Emerson Hospital in Concord, MA, recently delivered a bundle of joy: $280,000 for its OB services. The facility is in the midst of a $36 million construction project called Project SCORE (Surgical Center, Obstetric and Radiology Expansion). "This project will add new space, renovate existing space, and include sophisticated imaging and surgical technology," said Christine Schuster, Emerson's president and CEO, during the groundbreaking. "In the process, we will improve the efficiency of how care is provided."
During the project, the team at Emerson has reached out to prospective donors and played up the service line areas that would benefit from the expansion with fundraising events. Though many events were planned and executed, one event in particular, the "Oh, Baby! Fundraiser," a ball benefiting Emerson's birthing center, received a particularly positive response.
"The Oh, Baby event was one in particular that was very visible within the community, fun, and successful," says Jack Dresser, vice president for development for Emerson.
What made the event such a success? Marketing materials that went out to the community included invites, posters, raffle cards, and save the date cards. The event was also advertised with pre-event press releases circulated to all local newspapers.
But advertising alone didn't attract members of the community to the event. Emerson Hospital committee members encouraged table buys and members of the Emerson staff took on a special role: tour guide.
"Assistance from the medical staff in the OB areas was tremendously helpful to our success," Dresser says. "In addition to the ball, the staff also took prospective donors around to show them the space undergoing renovation. They made sure the prospect would be treated well, which was instrumental in our success."
The event was a sellout, netting more than $280,000 for the project.
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.
Some of my colleagues have already reported on the recent HealthLeaders Media Top Leadership Teams event from the point of view of their own beats: finance, leadership, and global healthcare, for example. But taking in the views of the C-level participants through the lens of hospital marketing was a real eye-opener for me.
Sometimes it feels like CFOs, CEOs, COOs and other top administrators speak a different language than marketers. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to hear them use many of the same words and phrases. They talked—a lot—about patient centered care, consumerism, and patient satisfaction, as well as internal communications and employee satisfaction, to name a few.
I was particularly excited to hear that so many of this year's Top Leadership Team leaders understand the role that employee satisfaction has on patient satisfaction.
One example that you could easily replicate in your own organization came from keynote speaker Al Stubblefield, president and CEO of Florida's Baptist Healthcare Corporation. He talked about the importance of sharing "feel-good moments" with employees. When a friend of a patient wrote to praise hospital employees and departments for the excellent care his friend received while hospitalized, the organization created a video of the man reading the letter and showed it to employees. Accompanying slides highlighted the individuals and departments he mentioned to show, as Stubblefeld noted, that "everybody makes a difference."
Several other speakers used words and phrases that marketers know well, including community relations, community benefit reporting, relationships with stakeholders, touch-points, branding, and transparency. Other topics that fell into the marketing domain included physician relations, increasing physician referrals, internal communications and employee satisfaction, educating disruptive doctors, recruitment, adding ancillary services such as alternative treatments, and increasing self-pay revenue.
They even talked about public relations—a discipline that doesn't always get a lot of respect from administrators, even though it should. The best line from the conference, as far as I'm concerned, came from Jeffrey Thompson, MD, CEO of Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, WI, who said that his organization educated the community about their efforts to go green and to be using 100% renewable energy by 2014.
The community thought it was nice that the hospital wasn't killing too many patients, he said. But they thought it was wonderful that it wasn't killing too many trees.
Maybe not all of the topics I've mentioned involve the marketing department at your hospital. But they should.
There's a lesson here, and it's one I've expounded on before, but from another perspective. In the past, I've said that marketers must get out of their offices and walk the halls looking at the organization from the patient's point of view. That they should visit the parking lot to see how easy it is to park. That they should talk to the valet attendants and the volunteers and the front desk—those people that have such an impact on patients' and families' first impressions of your hospital.
Now I'm going to add another task to that list: Get out of your office and talk to the leaders at your organization. Invite them to lunch. Ask for a half hour to meet in their office and pick their brains. Ask them what topics are top-of-mind for them. Ask them what solutions they've considered and what solutions they still seek.
And then explain to them how the marketing department can help them find and implement those solutions in order to help them meet their goals.
Unless you already have an ongoing dialogue with your C-suiters (and, if so, good for you), looking at your job from the top-down perspective is sure to be an eye-opener for you, too.
CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, and other executives and leaders can be intimidating but they are, after all, your internal clients. You cannot effectively serve them without understanding their perspective and their needs. Would you ever launch a direct-to-consumer marketing campaign without understanding the needs of your target audience?
Gienna Shaw is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at gshaw@healthleadersmedia.com.
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Texas Health Resources has laid off 49 people at facilities in Tarrant, Dallas, Collin, and Erath counties because fewer people are seeking services as a result of the economic downturn, a company spokesman said. Texas Health Resources so far this year has cared for the same number of people at its hospitals as in 2007, but the nonprofit company is not seeing the growth it had expected, the spokesman said.
At least 19 Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital employees will be fired and 45 others disciplined after a breakdown in vetting allowed scores of people with criminal records to remain on staff even after background checks indicated their past crimes, Los Angeles County officials said. The move to rid the staff of the most serious criminal offenders came as the interim director of the Department of Health Services acknowledged for the first time that failures by the human resources bureau overseeing the county's 17,000 health service workers may extend well beyond King-Harbor.
The Public Health Trust announced two interim executives to lead the Jackson Health System starting Jan. 1 after Marvin O'Quinn leaves the chief executive position for a job in a Catholic hospital group in California. Gene Bassett, chief operating officer, will become interim CEO. Eneida O. Roldan will become interim president and chief operating officer.
With a bumper crop of flu vaccine expected this year and the clock ticking to get it into people before influenza strikes, disease fighters are no longer content to rely on doctors to dispense shots in their offices. Caritas Norwood is believed to be the first hospital in Massachusetts to implement a drive-through flu-shot clinic, joining medical centers and health departments stretching from Seattle to rural Virginia. Last year was the first flu season that drive-through vaccinations were offered at the hospital.