Marketing must take the lead in patient experience.
Marianne Aiello recently wrote an article for Health Leaders Media about how to improve patient experience. Aiello makes some excellent points. The article is republished here in its entirety.
Picture this. One day while watching TV you see an engaging hospital commercial, depicting smiling providers who whisk a patient through the continuum of care. The end of the spot directs you to a website, which has a fresh design and smartly describes the organization’s many service lines and resources.
A few weeks down the line you need to schedule an elective procedure, and, based on your positive memories of the ad and website, you choose this hospital. But upon arrival, the parking lot is confusing. When you finally stumble across the waiting room, the desk worker passes you some forms to fill out without raising his head. Your procedure goes well, but afterward it’s unclear how to schedule a follow-up.
Unfortunately, scenarios like this one happen all too often at well-meaning hospitals. Often the problem lies in the marketing department’s detachment from operations, which—like it or not—controls the patient experience.
For the marketing chief to be considered a key leader within the hospital hierarchy, marketers must bridge this gap and take full responsibility for the patient experience.
1. Align promise with experience.
The positive hospital ad/negative hospital experience described above showcases the hypothetical organization’s inability to align its brand promise with its brand experience.
“No longer can healthcare organizations be a lot better in their ads than they are in reality,” Gary Adamson, chief experience officer of Starizon told the April issue of Healthcare Marketing Advisor. “There is too much consumer information and power for that approach to be viable any longer. The marketing department must become responsible for the melding of the promise and the experience into a powerful and fully differentiated brand.”
In order to merge the promise and the experience into a differentiated brand, Adamson suggests thinking of the two as overlapping circles. It is ultimately the marketing department’s duty to not only make the area of intersection larger, but to eventually create concentric circles.
To do this, marketers must integrate operations and communications.
“By working with cross-functional teams, marketers can help organizations keep a finger on their patients’ pulse and develop communication materials that heal and strengthen relationships,” Tom DeSanto, principal, Tom DeSanto Strategy and Communications, told HMA. “It’s like multispecialty care for the patient experience.”
2. Start with first point of contact.
Naturally, aligning the brand promise with its experience is a daunting task. A good way to start is to focus on the patient’s first physical point of contact with your organization. The patient’s perception of your parking lot, lobby, and front-line desk staff make a lasting impression on their overall experience. This is why many organizations choose to employ valets and greeters; to construct warm, spacious entryways; and to extensively train staff in customer service.
“Marketers should consider all of the variables that will impact the patients’ and their families’ or visitors’ impression of the building and the people inside,” Shari Short, research director and strategist for Aloysius Butler & Clark, told HMA. “For example, if the parking lot feels unsafe or if the elevators are broken or too slow, consumers note these factors as part of their experience.”
Once the patient enters the treatment phase of their visit, clinical care takes precedence. But there is always room to craft a positive patient experience.
“For many healthcare workers, the patient experience is about clinical health outcomes, but for the healthcare consumer, it is about the levels of comfort and customer satisfaction that determine whether it is a positive patient experience,” Short says. “Marketers need to be present and involved in designing the patient experience from parking, to driving away after discharge, to keep the voice of the healthcare consumer in the conversation.”
3. Improve staff communication.
Staff attitudes, from disengaged desk workers to pressed-for-time caregivers, has a profound impact on the patient experience. The first step toward correcting any unsavory behaviors is education. Many staff may not realize that the way they are acting has such an impact on the patient’s satisfaction and perception of their care.
You can “inspire frontline patient care staff through simple, ongoing quality and satisfaction communications that praise their efforts and challenge them to improve,” DeSanto said. Also, “develop simple training and motivational materials to help improve performance in areas that have low satisfaction ratings.”
Furthermore, it’s important to report individual successes and overall progress in improving the patient experience to staff members, as well as patients and the hospital community.
4. Improve the patient experience.
Providing patients with friendly, uncomplicated, and practical information about what to expect from their hospital stay will help the patients feel more at ease even before they step foot in your facility.
This virtual or paper first point of contact can be just as important in making a positive impression as the physical first point of contact.
It’s also important to “examine and improve all aspects of communications with patients from initial contact with the physician referral line through episodes of care to interactions around insurance and billing,” DeStanto says.
Much like how the patient experience can begin before the patient enters the hospital grounds, it can continue long after the patient leaves.
In order to stay competitive in today’s healthcare environment, marketers must be responsible for much more than advertising and public relations. Not only must marketers communicate the brand, they must create and sustain the brand.
“If marketing is ever to evolve into the important strategic discipline in healthcare that it is in other industries, then the marketing department must take the lead role in orchestrating the patient experience,” Adamson says.
“For those marketers who choose not to leap across this chasm with excitement, however, they will be dooming themselves and the departments they lead to more of the same frustration that has been vocalized since the advent of healthcare marketing.”
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I just read an article by Bill Lee in the Harvard Business Review. In the article he declared, “Traditional marketing – including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications – is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they’re operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.”
Posted by Jimmy Warren 
Healthcare Marketing: 25 Interesting Facts about Social Media
October 27, 2011In her social media and PR blog, “Commentz“, Sarah Evans and her staff compile a lot of interesting stats. She cherry-picked the most relevant for marketers and recently shared them with Ad Age. They can be quite useful to healthcare marketers.
1. “Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US.”
2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.”
3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.”
4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.”
5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.”
6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.’”
7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.”
8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.”
9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.”
10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.”
11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.”
12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.”
13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.”
14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. [...] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.”
15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.”
16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.”
17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.”
18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.”
19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.”
20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.”
21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.”
22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.”
23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.”
24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.”
25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.”
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