Better Health's Dr. Val spoke with Dr. Michael Shabot, Memorial Hermann Hospital System's Chief Medical Officer, about the steps his hospital is taking to improve patient safety and healthcare quality. The hospital recently won 2008 National Health System Patient Safety Leadership Award.
Just 16% of people surveyed in a new Forrester Research report said they trust corporate blogs. This result makes them the lowest-rated source of reliable information of the 18 categories Forrester asked about. "Email from people that you know" ranked highest in trustworthiness at 77%. Media such as Web portals, print newspapers, radio, and personal blogs were also included.
Opportunity might be knocking . . . but no one is answering the call from the usual print ad or billboard. So, how do you get the attention of qualified professionals? A different execution tactic could be the key to recruitment success.
Good Samaritan Hospital and Regional Medical Center of San Jose (CA) needed to recruit but didn't want to pay the typical agency fees to do it. So Leslie Kelsay, marketing vice president for Good Samaritan, did a little research. "I had seen a few wrapped vehicles around the community so I started researching campaigns that had been done in other industries." What she found was a cost effective way to get the word out.
"We recruited our employees to serve as rolling ambassadors for the hospital," Kelsay says. "We asked them to commit to wrap their vehicle for a minimum of a 6 month period. And to carry employment information packs in their cars in case someone approached them directly." Forty employees jumped at the opportunity but only 13 were selected on the basis of geography and how many miles they would cover throughout the community during their commute.
The car wraps were designed to be eye-catching, using bright psychedelic colors, and a catchy phrase: "If your job ain't rockin', opportunity is knockin."
"That was actually one of the phrases the agency thought they wouldn't show us," says Kelsay, "They weren't sure we would be willing to go that far but we were." Also included on the wrap design was a toll free phone number, fake bumper stickers with sayings like, ‘My other car is an ER gurney,' and information about a $7,500 sign-on bonus for RNs and lab technicians.
The benefit to the employees? The fun of driving around in a wrapped car aside, if a recruit was hired and worked for a full year the car fleet employee would be rewarded with a $1,000 bonus for the referral. The benefit for the facility? Overall, they made six hires—a good return on investment considering the fairly inexpensive effort.
"This campaign paid for itself in the first 48 hours," says Kelsay. "We hired two RNs and didn't have to pay agency fees." The campaign also generated a lot of buzz. "The campaign was featured on news stations from California to Ohio," Kelsay says. "Breaking through with that level of earned media was kind of the cherry on the ice cream sundae."
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.
From the moment I heard about the social networking site Twitter I was skeptical. The premise—people post short reports (140 characters or less) about what they're doing and send them out across the Web in live time—seemed absurd. Really, who has time to follow the minutia of people's lives? Who cares if someone is eating an apple at the airport or feeling sad that their sports team didn't win?
And there's only so much time you can dedicate to social networking sites. I don't care how cool it is or that everybody else is doing it. I don't know about you, but I have work to do.
On the other hand, Twitter is a potential marketing tool. And although it's good for reporters to be skeptical, we're also supposed to know a little something about subjects before we express that skepticism. So on Tuesday afternoon I signed up for my own Twitter account.
I hate to admit this, but it was easy. It was kind of fun. And I did discover a baker's dozen of potential marketing applications—from promoting your fundraising events to organizing focus groups to boosting blog readership. Keep reading for my "top 13" list.
Yes, it was a little confusing at first—anything new is bound to be. But after poking around the site for a little while I figured out how to do several things. The first thing I did was announce that I am writing about Twitter.
Here's what else I did on my very first visit to Twitterville:
Learned that "following" is Twitter talk for subscribing to someone's tweets—and "tweets" is Twitter talk for the short posts that members write.
Looked for sources in the healthcare marketing field. (Let's just say the pickings were slim.)
Checked out the twitterings of Paul Levy, President and President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and signed up to "follow" him. No, not stalk. Follow. Coincidentally, later in the day he twittered: "Who are all these people following me?"
Found a bunch of new healthcare marketing resources, including a couple of blogs and some online articles, two of which you'll find in today's Editor's Picks section.
Followed a link to an article about whether robotic surgery actually improves quality of care or if it's just a marketing ploy.
Read a tweet from a healthcare consumer who called the ability to e-mail his physician "heavenly."
Read another from a healthcare consumer who was mad that a hospital advertises its open MRI but doesn't let patients use it unless they have a claustrophobic attack.
So I got a couple of healthcare marketing story ideas, found some interesting articles to share with you in this e-newsletter, and plugged the HealthLeaders Media Marketing Awards. Then I got a little bored. And it was time to get off the Internet and write my column.
So what happened to my reporter's skepticism? Don't worry, it's still there. After the fun of learning something new starts to wear off, you realize that, like any other form of social media, you have to work hard to make it work for you. And one of the biggest hurdles is building that network of followers. How do you reach that audience? And how do you convince them that they want to "follow" you?
Make it work for you
It seems to me the answer is that you must target a specific audience—not shoot for the entire Twitterverse. And then offer that market segment relevant, current content without overwhelming them with information or sounding self-promotional.
Say you have a star obstetrician on staff. You could set up an account for her and send daily tips and the occasional announcement about classes and events to expectant mothers. New OB patients sign up when they first come in (they can get the Twitter updates via their cell phones without ever having to log into the online site).
Here are 13 ways you might use these short-form communications to targeted audiences:
Direct followers to the latest posts on your CEO's or patients' blogs. I twittered Levy today and asked him if Twitter is complementary to his blog. "Very," he twittered back. "There's a nice reinforcement between the two mediums."
Promote upcoming events such as classes, seminars, and health fairs.
Solicit charitable donations and recruit volunteers.
Share the results of fundraising events with donors.
Post messages targeted at patients in specific service lines—heart healthy tips for cardiology patients, healthy eating and exercise tips for bariatric patients, and so on.
Announce awards and quality rankings.
Monitor tweets—both positive and negative—about your own organization from employees or customers (just do a search for your own hospital's name).
Give updates on construction projects to neighbors and other stakeholders.
Post links to research papers by your physicians.
Follow the competitions' tweets.
Post job openings and talk about what makes your organization a great place to work.
Keep an eye out for job postings in your own field (I won't tell if you don't).
You can follow me on Twitter if you want. But until I can figure out how to segment my audience and only give them the information they need and want, I probably won't be writing any 140-character posts there.
Unless I'm eating a really delicious apple at the airport.
Gienna Shaw is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at gshaw@healthleadersmedia.com.
Note: You can sign up to receive HealthLeaders Media Marketing, a free weekly e-newsletter that will guide you through the complex and constantly-changing field of healthcare marketing.
A new study that surveys 3,562 emergency department clinicians in 65 hospitals across the nation raises concerns about the safety of critically ill patients who are parked in hallways and denied timely care in overcrowded emergency departments.
The study's lead author, David Magid, MD, an emergency physician and a senior scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Colorado Institute for Health Research, says emergency department clinicians are reporting widespread problems in four systems that are critical to ED safety: physician environment, staffing, inpatient coordination, and information coordination and consultation.
"Prior studies have shown that emergency departments are overcrowded. Our study was the first to closely examine the safety from the perspective of the clinicians who actually work in the emergency department, including physicians and nurses," Magid tells HealthLeaders Media. "We found the same results in small hospitals and large hospitals, the same results in community hospitals and academic hospitals, and we found the same results in hospitals in every area of the country."
In the study, 25% of clinicians say their ED is too small, 32% say the number of patients exceeds their ED's capacity to provide safe care most of the time, and 50% say their patient capacity is exceeded some of the time. Fewer than half of ED clinicians say that most specialty consultations for critically ill patients occur within 30 minutes of being contacted. Half of the clinicians report that ED patients requiring ICU admission are rarely transferred from the ED to the ICU within one hour.
"What our study does say is that we need greater investments in the larger emergency care system and we need more investment at the hospital level. We need hospital leaders and administrators to step up and make additional investments," Magid says.
The study is funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and published online in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
When ED patients are parked in hallways, Magid says, they are frequently denied or delayed access to the specialized services, supplies, monitoring equipment, and privacy that would be found in a dedicated ED treatment area.
The demand for emergency department services has increased by 26% over the past decade, even as the number of EDs in the nation has decreased by 9%. And Magid's study was compiled before the national economy tanked this fall. "With the numbers of people losing their jobs and likely losing their health insurance, as well as employers and people who are employed reducing their health insurance coverage, it is certainly possible that this could drive up the number of ED visits, which would only exacerbate the problem that we were already seeing in the study," Magid says.
Any coordinated national solution to address ED overcrowding will have to involve the federal government, Magid says. But he says there are also measures that individual hospitals can take. "I would tell them to increase or redesign their emergency department space so it can handle greater capacity of patients," he says. "I would suggest increased staffing during periods of high demand. And I would suggest they increase access to health information technology by providing more computer work stations and access to electronic health records that can be easily accessed by emergency department clinicians."
Magid's not sure what impact his study will have. After all, ED overcrowding has been widely reported in the news media, and has been the subject of numerous prior studies over the past few years. But the problem persists.
"I can't emphatically say that people aren't working on this problem already. But to the degree that they are, we need increased effort and new solutions," he says. "Hopefully, results of studies like ours, which go beyond merely showing that the ED is crowded to showing the impact crowding is having on safety issues, might motivate people to do more."
What will it take to get that message through to hospital administrators?
"The best people to ask that question are hospital administrators," Magid says.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeaders Media. He can be reached atjcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
Note: You can sign up to receive HealthLeaders Media Community and Rural Hospital Weekly, a free weekly e-newsletter that provides news and information tailored to the specific needs of community hospitals.
Senate and House leaders, along with committee staffers, have been discussing with members of President-elect Barack Obama's healthcare team the possibility of cutting $100 billion from the cost of permanently fixing Medicare physician payments by eliminating from the payment formula drugs administered by doctors. Under the sustainable growth rate formula, physicians face a Medicare payment reduction annually, but Congress usually passes a measure to avoid the cut. However, lawmakers next year hope to permanently eliminate the cuts.
William Schoen, the non-executive chairman of the board of directors of Health Management Associates Inc., will not receive any cash payments from the company through the end of 2009. Schoen voluntarily is forgoing all compensation that would otherwise be required to be paid to him through Dec. 31, 2009, in conjunction with his service to HMA, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Scans are expensive—Medicare and its beneficiaries pay about $750 to $950 for an M.R.I. scan of a knee or back, for example. Many doctors own their own scanners, which can provide an incentive to offer scans to their patients. But the scans are increasingly finding abnormalities that may not be the cause of the problem for which they are blamed, according to this article in the New York Times.
When most Americans think about the healthcare reform debate of the mid-1990s, they picture two "ordinary" people at the kitchen table.
Forever known as Harry and Louise, the dynamic duo killed President Bill Clinton's dreams of healthcare reform and are now in the pantheon of political advertisements alongside LBJ's daisy girl and George H.W. Bush's Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis.
Harry and Louise returned to TV briefly this summer in an ad that promoted making healthcare a top priority, but thankfully, as we gear up for another healthcare reform battle in 2009, the couple is not headed back to the dinner table. They have been replaced with stakeholders actually working together to come up with potential solutions to the country's healthcare problems.
America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) last week joined a growing list of stakeholders by presenting a plan to fix the system. In their proposal, health insurance plans said they are willing to accept all customers regardless of illness or disability, but they want something in return—a mandate that requires all Americans to have health insurance.
In a four-point plan, AHIP said its proposal would control costs, help consumers and purchasers, achieve universal coverage, and add value to healthcare.
AHIP's proposal includes the major piece of the Massachusetts reform: the individual mandate. Jon Kingsdale, executive director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, told me recently that the individual mandate was the most important part of the Bay State's initiative. Without requiring the young and healthy to get insurance (and pay into the system), insurers would not have the money necessary to pay for the sickest.
Unlike Massachusetts, however, AHIP includes a proposal to limit healthcare cost increases and a public-private advisory group to provide specific policy recommendations. There is also a plea for universal quality, reporting, and information technology standards, as well as prevention programs.
Most healthcare stakeholders support those ideas, but AHIP's fourth idea is a nonstarter—insurance portability. A new "portable health plan" would allow federal law to trump state minimum coverage standards.
AHIP has been outspoken in its opposition to state mandates that require insurers to offer specific services and coverage. Mandate foes point to services like hair and limb prostheses and requirements to cover non-custodial children and dependent adult students, which they say increase healthcare costs for everyone.
Those who oppose mandates also complain about the confusion raised by myriad mandates, especially for companies operating in multiple states.
AHIP says its portable health plan idea would reduce regulations, satisfy multi-state businesses, and cut costs because of fewer mandates—but it's not going to happen. Barack Obama will soon enter the White House, and the Democrats control Congress and will be nearly filibuster-proof in the Senate. This means portable health plans are DOA. There is no way the Democrats are going to implement a national program that limits state coverage requirements. Heavily-mandated states and Democrats will defeat a federal program that supersedes more expansive state regulations and removes service and coverage guarantees.
AHIP's proposal received sharp rebuttals from groups that support a single-payer system like Health Care For America Now and the California Nurses Association. Despite that criticism, AHIP's proposal is a step forward from the healthcare debate of the 1990s.
Whether major healthcare reforms happen in 2009 is questionable, but at least this time around, healthcare stakeholders are working together—rather than spending millions on advertisements that don't offer solutions.
Les Masterson is senior editor of Health Plan Insider. He can be reached at lmasterson@healthleadersmedia.com.Note: You can sign up to receiveHealth Plan Insider, a free weekly e-newsletter designed to bring breaking news and analysis of important developments at health plans and other managed care organizations to your inbox.
Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox has renewed his call for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to provide more precise details about its projected losses on individual health policies, saying the Legislature should not pass bills sought by the insurer until consumers have more answers. The bills propose changing the way individual health policies are regulated in Michigan. The nonprofit Blue Cross wants to be regulated more like private insurers, including being able to immediately raise rates, rather than having rate hikes approved first by the state Office of Financial and Insurance Regulation.
