DENVER - The hundreds of healthcare communicators who attended the fourth annual Society of Healthcare Strategy and Market Development conference here this week experienced a thought-provoking reality check. Attendees were challenged to address pressing issues like:
- Will your hospital be prepared if the press camps out on your doorstep this New Year's Eve?
- Does your hospital have the appropriate infrastructure that your advertising promotes like top-notch quality, caring staff and attentive customer service?
While these questions don't have one-size-fits-all answers, they need to be tackled with community-specific strategies.
If Y2K planning hasn't been a top priority, now is the time to make it one. The fourth quarter will be the true test of your Y2K preparedness, says Steve Brawley, communications director of the BJC Health System in St. Louis, Mo.
In addition to the possibility that reporters may be camped out at your facility to find out whether your systems make the successful transition to Jan. 1, 2000, you should also expect community inquiries about your hospital's ability to communicate with its vendors, nursing homes and physician practices. It's also a good idea to determine whether your physicians should schedule elective surgeries on or around New Year's Day and be prepared to address this position with the media.
You should also determine how your staff will handle new millenium moms with the media. Lastly, plan an uplifting event or program for both patients and staff who will be in the hospital during the holidays.
For additional Y2K information, check out SHSMD's web site, www.stratsociety.org and the American Hospital Association's Web site, www.aha.org, which provide a communication tool kit, fact sheets and sample letters to various audiences.
Creating the Invisible
Chew on this: There is no correlation between healthcare advertising expenditures and market share. Scott Regan, VP of marketing and strategic planning at Memorial Health in Savannah, Ga., came to this disturbing conclusion after studying healthcare advertising trends in 11 cities over a three-year period, from 1994 to 1997.
Though he's not slamming the overall effectiveness of advertising, he argues that investing in it is useless if your hospital doesn't have the right corporate culture in place to support promotional claims.
Initially, when Regan joined Memorial a few years ago, this theory wasn't very popular among key employees. The physician who headed Memorial's ER department was particularly disappointed when he learned that there weren't any immediate plans to advertise the ER. Regan pointed out to the physician that there was an average four-hour wait for patients in the ER and that the department wasn't ready to be advertised. The physician then posed the question that many other employees had to answer, "How do we fix it?"
Fixing Memorial's infrastructure took precedence over advertising. The marketing department focused on making internal quality improvements through employee recognition/awards programs, patient satisfaction efforts and employee training programs.
These internal factors are critical in choosing a hospital, says Regan, who found through research that on a scale of 1 to 10, the top reasons consumers select hospitals are based on:
- Quality of physicians (9.6);
- Up-to-date technology (9.6);
- Caring and concerned staff (9.4);
- Availability of all sources (9.3);
- Physician preferences (9.1); and
- Pleasant surroundings (8.9)
(Steve Brawley, BJC Health System, 314/505-6602; Memorial Health, Scott Regan, 912/897-3766)