Trial-size packages of free drug samples are popular with doctors, who often reserve them for poor or uninsured patients. A new study shows, however, that most of the free medications go to wealthier patients who have insurance.
A Texas-based developer and Wichita, KS-based Presbyterian Manors of Mid-America Inc. are teaming up to build a $155 million continuing care retirement facility in Kirkwood, MO. Marketing for the community began in October 2007, after the Kirkwood City Council approved the plans for the facility, and more than 300 people have signed up to receive more information.
With many large children's hospitals in the Twin Cities, University of Minnesota Children's Hospital (UMCH) needed to show consumers that they have a choice when it comes to their children's care. The hospital's marketing team knew that the care the hospital gives to children and the patient stories they had to tell could differentiate them from the competition.
"Originally the facility was thought of as a place you'd only go for acute care," says Bill Faude, creative director and copy writer with UMCH's agency Storandt Pann Margolis (SPM) in La Grange, IL. "We wanted to show people that the facility could be used for a variety of procedures and that's a big part of why we did the work we did."
From that need to rebrand and capture regional market share, the team created the 'This is more' campaign.
Though they used a multimedia approach, the campaign's TV spots and its peer to peer level strategy made it distinctive. For example, one spot features a 'patient' named Ella. Her father speaks about the excellent care Ella received at UMCH, but also about how the level of care benefited the family. UMCH shows that though getting its message out about its professionals and their abilities is important, the patient and patient's family are its primary focus.
"Many other organizations deliver messages through their physicians but hearing medical information from professionals can feel like it's coming from Mount Olympus. We tried to empathize [with consumers]: 'Who would parents want to hear from?' and centered on the concept of getting information from those who had lived it," says Faude.
The campaign ran throughout 2007 and with Web hits doubling, targeting the consumer with a person they can relate to seems to have been the right move.
In New England, we're fresh off the heels of primary season, where each presidential candidate has been trying to convince our New Hampshire neighbors to the north that he or she is the true candidate of change. You have to at least appreciate the dialogue that elections encourage. It's kind of hard to imagine any change without a good number of open-minded people talking to each other. And that brings me to this week's column, which is all about dialogue in the form of your thoughtful responses to what I've written in the past month or so in this marketing column.
For starters, I finally got some answers to the question I posed back in December about whether or not healthcare marketers are taking on a more strategic role in hospitals and health systems. The answers: Sort of, sometimes, and it depends on what your definition of 'marketing' is.
I meet with leadership from different hospitals almost weekly to discuss strategy. My experience is that marketing is invited less than 25 percent of the time. When present they do not usually participate unless directly asked a "marketing" question. When they are involved strategically it makes a positive difference and the institution is more informed. I was surprised at the low (47 percent) COO involvement. My experience is they are always involved in strategy along with the CEO, CNO, and CFO. Marshall Steele, MD CEO Marshall Steele and Associates
I posed this [question] to a recent gathering of marketing and PR folks. Way back when I entered the profession, there was no such word as 'marketing' in the hospital vocabulary. It was all about solid community relations at that time. At the end of the day, are the marketing functions really about that anyway? Maybe the department is misnamed. Telling the hospital's story and getting involved in the community are some of the biggest responsibilities these functions undertake. Moving market share is something that marketers can try to do but never actually can fully measure. So, should we be doing what we do best and recognize that there is a value to that (as CEOs I have talked to recognize) and try to stop disguising these initiatives under a marketing banner? Anthony Cirillo, FACHE President Fast Forward Consulting, LLC
I was fortunate to have spent a lot of time at the top planning level during my 20-year career in hospital marketing and operations. I recently opened a health insurance agency for one of my clients. Agents I brought in have been demanding "marketing" to help them make sales. I quickly realized that to insurance agents chasing Medicare Advantage enrollment, "marketing" means "leads." Once I figured out what they wanted, it has not been too difficult keeping them happy. In hospitals, "marketing" may also be too encompassing a term. "Business development" or "medical staff development" would tend to move the function up the planning scale, while "public relations," "communications," and "creative services" would move it the other way. Perhaps we should be focusing more on the "components of marketing" in hospitals than on marketing itself. Ken Peach Future Vision Group, LLC
In response to my predictions for healthcare marketing in 2008--one of which was the death of sites that allow consumers to rank physicians and hospitals--my colleague Molly Rowe pointed to the fact that the insurer Wellpoint has partnered with restaurant review giant Zagat to help it rank the hospitals and physicians in its network. "Although customer-written review Websites may go away, restaurant and hotel raters might replace them," she noted.
Another reader wasn't confident in that particular prediction, either. "I am not sure I agree with the fall of consumer written Web sites and rankings. I think they will proliferate not dissipate," said Cirillo, using our new online comment feature.
To clarify, I'm not saying that I think those sites will disappear altogether. The insurance-based ratings sites, in particular, probably have legs. But I do think those anonymous sites--the 21st Century's version of a slam book--won't hold much sway with consumers. Other types of ranking sites, on the other hand, could well catch on.
I did get at least one vote in support of my prediction that there would be an increased focus on internal communication among healthcare marketers in 2008.
Your comments on the importance of internal communications in improving employee satisfaction really resonate. At Studer Group we believe that the culture that is created and hardwired by specific tactics for good communication makes all the difference not only in employee satisfaction but even more importantly in great patient care.
We in healthcare have an obligation to provide the employees and volunteers at our hospitals with the tools they need to make a difference in saving lives. We must communicate both the tools and the passion that we share.
At 56 years of age, I continue to be in awe of healthcare difference-makers. Tools, techniques, medications, and training are wonderful and a necessity. But passion is the constant that keeps our souls alive to continue to serve others. Quint Studer, CEO Studer Group
And one last note from the field came in the form of an update. One reader who resolved to cut down on meetings after reading my column Death by Meeting says reports that "meetings are down, productivity is up, and . . . morale is up too."
There could be no more fitting end to the healthcare year of 2007 than President Bush sitting down in his Crawford, TX, ranch on Dec. 29 essentially taping a bandage on some fundamental healthcare problems still facing us. It was typical of a year that started with the best intentions to make progress in healthcare, but like so many personal resolutions ended in a pathetic whimper.
So basically what we have are two extensions--the State Children's Health Insurance Program stays at covering six million kids, and the Medicare physician fee reduction schedule gets officially procrastinated until June. Why should we have expected anything different? It sets up 2008 to be another year of policy workarounds and empty dialogue without much accountability toward fixing a healthcare system that threatens our national prosperity.
The fight over SCHIP shows in flashing lights just how petty the politics became. Progress toward any meaningful reform will require a progression of political steps, the first of which, I assert, must at least be some consensus on how we as a nation want to provide adequate healthcare coverage to our children. Both sides continue to accuse the other of using children either for or against the expansion toward government-sponsored universal care.
"Ultimately, our nation's goal should be to move children who have no health insurance to private coverage," President Bush said in an October radio address. That private coverage depends on mom and/or dad having a job that offers health coverage, and being able to afford premiums that grew 6.1 percent last year and now average $12,000 a year for a family of four, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. So our nation's goal is to essentially push children into a private insurance market that is more expensive and more difficult to obtain?
The repeal of the Medicare physician fee reduction schedule until June likewise is a way to put off the pain, hoping that the lump will just go away. By mid-2008, Congress will be in the full heat of a presidential election cycle, with neither party wanting to risk its candidate's appeal.
"Regardless of the outcome in November 2008, there's no doubt the U.S. health system will experience transformative changes and disruptive innovation in coming years," says Paul H. Keckley, Ph.D., executive director of the Washington, D.C-based Deloitte Center for Health Solutions. "But for the next 12 months, it's wait and see."
When faced with a problem that threatens the health and safety of patients, good hospitals work with a sense of urgency. In Washington, unfortunately, the new year of healthcare continues to be dominated by political pie fights--as in who can keep the bigger piece--rather than meaningful movement. We can hope that other pressures on the system from employers, consumers and even internal pressures from hospitals and physicians, will keep some momentum toward change going in 2008.
When administrators at Schneck Medical Center in Seymour, IN, decided to construct a state-of-the-art cancer treatment facility, ideas for the site's design came from those that would be using it most: patients. In fact, the medical center and the project's designers utilized both community and staff input when constructing the new Schneck Cancer Center that opened in fall 2007.
Prior to construction of the new Schneck Cancer Center, Schneck Medical had offered medical oncology services since the 1980s. A lack of radiation therapy, however, forced patients to travel several miles to nearby cities for treatment. Schneck Medical serves a five-county radius in southeastern Indiana.
"Cancer is very exhausting in its own self--and it's worse for my chemotherapy patients because they have a battle going on in their body. Then they were having to travel every day 30-45 minutes one way to get radiation therapy," says Sally Acton, director of cancer services at Schneck Medical. "It just broke my heart because I would see how tired and debilitated they were with their disease. It was just an awful burden, so that was really the reason I wanted to see it, because it is hard to watch patients have to do that."
Acton has been at Schneck Medical for 20 years, and she says in that time she has asked countless cancer patients what they liked about what the facility offered, and what they would like to see if a cancer center was ever constructed on site. She also distributed a survey among her patients asking what they specifically would like to see in a cancer center.
"The reason we even started talking about the cancer center was because a community survey showed they wanted more cancer services, they wanted to have radiation therapy here--so it's the community that really asked for it," Acton says. "They often asked, 'Why would I go anywhere else if you offered it here?' "
The building was designed by Indianapolis-based BSA LifeStructures, which Acton says was very good about listening and accommodating the needs of both Schneck Medical and its patients. Private rooms, ample space for patients' family members, and a "healing garden" are all portions of the design that were incorporated by BSA LifeStructures after receiving suggestions from Schneck and the community.
"They had a lot of influence; we always try to consider the community when designing facilities," said Doug Abrams, an architect and associate principal at BSA LifeStructures. "The goal, especially in a cancer center, is to provide a healing environment, to serve the community by providing a stress reducing environment. Patients have a lot of ideas, they've been through the care process, and they're good about sharing their experiences."
Acton says she took information she gathered from patients and the community, and attended every construction meeting to provide input. One of the aspects she nixed early on was private treatment bays for the patients.
"Our culture is not that way. Our culture is you talk to everybody, you know everybody, or you are related to everybody you are in the room with--it's like one big support group," Acton says. "My patients wanted a centralized television system, they wanted to be able to talk to each other, so we just changed the chemotherapy room completely."
Although patients wanted the best technology available, Acton says for the most part requests from the community were reasonable. She said there were many intangible aspects that were important to the patients, such as communication among all doctors.
"Every place that I went it seemed like the medical oncology and the radiation oncology were two separate bodies and they weren't really looking at the patient as a whole person, and that's a huge deal--the community wants that and they deserve that," Acton says.
Another aspect that derived from the community's input was a "healing garden" visible from inside the facility. The garden also features a concrete walkway that allows patients to take their IV poles for walks out into the area, and it also provides places for them to sit.
"The community just wanted a calm atmosphere, and it very much is," Acton says.
By providing the community with an opportunity to help with the design, the entire project benefited, Abrams says. "The benefits are giving the community a sense of ownership and involvement in the project--and it helps the hospital reach its goal of serving the community."
In addition to providing input on the site's design, the Seymour community raised $4 million for the center and the building that houses the center is named for Don and Dana Myers--the largest contributors. Furthering the community-based feel, the center also features a resource section that provides a computer designated for community members where they can access research on cancer support groups and other cancer-related services.
"It's really the community's cancer center," Acton says. "They feel a part of it--and that is very important, to have this community understand that this is for them."