When a local reporter said during a tour of the Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, SC, that the organization’s safety system was impressive, the hospital realized it should promote that strength to the community.
“There was a lot of national attention on patient safety in hospitals so we really wanted to take the route of getting information out before anyone questioned [our safety],” says Tod Augsburger, COO for the facility.
That’s how the organization came to create the budget-friendly, in-house designed “Patient Safety 24/7” campaign.
Many competitors were also concentrating on their safety records, says Augsburger. “So we needed to find ways to differentiate ourselves from the competition.” Focusing the campaign on safety, technology, and nurse staffing levels was a piece of the campaign. However, the major focus was to appeal to the community with ads that had a local feel.
Mark Shelley, director of marketing and advertising for Lexington Medical Center says the organization was seen as the local community health system. “Then we found out we were going to be a part of a large merger years ago. With that we knew we were going to lose our community hospital identity. So we pulled out and decided to go with a small community strategy.” That strategy has a strong influence on the creative. “We wanted to create something that was clean, unique, and not typically healthcare-looking,” says Shelley.
Although the marketing team chose to use a multi-integrated approach, it was the TV spots that really took a unique look at the organization’s level of care by showing the facility’s ‘rapid response’ team. The spots do the job of showing the immediate attention for the patient in a non-threatening way by having a sense of dramatic urgency combined with a calm but quick response. The commercial uses actual physicians and nurses.
Although the campaign is still new, the early results have been positive. “So far we have a high number of nurse applications coming in, we do surveys periodically, and we will do a community profile,” says Shelley. What’s most important to Lexington Medical Center, though, is that it’s raising awareness about the facility and those who work there.
Kandace McLaughlin is an editor with HealthLeaders Media. 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.
Men are 25% less likely than women to have visited a doctor in the past year. In an attempt to change those statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has teamed up with the Advertising Council and has created a humor public service announcement campaign. The slogan: Real men wear gowns.
Will the current economic downturn affect consumer behavior for a few months. . . or forever? One brand strategy VP argues the latter: Our customers' behavior is changing right under our noses, he writes. "When the economy bounces back, you might find that what motivates consumers to choose or not choose your brand has changed. This is critical learning that needs to be sought now, not after you launch a shiny new post-recession ad campaign."
Phyllis Anderson, Humana's vice president of corporate marketing, has a background in non-healthcare related industries, including Pillsbury, Nabisco, and Bank of America. Her background gives her a unique outlook on healthcare consumerism. She shared her insights at the World Healthcare Conference.
A hospital's continual advancement of strategic goals just won't happen in a rigid top-down leadership structure. I talked with a new CEO who was in the midst of dealing with an organizational culture that sucked him into just about all hospital decisions—the strategic, the operational, and the mundane.
This organization might have ambitions to become a world-class international hospital, but the CEO knows it won't happen if he doesn't have empowered leaders among his clinical and administrative staff. For now, he's prepared himself for a long journey to bring the hospital out of the paralysis of group think.
It's probably little comfort to this CEO that he's not alone. I've heard this complaint from other hospital leaders. It's usually an incoming administrator who discovers the job is less about stewardship of a strategic plan than it is about sitting in meetings with folks in suits, white coats, and sometimes hardhats; they offer only questions and vapid stares, waiting for the CEO to make up his mind. There's good reason why the top healthcare organizations have multifaceted leadership models, and the best reevaluate the effectiveness of their leadership structure as the organization evolves.
As an example, Bangkok Hospital Medical Center is the leading healthcare system in Thailand. The 500-bed four-hospital system caters to regional and international patients, with state-of-the-art medical facilities that received JCI accreditation last year. I recently had an e-mail dialogue with a couple members of Bangkok's leadership team about the roles and responsibilities of the C-suite staff.
Chief Medical Officer Trin Charumilind, MD, told me about the leadership model that works for this complex system. To put it simply, the CEO of the system sets the targets and direction for the leadership team, but hospital directors and department managers have full authority over their assigned areas. Charumilind also points out how vital it is for the entire leadership team to be able to interact with one another. They have common areas in which to network and make decisions as a team, he says. "But strategic decisions about each hospital is the sole responsibility of the hospital director," he notes.
And the targets set by the CEO are not without careful discussion and feedback from the senior leadership team, adds Somchai Chansawang, MD, director of Bangkok Hospital, the system's flagship facility. "Decisions made by the CEO will affect the whole team, which makes us responsible to provide feedback," he says. "Our CEO encourages this behavior because he has altered plans and decisions many times over recent years due to feedback from the leadership team."
This kind of feedback won't happen unless the CEO gives access to each member of the leadership team, and Chansawang says BMC's CEO, Chatree Duangnet, MD, makes the effort to interact informally with executives so that he appears approachable to receive advice.
The ability for BMC's leadership team to plan and implement strategy has been critical to its growth, but the team is starting to worry about succession planning. Chansawang says employers in Asia face a severe shortage of management talent. "A company's growth trajectory depends largely on the quality of the leadership pipeline …. This is not replacement planning, but a commitment to build great leaders by alignment between individual career goals and organizational needs," he says.
So even a system with a strong management model has serious concerns about maintaining it. Perhaps that underlying sense of urgency is why leaders at BMC interact so well in the first place.
Egypt hopes to boost its tourism earnings by 26 percent to 12 billion dollars by 2011, said Tourism Minister Zuheir Garana. Egypt wants to attract private investors to fund the ambitious plan which also includes developing eco-tourism and medical tourism, limiting the government's role to supervision and planning, the minister said.
Before Ruben Toral arrived in 2001 as Bumrungrad International's marketing director, "we were a Thai hospital serving a Thai community," he says. "Now we're an international hospital that just happens to be in Thailand." Overseas patients have more than doubled on his watch, generating the majority of the privately owned hospital's revenue. Bumrungrad was arguably a world-class hospital even before it became a world-famous one-administrators have spent the past 15 years acquiring state-of-the-art technology, adding beds, and wooing Thai doctors abroad to come home.
A McKinsey survey shows that almost 70% of executives around the world say that global social, environmental, and business trends are increasingly important to corporate strategy. However, relatively few companies act on the global trends they think will affect them most, the survey found. Among those that do act, only 17% report significant benefits, and one reason might be underinvestment in trends.
Some Michigan lawmakers are supporting legislation that would let motorists save up to 16 percent on their auto insurance by choosing less medical coverage. The legislation would let motorists choose medical coverage worth between $50,000 and $400,000, or continue paying for unlimited coverage through the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association. The bill is opposed by a group of health providers, trial lawyers, labor unions and consumer advocates known as the Coalition Protecting Auto No-Fault, which says Michigan residents would end up footing the bill when motorists with too little medical coverage are hurt in serious accidents.
A new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows concerns over rising healthcare costs have kept pace with other major economic worries. The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 44% of the more than 2,000 adults interviewed April 3 to 13 ranked paying for gas as a serious problem, compared with 29% for jobs and 28% for healthcare. The poll shows that healthcare remains in the forefront of Americans' concerns despite the mortgage crisis and growing overall economic woes, said experts.
