On April 12th, Maryanne will give a presentation at Becker’s Hospital Review 9th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker’s is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 11-14, 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Maryanne’s session, click here.
Question: All healthcare is local. What about your market influences your organization’s business or operations most?
Maryanne Aldrich: As a 15+ year veteran in the rural healthcare marketing field, I take great pride in staying focused on the patient. At the end of the day, isn’t that what we are all trying to do? Rural healthcare is a whole different type of marketing. Community over competition is the name of the game for us! The type of market influences that affect our decision making are primarily driven by our community needs assessment and our diversification strategy. Understanding your customers’ needs and wants and compounding the financial stability of those goals are key.
Q: How do you define patient engagement?
MA: Relationships! While that may seem obvious, it is very easy to get so bogged down with policies, legislation, quality measures and whatever else you are evaluating that you can quickly lose sight of the patient. Taking the time to understand an individual’s needs or a target population’s wants will provide a clear roadmap on building patient engagement. We provide healthcare to the patient and it’s all about them. So, making them part of the process in a collaborative spirit is imperative to ensure the buy-in needed for success.
Q: How do you see the barrier between competitors and collaborators changing?
MA: This is one area where I believe rural healthcare has far surpassed its urban counterpart. [If you] truly understand your business, your strengths and weaknesses, you [can] to build an agile business model. I like to call it “”Collaborative Leveraging,”” which may sound like an oxymoron, but I believe that from a competitive standpoint we are all always seeking to gain market share.
The question we have to ask ourselves from a healthcare standpoint is, “”When do we come together for the greater good of our consumers versus going it alone?””
From a simplistic perspective, let’s take the invention of the ice cream waffle cone as an example. At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, a concessionaire was selling a crisp, waffle-like pastry — called the zalabis — in a booth right next to an ice cream vendor. Eventually, the vendor ran out of dishes. The concessionaire rolled one of his wafer-like waffles in the shape of a cone, or cornucopia, and gave it to the ice cream vendor. The cone cooled in a few seconds, the vendor put some ice cream in it, and the rest was history. Two complementary products coming together to satisfy the customer’s needs, and inadvertently creating a new market that they could both be enjoyed together.
Collaborative leveraging is as old as ice cream, every day we see multiple business deals involving healthcare organizations partnering with their competitive counterparts. From a transactional standpoint, it’s practically a no-brainer. The macroeconomics of such relationships make sense for financial efficiencies, and when we do it in the spirit of bringing the best of two organizations, services or providers together for the patient, then it’s a win-win. Everybody — the competing providers, the patient and the community as a whole — ultimately win, and the barrier dissolves between competitors and collaborators.
