Key Resources Mentioned in Today's Episode

• Rev Cycle Intelligence Article: Volume Declines Drive Hospital Operating Margins Down 282% in April

Key TakeAways

Salinas Valley’s Crisis Response

• We were seeing people put off critical care and recognized the need for us to communicate that it’s safe to come back for care.
• Once we started reassurance messaging, we saw an increase in patients around mid to late April.
• In the last couple of weeks or so, we’ve restarted our scheduled surgeries processing again.

Salinas’s unique experience during the evolution of COVID-19?

• There’s a sizable agricultural history here. We call it the salad bowl of the world. We provide a large number of provisions to the entire world.
• There are thousands of employees living and working in very close conditions, so we started seeing cases appearing.
• We wanted to focus on a strategy to help educate these workers:
  • We’ve sent our nurses out to the fields to conduct training with workers about sanitation at the worksite and home.  
  • We’ve also donated masks.
• We’ve always focused on our cultural understanding of our care, but we’ve tried a few new tactics during this time:
  • We provided a Facebook live with a Spanish speaking physician and had a peak of over 800 viewers join the livestream.

Scheduling Surgeries  

• Before implementing the process, we spent a couple of weeks figuring out what it would look like. We asked:  
  • How do we test the people a couple of days before they come in?
  • How do we give them instructions to isolate between that test and when they’re coming into the surgery?  
• We started by conducting a few surgeries with the process to see how it works, and then Tuesday of this week, we started ramping up.  
• In terms of communications and marketing, we started internally and made sure that our employees knew exactly what we were doing and started putting the message out externally.

The "Be Well" Campaign

• People need a message of what they should be doing. So, we’re looking at a traditional brand-level campaign that gives people some options on how they can stay connected.  
• The idea is to set the stage for people to start thinking about health care again and start thinking about how we want to support them.  
• It’s important to provide high level messaging that’s more aspirational, and then other messaging that is more specific to interactions.  

The Campaigns Evolution

• There wasn’t enough time for detailed focus group testing. So, we were able to get some input in different ways. It’s important to keep connections in place, even as some of the restrictions start to lift.  
• It is essential to keep the campaign flexible because things can change in a matter of 30 days.