Marketing Ideas

Marketing Your Hospital: One Texas Hospital Holding the Line on Healthcare Costs

Healthcare Costs Texas non-profit Scott & White Hospital is  a success story on changing the focus on  outcomes, patient satisfaction and cost  efficiency.

 

The Scott & White Healthcare System based in Temple, Texas is holding the line on healthcare costs through collaboration and cooperation.  This amazing program has different incentives than the “fee for service” type of compensation. 

Some of the things they are doing worthy of study are:

1.    Scott & White Doctors are employed by the hospital and do not feel pressure to use multi-million dollar machines because they don’t own any.

2.     Doctors are on salary but are paid bonuses linked to patients being “happy and healthy” and not on how many office visits and procedures the patients generate.

3.    Hospital interiors are  “more Hampton Inn than Hilton.”

4.     Frontline doctors at their 31 primary care outpatient clinics work closely with specialists at the main campus —sharing test results and scans in computer assisted huddles.  This sometimes saves an unnecessary appointment with the specialist.

5.     State of the art electronic records are shared throughout the system-something a physician in private practice couldn’t run.

6.    The administrator must be a doctor and the 800+ doctor system uses a strong peer review system to stop overuse and improve fiscal discipline.

7.    Self-improvement is encouraged with doctors getting 15 paid days off for educational activity and service to the group.

8.    Patient surveys and outcomes records are used to evaluate performance.

While this system has some shortcomings, it is certainly doing a lot of things very well and patient outcomes paired with the cost savings in healthcare should be a model for all to study.

 

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Hospital Marketing: Website Must Do More Than Provide Info

Consumers are expecting more from websites.  They want sites that are transactional.Hospital Sign button

Hospital websites have been a staple of hospital marketing efforts for many years now.  It’s not only expected, it’s a necessity. There is probably no hospital in America without a website.

As you peruse various hospital websites, most are fairly good and some are very good. All the necessary information is provided: location, services, careers, information for patients, schedule of educational classes and the like. And of course, the mandatory stuff that most visitors don’t read like mission statement, values and history are there. And some sites provide extremely helpful and quite comprehensive health information.

Is this enough? In an age where consumers expect websites to have interaction and commerce, most hospital websites come up short. Basic informational sites, regardless of how robust the information, are no longer adequate. Consumers expect to interact and transact business on websites. And hospitals need to take the next step in that direction. The more advanced hospital sites allow visitors to:

  • Order flowers from the gift shop to be delivered to patient rooms.
  • Select get-well cards online that can be customized and personalized, printed within the hospital and delivered.
  • Sign up for classes and seminars.
  • View their bill and make payments online.
  • Complete and submit electronically pre-admission registration forms.

As consumers depend more and more on the web to conduct business and to get things accomplished, hospitals have to adjust. Just providing information is not enough anymore. More will be expected. And the faster these services are available, the sooner hospitals can use their website to more effectively create points of contact with the consumer, establish a stronger relationship, build loyalty and enhance the brand. 

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Healthcare Marketing: Let’s Go To The Movies!

film rollsMovie attendance increased 21% in the first two months of 2009 and year-to-date box office revenues are up 6.6%.  While other media is experiencing no growth and even declines, cinema advertising is a bright spot. 

More and more people are going to the movies.  Despite an economic recession, box office receipts have increased.  Instead of traveling or spending money on expensive items, people are enjoying the movies as a lower cost pleasure.  In addition, movies provide an escape from the hazards many people face at work or at home.

As more people head to the theaters, cinema advertising becomes a viable media option for healthcare marketers.  And it’s generally a younger audience than other mediums deliver – an audience that is sometimes difficult to reach.  It is true; this audience is not the biggest users of healthcare.  But it’s an audience marketers want to reach to start establishing an identity or a brand.

Because of the younger demographics, cinema advertising can especially be effective for recruitment efforts.  The promotion of healthcare career opportunities can be an excellent tactic by HR departments.

In the early years of cinema advertising the cost was high and the ramp up time was slow.  Technology has improved lead-time and a new aggressive sales effort has led to lower costs. 

Cinema advertising shouldn’t be the lead medium but it can effectively supplement traditional medium and reach an audience that is not so easy to reach.  Hollywood can be a big hit for healthcare marketing.

 

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Healthcare Marketing: Time Spent on Internet Leveling Off But Hospitals’ Advertising Opportunities Have Increased

Time spent on the Internet is leveling off because users are more savvy  and more familiar with it.

The time spent on the Internet was less than 6 hours per week in 2004.  That time has been increasing until this year.  Now the average time spent per week on the Internet is 12 hours but it is leveling off and not increasing according to Forrester’s Annual Survey.makro/nahaufnahme laptop/notebook

Are consumers losing interest? Hardly.  The time spent online is leveling off because they understand the web better and know where they want to go.  Consumers in their early days of usage explored, searched, played and experimented with the web.  As they learn and gain online experience they become more efficient.  Less time is spent just surfing and most of the time online is well defined because the user knows where they want to go or search engines help narrow the search to be more targeted. 

So a hospital’s online strategy is even more important.  The competition on the web increases everyday, but the average amount of time spent online is not increasing.  And with the emergence of Facebook and Twitter, is now consuming a significant amount of a person’s online time. 

The good thing however is because consumers are more focused and their choice of sites visited is much more narrow; the efficiency of web marketing is greatly increasing.  By knowing demographics, social graphics, and psychographics of the target audience, it’s easier to find where those people are on the web.   Web marketing becomes less about mass numbers of people on the web, but more about knowing the target audience well enough to know where specifically to find them on the web. 

Internet users are becoming more efficient with their time spent on the web, which enables marketers to be more efficient as well. 

 

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Hospital Marketing: Facebook Ads Offer New Targetability

Target

Specifically targeted groups – even if they are smaller in number – are very valuable when using Social Media for your hospital.

Unlike traditional media, Social Media is a conversation, a dialogue. You are more likely to build that relationship with conversation and dialogue when the group is more narrowly focused.

 Facebook Ads offer many opportunities to define your audience for your hospital with several new ones just released mid July.

  • Location: Target by country, state, city based on the users IP address (not their network or hometown). Pretty straight forward but maybe you are doing a mobile screening event outside of your customary market region or you excel at a certain procedure that is worth driving a distance for. Use this feature to place your ads outside your area.
  • Age and Sex: Offers a little more targetability than some media outlets. Your goal is to increase number of mammograms? Target women 35 plus and avoid teenage boys getting the ad.
  • Birthday: This is a new target feature. The obvious is to create an ad that appears to the user on their birthday wishing them a happy birthday from your hospital. Take it one step further and make the connection to enjoying more birthdays (or their family having them around for more birthdays) by them taking advantage of a certain service line/screening.
  • Keywords: These are based on a user’s profile and offer insight into the consumer. Target sports enthusiasts or those who enjoy gardening with ads for your hospital’s spine care.  Target those who enjoy grilling with recipes for healthy sides from your hospital’s cardiac care center.  This feature auto populates. Spend some time looking for users with activities that are a match for your hospital’s service lines.
  • Education: Allows you to target based on education level. Most beneficial if you are trying to reach graduates of a certain school (perhaps a nursing school for recruitment).
  • Workplaces: If you are looking to promote your hospital/service lines to employees at certain workplaces this can be a valuable filter. Perhaps there is a message you want to get to the workers at XYZ factory?
  • Relationship: Facebook users can choose Married, Single, Engaged, or In a Relationship in their profile allowing Facebook Ads to appear based on a user’s marital status. This feature could be beneficial in promoting your hospital’s Sleep Disorder Lab by targeting married women with ads that ask if their husband’s snoring is keeping them awake.
  • Language: Target specific segments of the population based on their language. If you use this, make sure the ad is in their language.
  • Connections: This is a newer filter allowing you to target or even exclude users based on events, pages, and applications that they have joined.  Maybe your hospital has a Facebook Page and you are using ads to increase the number of fans. Use this feature to keep the ads from appearing to those that are already fans.

A very general ad with little or no targeting may result in more click thrus – but can also result in wasted dollars. After all, a Facebook user out of your hospital’s marketing region, female and 18 is probably NOT the target audience for your hospital’s prostate screening event. In this era of having to be most frugal with budgets, why send her the ad and waste the money? Target instead.

 

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Marketing Your Hospital-When a Stroke Strikes

EKG HeartTrain and qualify as a stroke certified “ GET WITH THE GUIDELINES” hospital through the American Heart Association’s stroke division  and educate your community  to all the danger and symptoms.

Recently a young  neurologist told me the average age of the patients on his ward who had suffered strokes when he did his residency was 31!  An incredibly young age for a condition traditionally thought to be an older person’s malady. What’s contributing to  the incidence of this killer among younger, more typically healthy patients?

  1. Higher stress levels in our society
  2. Higher incidence of obesity and inactivity
  3. Higher incidence of diabetes
  4. Smoking
  5. The associated rise in blood pressures that comes with each of the above
  6. Patients not being aware of the dangers of high blood pressure and lack of attention to it because of their younger age.

Most stroke patients enter the hospital through the ER and  one way to market your ER is through  educating your  community.  Strokes can often come with symptoms as slight as a numb hand or fingers –something easily mistaken for other problems. 

Having your market fully aware of the symptoms and preparing your department as a stroke certified hospital through the American Heart Association can deliver the much needed  top of mind awareness when stroke symptoms strike the patient or their family.

The first three hours after a stroke are critical as a clot busting drug called tPA can be administered to reduce the long term disability of a stroke. Having the community think of your hospital as very stroke prepared and capable, along with timely treatment, is a must for this ever increasing medical crisis.

Go to strokeassociation.org for more details

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Healthcare Marketing: The Strongest Endorsers are Within the Walls of the Hospital

Healthcare professionals have the highest level of credibility in the country. They should be used in a hospital’s marketing efforts. 

In Gallup’s most recent poll (Nov. 2008), the results for professionals perceived to have the most honesty and ethics, healthcare professionals again ranked at the top of the list. Here are the results:

Please tell me how you would rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these fields.

In a series of focus groups I observed within the past year, the resounding feedback was that consumers trusted the opinion of their friends and healthcare providers far above anybody else when it came to making healthcare choices. The results of the Gallup poll certainly support and affirm the focus group observations.

So the most trusted and respected endorsers of your hospital are those within the hospital.

In addition to patient testimonials, the use of nurses and doctors in our marketing efforts can be very effective. They are trusted and believed to be honest and ethical.

What better perception would you want for those who endorse your hospital?

Marketers are always searching for ways to make their message believable and credible. Based on what consumers repeatedly confirm, testimonials and endorsements from doctors and nurses can certainly be helpful.

True, such testimonials may not be the most creative, most edgy thing we could do. But if they deliver the message effectively, that far outweighs creativity.

And just so you know, advertising practitioners ranked at the bottom of Gallup’s list just ahead of car salesmen, telemarketers and lobbyists. All the more reason to let others tell our story.