A report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation shows that there is an expected health gap between rich and poor children. However, the report also points out a significant gap between the middle and upper classes—one that is seen across the country.
Three small Iowa hospitals have installed an integrated electronic health record system. Kossuth Regional Health Center in Algona, Franklin General Hospital in Hampton and Mitchell County Regional Health Center in Osage recently completed implementation of a regional network called EHR10. The three hospitals are the first of seven Mercy Health Network-North Iowa rural facilities to implement computerized physician order entry and other clinical/revenue systems.
A small group of hospitals in western Wisconsin is providing a lesson in innovation for rural hospitals everywhere.
The Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative Information Technology Network will get $1.6 million over the next three years as its share of the FCC's $400 million Rural Healthcare Pilot Program. The first-of-its-kind grant will be used to offset the cost of building a collaborative information system and electronic medical records initiative.
While the FCC pilot is providing funding for the telecommunications upgrade, the federal Health Resources and Services Administration is providing another $1.6 million for software and EMR hardware, says Louis Wenzlow, chief information officer for the Wisconsin project. The funding is expected to underwrite about 85% of the cost to establish collaborative broadband networks that will support telemedicine services for the cooperative's four small critical-access hospitals, and two physician clinics in the traditionally underserved rural areas. The cooperative members will pick up the remainder of the costs through monthly fees.
Wenzlow says the collaboration will allow the hospitals to negotiate better discounts from vendors, reduce datacenter costs and software licensing fees, and tap into a pooled technical support staff—services that might otherwise be prohibitively expensive for one small hospital acting on its own. "It's really extraordinarily expensive for a hospital to implement a full EHR system. By creating value that way, they are better able to spend more money on telecommunications down the road," he says.
The four hospitals in the cooperative are now live on a shared system that was implemented over the summer and includes financial systems, and departmental systems like lab and radiology, order entry and scheduling. Wenzlow says the cooperative is preparing an "aggressive" roll out of advanced clinical systems that are scheduled to go live early next year.
Philip Stuart, CEO of Tomah Memorial Hospital, located about 45 miles east of La Crosse, in western Wisconsin, says his 25-bed hospital had already implemented many of the IT upgrades the cooperative was promoting, but decided to join because of the potential savings. "The advantage to us is the savings on the back end in terms of software licensing fees, being able to participate in grants for our interconnectivity with telecommunications lines, and computer redundancy for data storage. That's now cost-sharing for us."
Stuart says that Tomah could save about $80,000 over the next five years by joining the cooperative. The pooled technical resources also allow Tomah to leave unfilled a technical support position that was recently vacated. "We view the ROI as being very positive," Stuart says.
Even though Tomah was upgrading its IT system on its own, Stuart says he wanted to be involved in a cutting-edge project that is serving "a common good." He says small hospitals shouldn't be intimidated by the idea of joining together on such a project without the help of a bigger health system, because the formula for success is the same.
"I don't think it makes any difference if it's a critical-access 25-bed hospital or a 615-bed academic medical center," he says. "To make it work, the infrastructure has to be in place. You need to have the right mix of people with the technical savvy to do it."
"The up-front work saves you problems on the back end, too," Stuart says. "Anybody that gets into this needs to understand what it means and make sure the medical staff and the end users are part of the planning processes and are intimately involved or it won't work."
The other members of the cooperative are: Boscobel Area Health Care; Memorial Hospital of Lafayette County, in Darlington; St. Joseph's Community Health Services, in Hillsboro; and two physician clinics in Wonewoc and Elroy.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeadersMedia. He can be reached at jcommins@healthleadersmedia.com
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In look and feel, hospital ads run the gamut from slick to sloppy. The main culprit for ads that look less than professional? Bad photography.
And, oh! There are so many different kinds of bad photography that shows up in healthcare advertising. There are the photographs of buildings—great if you want to put your audience to sleep. There are the photos of medical equipment—great if you want to intimidate your audience. And then there are the photographs of people standing stiffly in formation as if posing for a police line-up—a terrific choice if you want your creative to be about as uncreative as it can be.
But to my mind, the two worst offenders are the snapshot and the stock photo.
Look, mom, I made it myself!
Sure, you save money when you take your own campaign photographs. Not many people would try to pull this off for a print campaign, but you see it a lot in internal campaigns, such as employee newsletters. The fact is these home-spun photos aren't half bad. But they're not half-good, either. The result is almost always vaguely reminiscent of a child's macaroni craft project.
Everybody thinks they could be a marketer, right? Well everybody thinks they could be a photographer, too. Just as the head of OB should not write marketing copy, you should not take your own campaign photographs.
Stock syndrome
Photos purchased from online warehouses look pretty and are easy to use, but the generic images also scream "fake." If you're looking for a picture that matches your target audience—say, a young Hispanic woman—you're likely to find a photo of woman who could be Hispanic, but also might be Asian and kind of looks vaguely Indian, too. That's not representing your unique audience—it's representing every audience.
Stock photographs are meant to appeal to the masses. That is why, by the way, you sometimes see ads for different products or companies that feature photos of the same model. Not exactly the best way to differentiate yourself.
Pictures speak loudly
Think about these two kinds of photographs—stock and snapshot—and what they say about your organization.
Snapshots suggest you don't care about your work. They hint that you take short-cuts. They make you look unprofessional. And they say that you don't care enough about your audience to make an effort to look nice.
Slick but sterile stock photos make you look good, but they also create a distance between you and your audience. It says you don't think of them as individuals. It says you don't really know or understand them. They make your organization look standoffish and cold.
Hiring a professional photographer might be the most time-consuming and expensive option. But of the three options, it is by far the superior choice. Your photos will look genuine. They'll look professional. And assuming you use a local photographer, you can use actual customers or employees in your ads. That shows that you know and care about your internal and external communities.
One caveat, lest you think that I'm completely unbendable on this issue: if you must take photographs yourself, at the very least invest in a good digital camera. And find someone at the hospital who has at least hobby-level experience taking photographs—you might make an announcement in the employee newsletter, for example, that you're looking for help.
Maybe you'll discover that head of OB is handy with a camera.
Gienna Shaw is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at gshaw@healthleadersmedia.com.
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Ellsworth (KS) County Medical Center wants to convince its patients to walk across the United States. And most will do so without leaving Kansas, or even Ellsworth.
The hospital is promoting a program called WOW, or Walking off Weight, which aims to encourage locals to become more active and healthy. Dough Stefek, community outreach coordinator, says the hospital came up with the program after a health assessment survey revealed that 33% of county adults are overweight.
The hook—the hospital is encouraging participants to walk the equivalent of a cross-country trip.
"What we originally were going to do is walk the mileage across Kansas," he says. "I think with the response that we've had—and we've had a pretty good response so far—we're thinking that since Kansas is only 400 miles across, we're thinking that we're going to go ahead and walk across the United States—see how far we can get."
The hospital will display participants' progress on a bulletin board in the lobby and on its Web site. After the first day of registration, 56 people signed up and 20 came to hear more information about the program. Stefek says he hopes 300 will participate.
The program began on October 5 and will run through April 24. On April 25 the hospital will announce the winners—those who walked the farthest and those who lost the most weight—at the local health fair. The top winners will receive prizes.
All participants will receive Walking off Weight T-shirts featuring the program's logo—the word "WOW" with tennis shoes on the bottom of each W. The logo was conceptualized by one Ellsworth's nurse managers and designed by one of its dieticians.
Stefek says that developing a healthier community will ultimately benefit the hospital.
"We're hoping this is going to be a preventative type thing," he says. "With people actively involved in physical exercise [we hope] that they won't be coming into the hospital as much."
"Nano-niche" marketing—targeting very small but engaged groups of consumers—is one way to weather a recession. How can you do nano-marketing if your brand is designed to be sold to a wide audience? It's more work for the marketing team but often far less investment in media buys. So, you may spend a bit more on salary, but a lot less on ads. That’s because you're relying on content, blogs, search optimization, and reaching out to extremely small (but ripe for the plucking) lists and media outlets.