Submitted by
René Bunting, Vice President, Marketing, AtlantiCare
Tom DeSanto, Executive Vice President, Aloysius Butler & Clark

The time has come for a healthcare marketing revolution.

How much longer can we continue pitting ourselves in competition, grinding out market share in heart, cancer and other major service lines?

How many times can we gain temporary competitive advantage with a gamma knife, 64-slice dual-source CT or other new technology—until it’s status quo?

How often can we compete by wooing prominent specialists to establish marquee programs at our hospitals—and start again when they move on?

How sick are we of talking about “high tech” and “high touch” as we attempt to differentiate our hospitals from others that provide remarkably similar services?

Let’s face it. Most current healthcare marketing involves meeting strategic and fiscal goals by creating competitive advantage. Marketing departments have “clients” throughout the organization who expect them to generate patient volumes and build a brand that will inoculate against competitive onslaught. This approach has two major downfalls. It reduces healthcare delivery to a commodity, instead of one of the most important relationships in every person’s life. It is also an inside-out process that focuses more on our organizations than on the patients we’re trying to attract.

We’ve all heard some variation of the saying “if you have your health, you have everything.” And most people believe it’s true. As we market healthcare, we must remember that we’re involved in restoring and enhancing the most valuable possession everyone owns. Health is sacred. It is intensely personal and emotional. Let’s treat it that way.

Current thinking, however, is moving in a different direction. The rush is toward offering consumer-driven health plans and providing detailed outcomes information to consumers. Both approaches rely on the assumption that people make healthcare choices the same way they choose other goods and services—based on cost and performance.

While cost effectiveness and quality standards are very important, the decision points for most Americans are much more basic and profound. To earn the privilege of providing healthcare services, every organization must successfully address two questions: “How can you help me?” and “Why should I trust you?” Sometimes the answer can be very rational, with outcome data or cost as the deciding factor. Almost always, however, decisions involve an exceedingly complex amalgam of emotions, impressions and experiences.

As conscientious marketers, we strive to understand what motivates our customers to act. We conduct research and use it as the basis for strategies and messages, but we fall short because conventional wisdom locks us into a competitive mindset. Often we seek to discover why people would choose what our organization has to offer, instead of determining what they really want.

Even when research uncovers precise needs, healthcare marketers tend to lack the organizational support and flexibility to create a constellation of health services to meet those specific needs. The current marketing model often involves promoting and/or packaging procedures within service lines. It’s a manifestation of the inside-out approach that limits the effectiveness of our efforts.

What if we could redefine marketing so it becomes outside-in, based on building relationships around the power of health in people’s lives?

What if, instead of benchmarking against our competitors, we could benchmark against meeting the health and wellness needs of the community segments our organization serves most effectively?

What if we could build connections so personal and productive with the people we serve that contacting us when they need medical care becomes second nature?

Nearly all healthcare organizations reach out to their communities to provide health education and support. Many also actively engage in fostering productive physician relationships. But often these efforts are not integrated into mainstream marketing and valuable opportunities to gain information and promote interaction are lost.

If we truly want to make loyal and lasting connections with consumers, we must focus more of our attention and resources on reaching out and taking action. Imagine if your organization could augment its marketing efforts in the following way:

• Identify the specific health and demographic profiles within your community where the need is greatest and your organization’s clinical strengths could make a demonstrable difference. These groups could vary widely based on your situation—from congestive heart failure patients awaiting transplant to menopausal women to senior citizens with diabetes.
• Begin a dialogue with members of those groups (and their physicians) so you can understand their needs and create awareness of the services you already provide. The next step would be to collaborate with them to create affinity groups around health where individuals can find information, support and a sense of community with their peers.
• Commit to providing these groups—and the physicians that refer them—with practical resources that can make their lives better.
• Work with physicians, planners and operations staff to assemble and promote a mix of medical/wellness services (across various service lines) that meet the specific needs of the groups you’ve identified. Together you would define success and set realistic and measurable goals based on the metrics your organization is able to supply.
• Remove barriers to access and seek ongoing feedback. You would then report back through your organization and partner with physicians and internal departments to continually enhance your organization’s response to these groups.

Under this outside-in approach, the marketing department would become a catalyst for developing internal and external relationships that lead to a higher level of engagement with the community. You would be able to build relationships that go far deeper than those you can make through conventional marketing and branding. Instead of being a healthcare provider, your organization would become a healthcare partner.

This kind of thinking is radical. Bottom lines must still be met. The demand to drive patient volumes, increase market share and prove ROI will not go away. Likewise, until the rules of governance change, healthcare will continue to be delivered in individual fiefdoms that have no choice but to compete by adding services, duplicating technologies and outmarketing each other. The die is cast for now, but revolutions are born by challenging and venturing beyond the status quo. They are also born when prevailing conditions call for change.

America’s burgeoning healthcare costs and the cycles of cost inflation continue to haunt us. Back in the 1980s, we marveled at how total U.S. healthcare spending could ever reach one trillion dollars. In 2004, it nearly doubled that mark. Some experts predict that spending may reach $4 trillion by 2015. It was cost pressure that drove the development of managed care and failed reform under the Clinton administration. Now, as employers try to opt out of skyrocketing costs, consumer-driven health plans are the solution du jour. Until our country fixes the financing side of healthcare, the pressure—and search for solutions—will continue.

Rising healthcare costs will prompt greater outreach with disease management and “healthy lifestyle” programs. The growing number of uninsured/ underinsured, as well as concerns about inequities in health care, will also motivate increased emphasis on preventive care and health education. Healthcare organizations will face an imperative to do more.

Cost pressure also will drive healthcare organizations to use their resources to intervene earlier in people’s lives to address health problems so they can reduce the need for costly procedures. Currently the major focus is on treatment of existing conditions. Eventually hospitals and health systems will be brought to the realization that they simply cannot afford to build enough facilities, recruit enough physicians and procure enough advanced equipment to keep up with the demand. Our aging population, the comorbidities of the obesity epidemic and other trends will lead the shift to prevention and early detection, so will advances in medical science.

With the advent of the human genome project and discoveries in molecular biology, medical science is becoming more adept at understanding and treating the underlying causes of disease. Scientists not only are learning to manipulate cellular mechanisms and chemistry to prevent infections and the onset of conditions, they also are developing procedures specific to an individual’s genetic code. With increasing frequency, medical intervention will occur earlier and become more personalized.

Based on these trends, as well as the challenges of increasing competition, healthcare marketing is moving away from an inside-out, mass-market approach toward one that is more outside-in and individualized. Soon we’ll discover that it is more productive to build our marketing programs around connecting with the people we serve, instead of competing for market share.

Should we all abandon our current competitive marketing and branding strategies and join hands in a collective kumbaya? Of course not.

Given that we are locked into competition, let’s make the best of it. We need to step out of the conventional tunnel vision that has so many healthcare organizations talking to themselves. Our audiences are tuning out because the claims we make are so similar: new technology, the highest quality, more compassion, the best doctors, the highest rankings—it’s all about us. And it’s often me-too.

In all fairness, we start out right. We customarily conduct research to discover what consumers say they want and the differences they perceive between healthcare organizations. Let’s take to heart our prospective patients’ decision-making process and take a closer look at how we can answer the basic questions of need and trust. How can we engage in dialogue, instead of pushing claims, facts, procedures and services at people?

We also need to elevate the importance of community outreach programs as part of our marketing efforts. Let’s create new ways to listen, learn and respond. The knowledge we can gain and the relationships we can build are invaluable. Outreach is not an adjunct activity; it is central to achieving new levels of success.

Closely integrating physician relationship management into our overall marketing strategy is equally important. We should include ongoing programs as well as specific elements that foster enhancement of referral relationships for every service we promote.

“Integrate and engage!” is the battle cry of the revolution. It’s about tearing down traditional management silos and integrating the marketing function across the entire organization. It’s about doing everything possible to reach new levels of engagement with our communities.

The revolution has already begun. At the SHSMD Educational Conference last September, AtlantiCare reported that board members from its organization conducted 33 meetings with various community groups and reported the results. The effort not only yielded valuable information, it also served to focus management on listening and responding. AtlantiCare’s strategic planning involves co-creating value around health with the eventual goal of demonstrating quantifiable improvements in health among various segments of the community.

In 2007, AtlantiCare plans to pilot several programs that will reach out to select populations with the intention of building relationships that lead to the development of service bundles that address their specific needs. As part of these programs, several marketing managers will become “consumer engagement specialists” who work across the organization on behalf of their select populations.

What makes this approach extraordinary is that it does not cast consumer engagement in the same old, inside-out competitive mold. It dares to redefine the role of marketing and consider all the possibilities. If we can get beyond treating healthcare as a commodity and stop limiting ourselves to the same old marketing strategies, we’ll be on our way to a healthcare marketing revolution.