In his Heath Markets Guru blog, Michael Harris asks "why is service line growth so new to hospital executives?" He says administrators at one hospital said that they are "finally ready to take this seriously" when talking about service lines. "It never ceases to amaze me how health organizations rarely applied the practices of health diagnostics and treatment to their own fiscal stealth," he says.
After a few years of consumer research and trial and error, Southern Ohio Medical Center had found that its most effective marketing centered on patient and professional testimonials. However, when they won the prestigious Magnet Award for nursing, they discovered that incorporating the awards into their plans made them a ‘magnet’ for attention.
Southern Ohio Medical Center decided to take a testimonial spin on announcing the Magnet Award to the community it serves. “Rather than having one of the hospital executives come out in a suit to talk about how great [Southern Ohio Medical Center is] we decided it would be really great to let the nurses do it—since they were the ones who earned the honor,” says Robbie Kemper, creative director and CEO of Southern Ohio Medical Center’s agency KGB Advertising, Inc located in Cincinnati.
The hospital selected community members for the TV and radio spots that were created. The ability to be featured was given out as a reward for those internal members who did the work to make the award possible for the facility. Overall, reaching beyond their normal emphasis of marketing particular service lines proved to be a positive internal communications move. “We’d hear from the community ‘enough, what about the rest of us?’ Most of what we’ve marketed has centered on the heart and cancer service lines at Southern Ohio Medical Center. This allowed us to do a campaign that was an all inclusive representation of the professional internal community,” says Kemper.
By using real nurses and professionals, and by having them speak one-on-one with the potential patient/consumer, Southern Ohio Medical Center manages to grab attention and community appeal with the simplicity and sincerity of their ‘heart to heart’ message. As Kemper said of the focus group’s reaction to the TV spots, “There has yet to be a focus group that doesn’t know someone featured in one of the spots. In one focus group a woman said, ‘that can’t be a real nurse, she looks like an actor.’ Another woman spoke up and said, ‘no, she’s real, she’s well known in our community and if she says this facility is good than that’s good enough for me.’ What could be better than that?”
Kandace McLaughlin is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. Send her Campaign Spotlight ideas at kmclaughlin@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.
Ratings from consumer group Public Citizen showed the Florida Board of Medicine disciplined doctors slightly more often than in a previous study, but still ranks in the bottom half of states. Public Citizen is concerned that many states are lenient in not disciplining problem doctors, and as a result endangering the lives and health of patients. The Florida Board of Medicine has repeatedly insisted it's only doing its job in treating physicians fairly.
The new report from nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen ranks California 36th in the nation in disciplinary actions against doctors, which include the revocation, surrender and suspension of medical licenses. The previous year, California ranked 27th in the nation. The data show that physicians who might have been properly disciplined a few years ago may escape scrutiny today, according to the report's authors.
There hadn't been a nurses' union in Texas since the 1970s, until Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. opened the door to nurses' unionization when Cypress Fairbanks Medical Center in Houston had the first successful union vote in the state's history. Now the California Nurses Association is hoping that agreement will give it enough leverage to push its way into Dallas-Fort Worth, where Tenet owns three hospitals. From there, the union says, it plans to head into unaffiliated hospitals throughout the state to bring Texas in line with other states where nurses are organized.
A would-be buyer has emerged for St. Francis Hospital & Health Center in Blue Island, IL, that would transfer the facility and other assets to a group of investors affiliated with a for-profit company. St. Francis parent SSM Health Care has signed a "tentative agreement" with MSMC Investors LLC, a buyer working with a startup hospital company known as Transition Healthcare Company. SSM recently announced that it would close the 410-bed hospital due to rising numbers of uninsured and the lack of a buyer.