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Is there a marketing question or topic you'd
like to see featured in HealthLink?
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FAQ
How can SoundCare help
promote patient safety initiatives?
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Explain goals with short, simple messages
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Build trust with CEO and staff SoundViews
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Establish credibility by highlighting awards
and accreditations
More FAQs
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Make the case for
cause marketing
A hospital's adoption of a cause, such as heart health
or breast cancer prevention, can become an agent of
change and a resource for the community.
As our new HealthLink
contributor Anthony Cirillo explains, cause adoption
also gives marketing the chance to lead, influence,
and create word of mouth both inside and outside the
organization.
Have a question or comment
about HealthLink? Send us an email at
marketing@vericom.net.
Robert J. Loeb
President & CEO
Vericom Coporation
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How Marketing Can Impact Care
and Cause Adoption Can Influence Marketing
By Anthony Cirillo
The gauntlet was thrown, and the
marketing department at Winston Salem, NC-based Novant
Health System had a challenge. Novant wanted to
institute a system-wide hand hygiene program. But it
was more than that. The real intention was to make
germ prevention and infection reduction part of the
system's culture. Nationally, it's estimated that
hospital staffs comply with proper hand hygiene
techniques only 20 percent of the time. Novant's goal
was to reach 90 percent, and eventually achieve 100
percent compliance.
Marketing ran with it -- and
rarely does marketing gain an opportunity to make a
real difference in people's lives. It initiated a
unique and edgy campaign to create a buzz inside the
organization and permanently change the quality and
safety culture. More importantly, the campaign helped
shift employee opinion, increase hand hygiene
compliance and save lives.
Impacting care and creating a
better experience ultimately leads to satisfied staff
and patients, who then spread the word about these
efforts.
Own a cause
The tenets of this campaign
can be applied to almost any quality, safety or
culture initiative. Hospitals routinely participate
and sponsor other organizations' causes. That is part
of the social responsibility of being a good community
citizen. That said, if you really want to make an
impact, adopt a cause that is all your own. Better
yet, adopt a cause that is a natural brand extension
of who you are. Ideally, you want to tie the cause to
the services you are calling attention to in your
marketing.
Choose strategic
partners
When you bring together people for a cause and step out
of the way and let them communicate with one another,
the halo effect on your brand is tremendous. March of
Dimes has Walk America. The American Heart Association
has its heart walk. Think about how people feel when
they participate. They are having fun and doing
something worthwhile.
And when it is all over, they remember who brought them
together. Good vibrations spread by Word of mouth. An
emotional connection is made. Effective cause marketing
results in ongoing brand loyalty.
Here are three tips to consider when implementing cause
marketing:
1. Plan for the future. Involving key
stakeholders in your cause builds good will for the
future. When tough times hit (and they will) the
relationships you have built in your cause marketing
efforts can soften the blow.
2. Tie-in to philanthropic efforts.
Letting key community members know what you are doing in
the planning stages will not only involve them, but also
assure that word starts percolating well before you
formally announce what you are doing.
3. Create a brand extension. In some
respects, adopting the right cause will extend your
brand and complement your mission and values.
It is kind of ironic that healthcare marketing starts
with good community relations and being a good community
citizen. There is often little consideration given to
the powerful effect a philanthropic strategic initiative
can have on a hospital's branding and marketing
efforts. As they say, what goes around comes around.
Anthony Cirillo is president of Fast Forward Strategic
Planning and Marketing Consulting, LLC in
Huntersville, N.C. He may be reached at
cirillo@4wardfast.com.
The Vericom
Institute for Learning (VIL) is all about Building
Indispensable Relationships. At Vericom, we
continually seek to learn about your challenges in
healthcare and how we can help you improve your
communications and relationships with your patients
and consumers, employees, and physicians.
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SoundCare®: personalized service that connects The
Christ Hospital to its community
Cardiovascular care, spine
treatment, women's health, and cancer are the heart
and soul of services at The Christ Hospital. This
555-bed not-for-profit hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio
informs its captive audiences about these critical
services and more in a meaningful and personal way.
SoundCare on-hold messaging connects The Christ
Hospital to its community with personalized messages
targeting patients already using one service with
information about its other services, programs, and
events.
Read the full case study
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Patient Safety: On the Marketing and Strategic Radar
Screen |
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"Woman has unnecessary double mastectomy due to mistake
by New York medical laboratory."
"Rhode Island hospital does surgery on wrong side of
patient's brain--third such incident in one year at the
same hospital."
"Movie star's twin infants receive 1,000 times the
recommended dose of drug due to error by California
hospital."
These headlines all appeared in the national press
during the closing months of 2007. Almost eight years
after the Institute of Medicine's landmark study, To
Err Is Human, reported on avoidable hospital deaths
due to mistakes or errors, and on the heels of the type
of headlines listed above, there is high public
awareness of medical errors--and justifiably lower
tolerance for them. |
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