Health system marketers are increasingly asked to defend their budgets in the same terms as any other department: with a number attached to a specific outcome.
Dona Landers, director of digital marketing at Cincinnati-based Christ Hospital Health Network, offers two numbers: 7,000 and 7.5%. The first is the number of unique registrants the system drove to a surgical services webinar series using its CRM platform, targeting patients who had already been identified as good candidates for surgery but, for various reasons, hadn’t yet scheduled it.
“With the permission of their physicians, we reached out to them to invite them to this webinar series, where it was a one-on-one conversation with a panel of surgeons as well as surgical clinical experts to get those questions answered,” Ms. Landers said at Becker’s Marketing Leadership Forum on Sept. 15 in Chicago. “That 7.5% is the increase in our surgical volume for the organization in the last six months.”
That work depends heavily on IT, she said — exporting data from the organization’s EHR, managing compliance and security, and maintaining a secure platform so patients can safely discuss protected health information during the webinars. “That really is, I think, a pretty impressive demonstration of how that partnership has worked,” she said.
Mary Fetsch, director of marketing and corporate communications at Munster, Ind.-based Powers Health, pointed to a Medicare wellness campaign the system unveiled with its managed care partners to get patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans for their annual wellness visits.
“We launched just last month an email campaign of 15,000. We had an open rate of 4,000. We had over 350 wellness appointments made, all within this first month,” Ms. Fetsch said at the panel discussion.
The process used to be manual, she said — Powers Health’s managed care staff previously called patients one by one to schedule those visits. Now it runs as an automated journey in Salesforce that integrates with Epic, timed to each patient’s plan requirements.
“We’re working with our partners in Epic to try and get the right patients at the right time into the journey … according to their plan requirements,” she said, “and we are really looking forward to the results month over month and year-end, where hopefully we achieve some payment incentive levels that we’re going for.”
Mari Considine, chief brand and marketing officer at Acenda Integrated Health, a New Jersey-based behavioral health provider, pointed to a less flattering number: 2,000 voicemails.
“Our IT just integrated a brand-new phone system. We’re having really great success with it. However, I’m looking at some of the data and noticing that we’re having 2,000 voicemails to one location,” Ms. Considine said at the session. “The good example is the 2,000 voicemails to one line in a very short period of time. I believe we were looking at a three-week period, and it’s not our main number. It’s just somebody’s voicemail.”
Marketing and IT traced the problem together. “Working together with our IT team, trying to figure out and problem-solve how we can prevent that from happening, turns out we did not have the right product,” she said, “so [we] invested in a completely new phone system.” The fix, she said, gave patients “a more marketing-friendly type of patient experience rather than one that was just IT.”
Lori Howley, vice president of marketing and communications at Lawrence, Mass.-based Merrimack Health, answered the same question differently. Her health system is about a year and a half old, formed after Dallas-based Steward Health Care’s bankruptcy left eight Massachusetts hospitals in jeopardy — two of which closed, six of which were acquired by other organizations, including hers.
The mandate in Year 1, she said, was simply to survive 2025. “The priority out of the gate was to do no harm to our patients, and make sure that they continue to have confidence in the access to the services that we were then going to stabilize and prepare to move forward for them,” Ms. Howley said.
That’s not a growth metric, but it shaped an early decision with its own long-term payoff. “One of the things that we did right out of the gate is we moved everybody to one medical record platform,” she said, “so that’s going to be a focus that we’re going to be looking at in ways to leverage moving forward.”
