Simplicity, at times in health care, is the farthest thing from Simple!

While I absolutely agree with Bob’s reference and comments relative to simplicity, I am also somewhat of a realist and have found that in health care, many times clients are being pressured from many areas seeking support. All healthcare marketers, at one time or another in their careers, have faced the multiple layers of pressure that are applied as physicians, service line leaders and hospital administrators prioritize and re-prioritize based on some new reality within their organizations. These have the potential to take the simple and make things oh so complex.

Understanding the organization’s priorities and establishing strategies early in the planning process can assist in keeping organizations on task and healthcare marketers sane. For example, if revenues are being driven into organizations by surgeries within the cardiovascular service line, healthcare marketers should be charged with driving business into this area. However, as we know, this is not that simple. Consumers don’t self-refer for open-heart surgery. There are, at times, many layers for that patient to pass through – a primary care physician, a cardiologist, an imaging department, sometimes a radiologist, perhaps back to the primary care physician, and ultimately to a cardiovascular surgeon. This may take some time for this process to play out, and a brand campaign talking about how great a hospital’s CV department is for treating heart patients may appear to be ineffective and not drive results.

This is where strategically we recommend, where possible, to be direct. For a marketing person to be strategic and creative, he/she first needs to understand what procedures or diagnostic tests may be available to identify a particular condition that can ultimately, and more quickly, move this patient across the continuum to the CV surgeon and drive the downstream revenue net effect for the system. I know this sounds pretty cold and calculated when you look at this and think that this patient is your loved one. However, wouldn’t you want your loved one, if he/she was in the demographic of patients with a propensity for a particular disease state, to receive care well before it reaches a critical stage?

Patients need to be proactive in their approach to managing health. Patients can leverage opportunities to identify potential health risks and have them treated early in the development of the disease, which in many cases results in a less invasive approach to care. Now, I know what some of you marketing managers are thinking, I just told you to attract patients to drive open-heart cases, right? Well, when you appeal to the masses to be proactive in their approach to health management, you are always going to find some cases that are advanced and need immediate attention. These drive the bottom-line. The other, non-urgent cases help to build relationships between your health system and the patient for the next occurrence.

In the end, I guess it really is simple… give people the opportunity to be proactive in the management of their own health, and organizations will ultimately see the net result.