Volume 8 of the “Humanizing Brand Experience: Healthcare edition” report deep dives both into what matters most to healthcare consumers as well as who is doing it best. The report ranks the most human healthcare brands by measuring how well they connect with consumers across the sensorial, intellectual, behavioral and emotional dimensions proven to drive choice and recommendation.
Monigle sat down with Chief Marketing Officer Christine Thiriet and Brand Strategy Director Katie Cunningham from Iowa City-based University of Iowa Health Care, the No. 1 most human brand, and Rob Whitehouse, vice president of marketing and communications at Cincinnati-based TriHealth, the fifth-most human brand, to explore the strategies, leadership practices, and cultural initiatives that have enabled these top-performing healthcare brands to excel in consumer experience and brand perception.
Question: What was the catalyst for TriHealth’s cultural transformation, and how did you implement it organizationally?
Rob Whitehouse: It started with our CEO wanting to change the experience. We began the Leadership Development Institute (our comprehensive leadership training program) as soon as he arrived, along with stoplight reports and manager training. Managers have huddles with their teams either daily or, at least, twice a week. This was a real change in culture for this organization.
Initially, leaders struggled with “How do I have time to do all this?” But once they saw that doing these things actually made their jobs easier and their people more productive, the time savings became apparent. There’s a learning curve at the beginning where it feels time-consuming, and then they start seeing the time savings come in. And then it just starts multiplying.
Q: UI Health Care has expanded significantly. How did you frame these acquisitions and new facilities in a way that resonated with communities?
Katie Cunningham: This past year we had a lot going on. We acquired a very large cancer practice in Des Moines, in the center of the state, a place where we have some services but hadn’t had a strong presence. We opened a new hospital near Iowa City that focuses on orthopedic care and emergency care.
The marketing communications component was that we were able to successfully tell a story about why that was really important. It really became about the conversation in Iowa about cancer and about access to critically needed care. We have the second-highest incidence of cancer in the country, and we need to continue to find ways to help Iowans access the care they need.
Being present in a new place and being able to help ensure patients get that care closer to home is a critical part of our mission. Opening that hospital allowed us to provide more access to critical care that people need in the corridor in the eastern part of the state. Our brand is about making all of Iowa better, and we’re able to position these things as examples of how we’re doing that.
Q: What makes UI Health Care so unique?
Christine Thiriet: One of the things that makes the University of Iowa and UI Health Care so special is the collaboration we have within our health system. As marketing and communications leaders, we have regular seats at the table to help make decisions and think of our stakeholders and patients when decisions are being made. The culture here is very much a “let’s do this together” model.
The other thing that’s special here goes beyond healthcare. We have a very close relationship with the university. You can see we’ve rebranded in alignment with our university partners and with athletics as well. We’ve had success with Caitlin Clark coming from Iowa, and we have heartwarming things like the Wave, where at the end of the first quarter of Hawkeye football games, everyone stops and waves at the children in the children’s hospital that overlooks Kinnick Stadium.
Q: TriHealth ranks No. 1 nationally for making it easy to get an appointment. How did you achieve this?
RW: There has been great leadership alignment and understanding of how important this is from top to bottom. We have had leaders who are willing to have the very tough discussions, including physician leaders, in terms of schedules and how much time you really need for an appointment.
We have leaned heavily into online scheduling, and that has also forced physician groups to make sure they are putting as much time on the calendars for patients as possible.
The reality was, I think it was never that difficult for consumers to get appointments. They just didn’t know how to do it easily. They would jam the call center, and that’s really where the bottleneck was. So the more we promoted getting people over to the online tool, and particularly onto the internal online tool for existing patients, it really helps with the logjam and frees up our website tool for only new patients. It then makes the people who still want to call into the call center have less of a queue to sit in in order to get there.
Everyone in operations agreed it was a priority, and we all worked on it together. It wasn’t just marketing saying, “Hey, you need to do this.” It was everyone recognizing it and making it a priority and not letting other priorities get in the way of it.
Q: How do you showcase organizational values through content?
CT: We’re a leaner team for our organization’s size, so we create content that highlights individuals and teams who demonstrate behaviors and outcomes that align with our mission, vision and values. We showcase success stories from projects and early wins to help gain momentum on systemwide initiatives like length-of-stay reduction.
By highlighting these individuals, we help with retention and recognition, but we’re also showing who we want to recruit. We use these same personal stories in recruitment materials to show what it means to work at Iowa.
Q: How do you maintain employee engagement when resources are tight?
RW: Our CEO was adamant. He said the reason we’re doing well today is because of our team members, and if the first thing that we’re thinking about doing because of any financial challenges is taking away from our team members, we’ve already lost.
We’ve all got to tighten our belts a bit. That’s just the reality. But why are we still doing all of these things for our team members? Well, because what they tell us they like is the reason they stay here. It makes them more productive and happier, they give better service, and they stay with us so we don’t have the expense of replacement.
Q: How do you ensure leaders are equipped to deliver on your brand promise?
RW: It’s a huge priority for our senior leadership and CEO — getting leaders with the right attitudes leading teams the right way. We watch engagement scores because you can clearly see correlations between their engagement scores and how their units are performing in HCAHPS scores and other measures.
We introduced the TriHealth way of leading, the TriHealth way of serving, and the TriHealth way of delivering care, in that order. So, leaders first, everybody learns how to serve. Now it all adds up to delivering care. If you don’t have the leaders in place, then this is just going to fail.
Q: How do you facilitate collaboration and alignment across different departments and locations?
KC: Marketing communications can be a real connector. With the downtown location, there was a real need to build trust and help build confidence that we really were going to do the things we said we were going to do. That takes time and repetition. We have great leaders there doing an amazing job of pulling people together and rallying them. We help support them with communication, helping them be really thoughtful and deliberate about what we’re saying and then coming back and talking about how we did what we said we were going to do.
Because we’re involved in so many things, we’re able to be the connectors. When something’s happening in one place, we’re often able to say, “Hey, let’s bring in these other people who are doing something similar so that we can make sure we’re doing this in the right way and thinking it through.”
Q: How does consumer experience connect to your business model?
RW: We have about half of the lives we care for in some form of value-based contract. We’re all in on population health, and most institutions think that’s insane, but we’re actually one of the few in the market right now doing this in a financially viable way.
Our CEO would love to have 100% of our patients in value-based care because it requires us to be more proactive in making sure people are getting their screenings, making sure they’re filling their prescriptions, and making sure they’re following up with their doctors.
This approach requires more high-touch interaction and consumerism, focused less on being the most impressive doctors with the most expensive equipment. Most people don’t need that. What they need is a doctor who hears them and takes care of their high sugar or hypertension.
Q: How does UI Health Care leverage your academic medical center status to build consumer trust?
KC: Trust is really a central part of our brand. As an academic health system, we’re less focused on primary care, but that idea of being a resource for the entire state of Iowa — being there to help people understand their options, especially if they have a serious health issue. We’re often the place people go for information, even those who may not end up getting care with us. That level of trust and being that leader for the state is an important part of what we do.
The blueprint for human healthcare experiences
According to the “Humanizing Brand Experience” data, less than half of consumers trust their healthcare provider to make the right decisions for them. The tactics, strategies, and priorities laid out by the UI Health Care and TriHealth demonstrate that intentional cultural transformation and collaborative approaches can break through to create meaningful connections.
These two brands come from distinctly different healthcare environments and represent fundamentally different business models. Iowa operates as a large academic medical center serving an entire state, while TriHealth functions as a community health system focused on population health and value-based care. Yet both have created deeply human brand experiences in their own unique ways, proving there’s no single path to humanizing healthcare, but rather multiple approaches that can work when grounded in an authentic commitment to putting people first. When healthcare brands prioritize human experiences alongside clinical, they build the foundation for sustainable growth and greater impact in an increasingly volatile world.
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