American consumers are participating in social networks to the extent that the activity is now mainstream, says to Forrester Research. A new report indicates 2008 has marked significant growth for social media and that a majority of Internet users are now taking part. A poll done in the second quarter found that 75% of Internet users participate in some form of social media, up from 56% in 2007.
Poor presentations cost companies sales, damage their reputations, and waste executives' time, say Dan Heath and Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Here, they offer advice on how to avoid bad PowerPoint presentations.
Paul Levy, president and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, blogs about a union ad campaign called "Eye on BI." The union sent a mobile billboard to a fund-raising event for an affiliated community hospital in Needham, MA. Even staff who are sympathetic to the union's message were "put off and insulted by the campaign," Levy writes.
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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Disease management's future is not in call centers, but in a convergence of DM, physicians, and technology. That technology includes remote patient monitoring, patient registries, electronic medical records, and personal health records.
Early pioneers in this technologically advanced DM met this week at the Center for ConnectedHealth's conference at Harvard Medical School and showed how DM, physicians, and technology are coming together. Their thesis: Greater connectivity will transform healthcare.
DM leaders know that the only way DM can work is if technology is integrated into their programs. DM/population health is no longer considered the enemy by forward-thinking physicians and health leaders. Instead, they realize that DM can be an effective member of the care team.
As this convergence continues, DM and technology will ultimately go hand-in-hand, and technological companies will take a greater role in disease management leadership. But that's in the future. Let's talk a little about the present. Here are four subjects discussed at the conference:
Medical home
One of the first questions DM companies ask about the patient-centered medical home is: Is there a place for disease management in the medical home?
The short answer is yes, because DM companies have experience in remote patient monitoring, call centers, and health coaching, which are complementary in the medical home. The change for DM is the companies will contract with physicians (either individually or in geographic groups) rather than health plans.
Though physician and DM groups support the concept, I still expect some physician resistance. The relationship between DM and physicians remains cool after years of DM bypassing doctors, and it's going to take plenty of collaboration before the relationship thaws.
Groups like the DMAA: The Care Continuum Alliance have built bridges to physician organizations, but one has to wonder how long it will take for most physicians to view DM/population health as part of the care team rather than a third wheel.
And then there are the questions about whether the medical home can even work. CMS is planning a demonstration project that will gauge the effectiveness of the medical home in the Medicare community.
Medical home advocates trumpet reported successes, including a North Carolina medical home project. One of DM's pioneers, Al Lewis, president of the Disease Management Purchasing Consortium, was not so sure about the medical home. He said the North Carolina study is flawed and called it a "shrine to regression to the mean." Lewis added medical home supporters can back the medical home because it improves quality, but should stop claiming that it will save money.
"It sounds good on paper, but when you do the math, it simply doesn't work," says Lewis.
Future of DM
DM has had a rough year. It's been under attack from various sides: CMS ending the DM-inspired Medicare Health Support (MHS) demonstration project, Healthways' stock nose-diving, studies questioning whether DM is worth the investment, and DM companies changing their focus from chronic disease to a larger population health improvement model.
Lewis said the MHS project was doomed to fail because of CMS' project design, and Gordon Norman, chairman of DMAA: The Care Continuum Alliance, said it is too premature to know whether MHS was a success or not. In fact, CMS' preliminary performance report only included the project's first six months and that is not long enough to know what worked and what didn't.
"The real question is who did and who did not benefit from these pilots? That is what will be interesting," said Norman.
So, what's the future of DM? Norman suggests a hybrid of call centers, Web applications, wireless communications, and face-to-face meetings with both clinical and non-clinical staff.
Election talk
With the presidential election next week, politics was a popular topic at the conference. Most polls are showing a Democratic win for both the White House and Congress. So, what would happen to healthcare in an Obama presidency?
Troy Brennan, MD, MPH, chief medical officer at Aetna, predicted an Obama administration would move healthcare away from the Republican idea of a consumer-driven model to a government-backed solution. Brennan suggests Obama will first tackle the nation's uninsured problem, which will include government program expansion. Greater government involvement will not kill innovation. Entrepreneurs will simply deal more with the feds rather than commercial entities, he said.
As an example of how the feds can spark innovation, Mariah Scott, worldwide director of digital health group at Intel Corporation, pointed to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is a leader in the areas of electronic medical records and telehealth.
Consumer-driven healthcare
One of the leaders in the consumer-driven healthcare movement, Regina Herzlinger, spoke via video conference to the healthcare leaders. Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, said policymakers should see healthcare consumerism through the prism of global competiveness.
Healthcare is sapping dollars away from mega companies like GM, which are struggling to compete against foreign carmakers.
If the country moves away from its employer-based system, what will the future look like? Herzlinger said the country's future is not in a single-payer system, but one that is consumer-based. Consumerism doesn't mean simply high-deductible plans with health savings accounts. Herzlinger's view of consumer-driven healthcare includes health plan variety that will allow members to choice between copays, deductibles, and personalized medicine options.
Herzlinger says consumer choice is good for the individual and sparks innovation and she points to a number of new movements that help the consumer: concierge medicine, medical home, and retail clinics.
A key to greater consumerism is in sharing information. Herzlinger says greater transparency is a way to drive consumer-driven healthcare.
However, both Herzlinger and Emad Rizk, MD, president of McKesson Health Solutions, raised the issue of whether consumer-driven healthcare can work in the underprivileged population, and this is one of the most important takeaways from the event. How do we improve care and lower costs for the poor and uneducated population?
As a consumer, I am excited about the opportunities in a fully-integrated consumer-driven system, but I wonder how much it can actually decrease costs if the most vulnerable are not actively engaged. I'm also looking forward to seeing the results from medical home demonstrations and interested to see how DM and technology converge into a larger industry.
Will any of these initiatives actually work? I guess you can call me an optimistic skeptic.
Les Masterson is senior editor of Health Plan Insider. He can be reached at lmasterson@healthleadersmedia.com.
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