The Backstory

As our colleague Reed Smith has noted repeatedly, marcom departments have historically been distant from other groups within a hospital or health system. Marketers have been back in the corner, executing campaigns and measuring what they can while comms teams have huddled up with leadership dealing with a story or issue. Neither team has been deeply involved in strategy.

Best practices, however, put a good healthcare marketing and communications team right in the mix, helping leadership set priorities and enabling other employees to use communications tools effectively.

We’re not the only ones thinking about this. There was a great deal of chatter about collaboration at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (MCSMN) conference a few weeks ago, and the conversation is continuing. Here’s what on our minds these days.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can’t underestimate the power of one person’s healthcare story.

Aaron Campbell, CPXP, leads Jarrard Inc’s Patient Experience work. Here, he talks about three things chief experience officers, CEOs and other leaders at hospitals and health systems can do to communicate more effectively, gain the trust of patients and caregivers, and improve the patient experience.

While Campbell spends his professional time focused on helping our clients develop, implement and improve their patient experience programs, he has also served as a caregiver himself. That personal role led to a tragic and painful experience in early 2019. It’s a story that highlights the devastation poor communication and a lack of emphasis on the “caring” part of healthcare can have on patients, their loved ones, and – potentially, the hospital’s bottom line. We’re grateful and honored that Campbell was willing to go on record and share this story with us.

Learn more about Jarrard Inc's Patient Experience work here: https://jarrardinc.com/patient-experience/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your hospital’s reputation is some of your most valuable currency.

You have to monitor it, manage it and maintain it well. Leave it alone and things will be said about your facility that you won’t like. To that end, we recently hosted Aaron Clifford, SVP of Marketing at Binary Fountain, at the Barn for a firm-wide lunch-and-learn After Clifford’s talk – and some great barbecue – he and our VP of Digital, Reed Smith, sat down to recap some of the highlights.

First off, you have to know where to find your clinic or practice across multiple online directories and then ensure you’re accurately represented. Otherwise, someone looking for you could end up driving to an empty field. And no, that’s not metaphorical.

Renting property can be cheap and easy, but what happens when the owner changes the rules? What should a healthcare marketing department emphasize when it comes to patient reviews and physician information? Those are the questions healthcare providers have to consider when deciding where to focus their online efforts. in this episode, Clifford and Smith discuss the relative value of “renting property” from third parties (Facebook, Google, etc.), versus “owning” it on your website.

Like every other tool online, online directories have changed over the years, which is just one more thing for healthcare marketers to keep up with to ensure their organization can be found and that the information patients find is accurate. Clifford and Smith talk about the evolution of online reviews for healthcare.

Finally, with the rising importance of HCHAPS scores and other modes of patient feedback, even healthcare transactions like hospital mergers & acquisitions can be affected by your online listings.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Headlines about hospitals in hot water over their financial assistance policies abound, and health system executives are looking around wondering if they’re going to be next.

In an earlier post, we outlined five steps you can take today to prevent your organization from being on the receiving end of negative attention regarding your collections and financial assistance policy (or at least being prepared when it comes).

If you’re reading this thinking “it’s too late, we’re already on the front page,” or your policies are being questioned, we have some thoughts for you, too.

We sincerely hope your hospital or health system's policies never come under fire. But if they do, we hope this information will help you navigate the issue and come out stronger on the other side.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The stories are everywhere: Health systems using collection agencies and the courts to receive payment for care provided to patients.

Are you prepared? Possibly not. You’re working on multiple fronts – helping a complex health system succeed and serving patients as well as you can, including those having trouble with bills. But getting ready is worthy of your time. It’ll take some detective work. A hospital’s collection activities and financial assistance policies span multiple departments and may include outside agents – even those, like collections agencies, your organization no longer uses or has a relationship with. In addition, the information requested is often complex, so it is important to understand that compiling it may take some time.

Take a close look. Even those of you at the most well-intentioned and mission-driven organizations are likely to find things you didn’t know or expect to see.

It will be uncomfortable. Regardless, you should be prepared to explain it and either defend or change it.

Here are five steps you can take today to ensure you understand how your financial assistance and collections could be perceived by others.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The latest edition of our book Healthcare Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships: An Insider’s Guide to Communications has just been published by HealthLeaders. Just in time.

So much has changed since the first edition was released in 2013 yet the need for clear, compelling communications and smart relationship management has never been more timely.

Organizations that provide care – who touch patients and save lives – are facing elevated scrutiny and demands for greater (even uncomfortable) transparency as the need for making dramatic and difficult change grows.

M&A remains a key strategic play for organizations looking to protect their mission, assure their viability and evolve to deliver tomorrow’s healthcare. A successful deal can leapfrog a health system forward; a deal gone bad can kill it. The stakes are high.

You can learn more in this podcast from our CEO David Jarrard. You can also download a free chapter of the book to get started.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The cold truth: The average tenure of a hospital CEO is somewhere around four years.

That’s right, just four years. And the process of replacing a CEO for a health system of any size is no easy feat.

A recent study cited by HealthLeaders* found that half of hospitals and health systems lack a formal CEO succession plan. Knowing that, we’d safely bet that – beyond the obvious introductions – robust CEO onboarding plans are few and far between. Yet without a good executive transition plan, healthcare organizations are at risk for rapid executive turnover. This, in turn, can cause frustration and loss of trust within the organization, lack of continuity in strategic initiatives, and a sucker punch to the bottom line due to transition costs.

Learn more about Jarrard Inc's Executive Transition work here: https://jarrardinc.com/executive-transition/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each year we’ve seen an evolution at the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network Conference that mirrors the evolution of the digital healthcare field.

In the early days, if you look at it like the Gartner hype cycle, there was a big spike of amazement. Everybody was excited. Then everybody got depressed when Facebook’s algorithms changed, and marketing plans went out the window.

Now we’re getting back to understanding where the actual opportunity lies. People are optimizing and finding the real value of digital tools. We’re venturing outside the strict confines of social media – how to use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. – into conversations around the bigger picture. Conversations like how to manage digital efforts with a small team, how to integrate CRMs, how to measure marketing efforts.

The emergence of those conversations indicates that healthcare is reaching a point of digital maturity where the tools are just tools within a larger strategic bucket. Today, unlike a couple of years ago, there’s not much delineation between CRM and social media, where one stops and the other starts. That’s allowed us to take a much more holistic view of our customer – whether it’s the patient or the caregiver or someone else – and assess how they want to connect with us across the board and not just on a particular social media platform.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We answer the questions healthcare leaders are asking. High Stakes offers concise takes on the issues affecting healthcare providers today: strategic positioning, issue navigation, change management. mergers and acquisitions, marketing, digital transformation, patient experience, executive leadership and healthcare governance, and much more.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices