ABC's summer docu-series "Boston Med" has quickly caused a stir both in the healthcare community and in my home state of Massachusetts. After a few weeks of telling friends, coworkers, and sources that no, I haven't seen it yet, I finally made some time to watch the first episode. Now, not only am I hooked, but I'm convinced it should be required viewing for any healthcare marketer.
If you're like me and are a little behind on your summer television, "Boston Med" chronicles doctors and patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham & Woman's Hospital, and Children's Hospital Boston. Each episode follows a patient story at each hospital and also tells the back-story of the doctors and clinicians involved.
As a healthcare journalist, the most surprising aspect of the show is the openness of the patients and doctors during shooting—and the hospital leaders for even allowing this show to exist. When conversations about "Boston Med" spring up in the offices of HealthLeaders Media, they largely revolve around how the show is able to film without violating any patient confidentiality. (There's a lot of blurring.)
Whereas some "real life" medical shows feature patient testimonials filmed months after the fact and reenact hospital scenarios, "Boston Med" follows the patients and doctors through each step of their journey in real time. In the first episode we see a surgeon fly to a nearby hospital to harvest donor organs, a surgical team perform two lung transplants with said organs, and a young ER doctor struggle when a patient cannot be revived after going into cardiac arrest. It's as real as real gets.
At first I thought filming this show seemed like a risk for the world-class hospitals involved. Not all outcomes are positive, and a good portion of most episodes focus on disagreements among clinicians. But after watching the first episode, I realized I was wrong.
Medical documentaries, when done right, generate heaps of good publicity. In a world where shows like "Jersey Shore" and "The Bachelorette" are pawned off as "reality," people appreciate the authenticity of programs like "Boston Med." Patients know politics and posturing occur among doctors behind closed doors in every hospital, and it's refreshing to see it on screen. By the end of the episode, I empathized with each physician and truly believed that they always kept the patients' interest in mind.
Of course, I know that most hospitals will never be featured in a primetime slot on a major network, but "Boston Med"—and other hospital docu-series on cable stations such as Discovery Health—proves that a tactic as simple as letting the public see unscripted doctors interacting with each other can boost a hospital's reputation.
Rush University Medical Center uses this strategy in its "Rush Stories" campaign, which consists of several TV spots and a microsite that feature several members of a patient care team talking about a specific patient success story.
"We get a group of doctors and nurses together and have them tell us about the story and we'll wind up with two to four spots," says Lori Allen, associate vice president for marketing and communications at Rush. "They not only tell us the story but they also help us with what was special about that and what [would happen] if the patient had gone elsewhere or what if the patient hadn't ever looked into this."
The microsite, rushstories.org, features longer versions of the patient story videos for key service lines, such as neurology, cardiology, orthopedics, and oncology.
"Our brand is completely reality—it's not at all contrived and it's very distinctive," Allen says.
And if your brand can convince the community of that, it will stick with them.
Marianne Aiello is a contributing writer at HealthLeaders Media.