There has been much concern about corporate influence in the doctor's office that's been criticized when the pharmaceutical industry entices doctors to prescribe brand-name drugs. Under pressure, the industry has since reined in its promotional efforts.
But insurance companies are allowed to push doctors toward cheaper prescriptions, frequently by offering the physician a form of bonus, a cut from the savings that insurance companies get when doctors prescribe generic drugs.
In the first national survey of patients' experiences, many hospitals were found wanting in key areas such as pain management and discharge instructions. Almost one-third of patients gave low ratings to pain management, and one-fifth gave low ratings to communication at discharge. For the study, a Harvard team reviewed data from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey. Of the 4,032 hospitals that report quality of care data, 2,429 reported patients' experience.
Despite the dour economic times, U.S. Rep. Lee Terry, R-NE, said there is little enthusiasm in Washington, DC, to cut spending on cost-effective programs like eICU, which uses broadband to connect America's rural hospitals with off-site medical experts.
"I'm not worried about that at all," Terry said last week from Omaha, where he presented a federal grant for $384,000 to Alegent Health's eFocus Monitoring Center. If the money's not there, he said, Uncle Sam will use the credit card.
"The emergency spending on the economy is going straight to the debt and we aren't offsetting that," Terry told HealthLeaders Media. "If we were forced to offset it we would have to look within the budget. No one in Congress is saying now we should go in and cut the budget.
"Healthcare reform is a priority in Congress and you are going to see a renewed discussion on it with whoever comes into the White House next year," said Terry. "These are the low hanging fruit that we are all going to embrace in the medical reform area."
Terry's assurances should be taken with a grain of salt. He doesn't speak for Congress. He is a minority member of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. And he was commenting in a room full of influential constituents, all of whom care deeply about improving healthcare access in rural America.
But, he also makes a good point. Money spent to improve rural healthcare is money well-spent. Since 2001, the federal government has funded $7.1 billion on all broadband programs, about $89 million a year. Hospitals are only one of many rural constituencies that benefits from the programs, along with schools, police and sheriffs departments, and local governments.
"If we can empower our rural communities through access of technology, especially through broadband, it really unites urban, suburban, and rural areas into one," Terry said. "We lack in rural areas the physicians and experts for our critical care centers out there and this is a way to bridge that gap."
The USDA Rural Development Grant will be used to connect Alegent's Community Memorial Hospital in Missouri Valley, IA, to eFocus, making it the sixth Alegent hospital in the program. By next summer the remaining three Alegent hospitals will have eICU capability.
Alegent officials are giddy with excitement. "How cool is this to have rural hospitals looking at the next generation of healthcare delivery," Mark Kestner, MD, Alegent's chief quality officer, said at press conference announcing the grant.
"This will allow the air traffic controller (the off-site physician) to look at the screen and analyze data while the pilot, in this case the bedside clinician, manages the immediate care. It's not a solution to the physician shortage but it does help us going into the future as far as coordinating care."
Kestner said Alegent is already looking to expand eFocus "beyond the walls of the ICU." By next summer, the health system hopes to provide broadband access to pharmacists, who can provide 24/7 analyses of drug-drug interactions, appropriate dosing, and potential toxicities. Beyond that, Kestner says, Alegent is looking at eFocus potential for other disciplines like infection control surveillance and case management research.
Government gets legitimately rapped for wasting taxpayers' dollars. Not this time. When cost-effective, well-targeted grants are awarded to conscientious and innovative entities like Alegent, good things happen and everybody wins.
It is hard to imagine any other program that gets this much bang for the buck. It's heartening to learn that at least one member of Congress knows that, too.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeadersMedia. He can be reached at jcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
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Patient social networks have become a new niche. Since health is often sensitive and private—and not something people want to discuss on general social media sites with all of their friends and colleagues—the ill often seek social networks that can connect them to someone else who can relate.
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.
Tracey Moorhead, president and CEO of DMAA: The Care Continuum Alliance, discusses the opportunities for population health improvement and DM companies in a medical home and the changes they may need to make.
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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