Resource Library

Imagine trying to manage strategic planning for a health system that has doubled in size in recent years, but lacks standardized business development processes to maximize growth opportunities. Then, imagine an extremely competitive consumer marketplace where two members of that same network are advertising for the same service in the same newspaper (or on dueling billboards) with no mention of the health system.

When a crisis occurs in your community, how should your hospital or health system's public relations/communications team respond? Whether an incident is local in nature or has national or international implications, it is vital for hospitals to have a crisis plan in place that will ensure effective communications to all key internal and external audiences, and stakeholders — and protect the hospital's reputation.

How to utilize data to improve organizational decision making. Today, the volume of raw data a healthcare organization collects can be overwhelming. In fact, it is estimated that 90 percent of all the data in existence today was created in the last two years. The challenge for healthcare strategists is to figure out ways to make sense of all this information. But how?

In today's increasingly vertically, horizontally, and virtually integrated healthcare landscape, a service line focus on core diseases and conditions can be an effective strategy for managing patient care and boosting market share. But while clinical service lines - from cardiology to orthopedics to neurosciences - have gained considerable traction elsewhere in healthcare, they are much less common in children's hospitals. This is unfortunate because, like other health systems, children's hospitals are increasingly focused on providing care outside the hospital itself.

Gundersen Health System is using an online consumer panel to make and validate marketing decisions. As hospital and health system leaders and marketers, we must evolve to meet the expectations of the engaged healthcare consumer. But how? Many of us have adjusted our business models or made changes to our marketing strategies to try to meet the needs of these new healthcare decision makers. But how do we know if our direction aligns with the opinions and needs of this more engaged and influential consumer?

St. Luke Health System turned its outdated online brochure into a dynamic website that drives engagement and empowers patients. Healthcare consumers expect the digital experience to be as easy to use and personalized as Amazon. But with the tight restrictions placed on patient information and privacy, delivering on the promise of a seamless, customer-friendly experience can be difficult. So, how can healthcare providers meet those expectations and integrate all their patient touchpoints?

Many hospital marketers want to engage physicians in marketing campaigns. This usually involves physicians sitting for interviews, posing for photos, and signing off on tag lines. But this level of engagement is only a start.

As healthcare strategists, we may also long for a similar scorecard to help us turn potential opportunities into real winners. The hospital leadership at AAMC teamed up to pinpoint gaps in services as well as the missing pros—the physician specialists and other clinicians—that might help grow patient volume and meet the healthcare needs of the community they serve.

A retail health initiative calls for careful planning. Here are five keys to a successful retail strategy.

"Leakage" is a buzzword today, especially for physician relations professionals and healthcare strategists as they prepare for the future of network referral management. Simply defined, leakage is what happens when primary care physicians send their patients to out-of-system providers rather than to those within your organization's network.

Here are answers to several questions about Spectrum Health's new approach to brand journalism.

The emergency department (ED) is often considered to be the hospital's "front door." For this reason, healthcare strategists have historically focused their attention—and marketing dollars—on driving ED volume, which subsequently drives inpatient admissions, surgical procedures, diagnostic testing, contribution margin, and net revenue.

In its white paper entitled "Managing Populations, Maximizing Technology," the nonprofit Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative listed 10 recommendations for achieving comprehensive population health management.1 Among those recommendations are: risk stratification, automated outreach, and advanced population analytics.

As healthcare strategists, we can no longer focus most of our resources on simply growing inpatient volume. Instead, we need to broaden our focus to the entire healthcare experience for patients and their caregivers—from initial research and preparation, to appointment scheduling, to doctor and hospital visits, to rehabilitation, to post-care follow up.

Today, many people in the hospital industry are trying to "think different" about healthcare. How can we use technology to redesign the way people interact with caregivers, become more active, and manage their own health? The answer might come from the tech industry itself.

Learn how Lafayette General Health developed and deployed a partnership ranking decision tool to support its long-range strategic business objectives.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a hot topic in healthcare marketing. From conferences to webinars to white papers, everyone seems to be jumping on the CRM bandwagon. And for every hospital or health system that doesn't have CRM, there seems to be another that underutilizes its existing CRM echnology. In an increasingly complex world of digital marketing channels, propensity modeling, and targeted analytics, a back-to-basics approach to CRM will help most organizations make sense of this ambiguous acronym.

Brooks Rehabilitation leverages video to share compelling patient experiences. Anyone who works in our field could tell you a touching tale of compassion or relate an inspiring story of recovery against all odds. This is what is unique about healthcare. Powerful stories are happening every day. So how do we effectively tell compelling stories that connect us with our audiences? How do we create content that engages by unlocking emotion?

Find out why the value-based purchasing score is getting harder to predict and why HCAHPS is important to track.

Once upon a time, hospital marketing didn't exist. Public relations functions were focused almost exclusively around media relations and what we called community relations. Then came marketing (with the glamour of advertising), the Internet, Facebook, Tweet, and pins. Community relations (CR) faded, got pushed to secondary priority status and then to the bottom of that "nice to do if we had time" list.