock was among the several dozen people who met for more than three hours on Monday with Obama and key White House officials in what was billed as a fiscal responsibility summit. The meeting also included members of Congress, leaders of business and professional organizations, and advocacy groups.
No firm resolutions or action plans came out of the meeting. However, Umbdenstock says he was "pleased, as a representative of hospitals and other provider organizations, that the tone was one of solving a shared national problem."
"The president and his team set the context at the opening session," Umbdenstock says. "We as a nation have to start thinking about the long-term fiscal situation and fiscal stability of the country and they see the rising cost of healthcare as the major issue driving the challenge going forward as the population ages, as demand increases, as new procedures and technologies keep coming on line, and so on."
The Washington Post reports that Obama urged the group to "build off this afternoon's conversation and work together to forge a consensus." White House Budget Director Peter Orszag told the summit that slowing the growth rate in healthcare costs is "the single most important thing we can do to improve the long-term fiscal health of our nation. Let me be very clear: Healthcare reform is entitlement reform. The path of fiscal responsibility must run directly through healthcare," the Post quoted Orszag as saying.
Umbdenstock says he told the administration that America's hospitals appreciate the approximately $150 billion earmarked for healthcare spending in the stimulus plan, including the supplemental funding for Medicaid and COBRA, and $19 billion for healthcare information technology implementation incentives.
"Those are all positive steps that we thought were necessary at the moment and can be built upon in the future" he says. "Hospitals are right in the middle of this economic crisis, in some ways even more so than other enterprises. Like other enterprises, we are having our financial challenges, access to capital challenges, but we also have challenges in the form of more people losing coverage and turning to the hospitals as a safety net." Umbdenstock says he made it clear to the White House that hospitals are ready for responsible reforms.
"We believe you have to cover everybody in the system so they are getting the right care at the right time and in the right place and not just relying on emergency rooms or waiting until they are terribly advanced in their illness," Umbdenstock says. "We do need payment reform to address the government underpayment in the public programs and therefore the cost shift, but also to align incentives and drive some constructive changes in the delivery system. We also need administrative simplification. We have too many ways of billing and filing for reimbursement."
Umbdemstock says the Obama administration knows that AHA supports evidence-based medicine, but only if all of the parts are in place. "What we are worried about is that—at the moment—we don't have a significant portion of the services provided that have been validated. We don't have national agreement on the evidence," he says. "We've got a large research and consensus process ahead of us, and we are a little worried that some of the payment mechanisms will get out ahead of the evidence, which would be wrong and hard for us to support."
While he can't predict what the healthcare system will look like in the coming years, Umbdenstock says change is coming. "The future will be different. The delivery system will be different and the incentives will be different, and that's OK," he says. "The challenge will be getting from here to there through the period of change. That is where we can't afford to have crazy things done in the short-term that will jeopardize these community institutions or the services that patients need."
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeaders Media. He can be reached atjcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
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As if the advertising industry didn't have enough problems, now the industry needs to show more and more demonstrable results, writes advertising columnist Dan Goldgeier on TalentZoo.com. But the not-so-well-kept secret is that no one knows if advertising works, he writes.
In this economy, how you choose to communicate your message is just as important as the message itself. With shrinking budgets at the forefront of decision making, there are many effective ways to get the word out without breaking the bank.
Miami (OH) Valley Hospital wanted to promote a recent high HealthGrades ranking for its cardiology services and also wanted to raise awareness for Premier Heart Works, a cardiology wellness and risk assessment program geared at educating the community about heart health while also potentially bringing in at-risk patients and downstream revenue for the facility.
Working with its agency, SPM Marketing & Communications in La Grange, IL, Miami Valley Hospital created a campaign that strategically combined traditional marketing mediums with a few new, creative, and cost-effective efforts.
The team decided to keep the message simple, keeping a consistent call-to-action pushing potential patients to the Premier Heart Works program. "Our goal was really to have more of a consumer appeal," says Rick Conrad, creative director for SPM Marketing & Communications.
The overall creative strategy featured a torso wearing a red t-shirt on all of the creative elements; which was used to carry the campaign message and to grab the viewer's attention. "Visually from a design standpoint, the red in the creative was a bit of a departure for us," says Mark Feighery, director of marketing for Miami Valley Hospital. "We launched a new visual identity two years ago and everything is blue, blue, blue. So this really stands out for us." Another tactic to get attention: Unusual ad placements in local newspapers—in the middle of an editorial page, for example.
Though the creative included traditional efforts like print ads and posters, it also employed a few interesting and cost-effective tactics, such as video postings on YouTube, t-shirts with campaign messages, and direct mail-like door hangers. The door hangers, in particular, were a cost effective technique that brought the campaign message directly to its target audience's door.
"We needed to make a small budget go as far as we could," says Anne Bassett, VP and account director at SPM. "So the door hangers were a great way of being very focused and very targeted on the audience we wanted to reach."
Playing off of the timing of national heart month and a special reduced rate for the Premier Heart Works program, the campaign is scheduled to run until the end of February.
What stood out most about this campaign for the team involved was its impact and resourcefulness. "For me, this campaign showed that with some creativity you can do a lot with a little," says Conrad. Thus far, reports have shown an increase in Premier Heart Works volumes since running the campaign.
Kandace McLaughlin Doyle is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. Send her Campaign Spotlight ideas at kdoyle@healthleadersmedia.com If you are a marketer submitting a campaign on behalf of your facility or client, please ensure you have permission before doing so.
It's an economic double-whammy: The recession is forcing some hospitals and health systems to cut back on recruitment campaigns—at the same time that demand for hard-to-fill positions such as nursing is growing. But there's a simple and inexpensive way to make your hospital or health system more attractive to candidates—and I'm amazed that more hospitals aren't taking advantage of it.
I knew that I wanted to write about hospital recruitment campaigns this week, so I took a tour of career Web pages at hospitals and health systems around the country. I looked at small community hospitals and large academic centers. Faith-based organizations, non-profits, and for-profits. Hospitals in big crowded markets, and hospitals in small communities. The variety of messages—some effective but many others quite off-putting—was amazing.
Your Web site's recruitment page is one of the first places prospective candidates will see when they're checking you out and deciding if they want to work for you. How can you make sure that your site is sending candidates the right message?
Make it easy. One home page I looked at had a miniscule and easy-to-miss link to the careers page. I had to look at the page from top to bottom three times before I found it. Another had a broken careers link. Think redundancy. There's no reason not to have more than one link to the careers page. You should have a link in the left-hand column, which is where most people look first and at the bottom of the page, another common place to find "about us" and "careers" links.
Make it welcoming. Another site I visited had scant information about what it's like to work at the organization—except for long and detailed "standards of performance" document with stern warnings about proper phone etiquette, attitude, and appearance. Not exactly a warm and welcoming first impression.
Make it personal. Another listed seven reasons to work for the hospital—all but one of which were written from the point of view of the hospital and why it's so great. Yes, you should tell candidates what your hospital is like. But like other forms of marketing, you must communicate the benefits to the customer and not just talk all about you.
Make it representative. Including pictures of employees on recruitment pages is a good idea. It breaks up text and shows some personality. Here's how to make that tactic backfire: One Website had pictures on its recruitment page that consisted entirely of older white men. That sends a clear message; one that I hope is not actually reflective of the workforce at that hospital.
Make current employees the stars. One of my favorite sites had video testimonials from real employees about the culture of teamwork and nurse-physician relationships. They had a fairly low production value, to be honest. But that also made them feel more real and unscripted.
Make it sticky. Another great site had an interactive healthcare trivia game with questions about nursing and healthcare history, for example. I played it three times and scored dismally low, proving that no one should ever hire me as a nurse. I spent more time on that site and the game hinted at the organization's personality and culture.
Make it mission-oriented. If you're proud of your faith-based mission or your standards of excellence, of course you should talk about them. But you can do so without talking about them only from your point of view. One site described its mission entirely from the point of view of its employees, explaining how they live those values. The word "you" appeared more frequently than the word "us" or "our." And that's a good thing.
Make it pretty. OK, maybe this isn't the most important recruitment page "do," but the sites that looked nice, that had visual extras like a well-made flash video, were much more pleasant to visit than those that simply had a plain-text page with instructions for submitting a resume. That also sends a message about your organization.
Take a look at your recruitment page. Does it reflect what it's like to work at your organization? Does it sell your hospital to potential recruits? Ask yourself: "If I had little or no information about our organization and had never seen this page before, would I want to work here?"
If you look and decide that yes, you're doing it right, I want to hear from you. Visit our MarketShare blog, where you'll find a post with some links to the great recruitment pages I found and share links to your great pages with us.
President Barack Obama pledged Tuesday to cure Americans from what he called "the crushing cost of health costs," saying the country could not afford to put healthcare reform on hold. Obama pointed to the increasing number of uninsured and rapidly rising healthcare premiums, which he said was one reason small business closed their doors and corporations moved overseas. Obama's prescription for healthcare reform included making "the largest investment ever" in preventive care, rooting out Medicare fraud and investing in electronic health records and new technology in an effort to reduce errors, bring down costs, ensure privacy and save lives.
The Prince George's County (MD) Council has criticized a plan that would allow a panel responsible for the sale of the county's troubled hospital system to sell pieces of it to various buyers. After a briefing by members of the Prince George's County Hospital Authority about proposed state legislation, council member Samuel H. Dean (D-Mitchellville) argued that the plan violates an agreement the county made when it pledged to pay $174 million over five years to the winning bidder.