When Tenet HealthCare Corp. completed its acquisition in June 2002 of five hospitals in the St. Louis area, it planned on farming out its public relations to a local agency. It
wasn't for lack of PR talent in-house, but because of resources.
"The problems we ran into is what several other of our colleagues ran into in other markets and that is, most hospitals have just one or two people, at most, in the PR
department and you can't do a lot of proactive PR story pitching because [the execs] are always handling damage control issues and reacting to inquiries from the media," says
Thomas F. Keller, former marketing director for Tenet Healthcare, St. Louis. Keller helped craft the media plan last summer for Tenet, which through its subsidiaries owns and
operates 114 acute care hospitals with 27,743 beds and numerous related health care services.
As a relative newcomer to the St. Louis hospital market, Tenet had to quickly localize its image with St. Louis media outlets - a tall order considering that Tenet had to
position itself against BJC Health System in St. Louis, the entrenched player in the market. What's more, Tenet wanted exposure not just for corporate but also for each of the
specific hospital facilities. For example, Tenet specializes in liver transplants and cardiology at St. Louis University Hospital; senior care at Des Peres Hospital; OBGYN and
cardiology at Forest Park Hospital; psychiatric care and rehab services at South Pointe Hospital and orthopedics and senior care at St. Alexius Hospital.
Enter The Vandiver Group, a St. Louis-based PR firm that Keller brought on last June after a vigorous selection process. Job One for the Vandiver Group team leader Mary Burke
was to huddle with all of the marketing communications directors from each Tenet hospital as well as their business development directors. Burke says she communicated closely with
the marketing directors from each hospital "because we didn't want to put out messages that were contrary to other messages that they were putting out through advertising
initiatives or other projects."
Although each hospital had a different message to convey to the media, Vandiver (20 employees; $2 million in annual billings) was told to dedicate the same amount of PR man-
hours to each facility in terms of media pitches.
A key part of the media strategy was -- in a sense -- to do the homework of local healthcare reporters and correspondents who are so busy covering their own backyard that they
often don't have the time to look for national healthcare-related stories that could be tailored locally. Burke says her pitches would germinate from stories scanned in several
national media publications, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well as online properties with a national audience like CNN.com and WebMD.
Burke would clip the national story and drop it into an e-mail blast to local healthcare reporters. She stressed that she did not attach the story to an e-mail but simply
embedded the information into the body of the e-mail to make things easier for reporters. One pitch related to a story that ran in The Wall Street Journal late last year saying
that by the first quarter of 2003 the FDA would most likely approve drug-coated "stents," used to hold arteries open during and after an angioplasty.
Vandiver lined up several physicians from a few of Tenet's St. Louis hospitals to discuss the procedure with local radio and TV outlets. But just as FDA approval came through,
the national story shifted gears to how the procedure would impact hospitals financially. Burke adapted to the change and proceeded to line up Tenet's CFO to do an interview with
the St. Louis Business Journal on how the procedure would impact financially all of Tenet's five hospitals. Burke was also able to sell the St. Louis Business Journal on a story
about the one-stop shopping senior center at St. Alexius Hospital in St. Louis, which sets up appointments and is able to shuttle seniors to doctors who can care for them. That
story was generated by all the national stories Burke read stating that seniors were having a tougher time finding doctors because of the limitations in Medicare reimbursements.
Burke and the TVG team also picked up on stories at the national level about the need for culturally sensitive medicine; not just a doctor or nurse who can speak the language
but understands the nuances of a culture. Burke lined up two doctors of Vietnamese and Hispanic descent from SouthPointe Hospital to do a panel discussion on a local radio program
on the issues related to immigrant medicine.
"Most of these were e-mail pitches and time was of the essence," Burke says. "We knew that our strategy was working when we got a call from a patient advocacy group saying that
the Vandiver Group had been referred to her by a St. Louis-based healthcare reporter who said we were the experts in the area of medical reporting."
PR Prescription is Just What Hospital System Ordered
Competition for healthcare-related stories can be fierce considering they're a staple throughout the nation's newsrooms. With tough expectations for media hits, five hospitals
to service and a region brimming with medical centers, The Vandiver Group had to craft a new model for helping its client Tenet HealthSystem, get media exposure in the St. Louis
metro area. Here's the PR prescription:
- Be First --The PR team developed a proactive system for identifying hot story angles. Everyday the latest healthcare news from national print and Web-based sources were
delivered via e-mail to the campaign team. Those late-breaking items deemed to be both of high public interest and on-target for the business development goals of the hospitals
were presented to the Marketing Director who would give the go-ahead and identify the most appropriate hospital for contacts. - Be Relevant -- Working on the assumption that reporters need to prove timeliness and relevance to their superiors and yet have precious little time for background research,
TVG made the pitch both relevant and easy to bite on by embedding the resource material in the emailed media pitches. Timeliness was critical. - Be Credible -- Whether it was a newspaper piece, TV news hit or radio interview, once the media pitch was made the pressure was on. The individual hospital contact had to
deliver the prepped medical contacts on-time, every time or risk losing the momentum of the campaign.
Source: The Vandiver Group
Contacts: Mary Burke, 314.991.4641, x119, [email protected]; Thomas F. Keller, 314.249. 8933, [email protected]