A 2015 study by healthcare consulting and research firm Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock showed hospital systems approach internal and external communications in various ways. The study is based on interviews with heads of communications and marketing at more than 18 large health systems nationwide.
To qualify for the survey, hospital systems had to: maintain highly complex integrated systems; employ physicians; have been involved in various mergers, acquisitions and partnerships; and had to have adopted a model that included entities like ACOs, multispecialty group practices, urgent care centers, research or academic programs and payers.
Here are several findings on internal marketing and communications trends identified in the report.
Model
- As health systems expanded, merged, partnered or acquired entities, they tended to adopt a centralized structure for communication and marketing functions.
- Health systems that spanned diverse geographic regions, however, tended to rely more on regional leadership.
Budgets
- Researchers found little to no correlation between budget and hospital size, location or annual net patient revenue. “One might hope that innovative, growing health systems would grow their budgets accordingly, but we did not find that to be the case,” the report’s authors wrote. “Nor did we find that size or scope or structure of the system was necessarily indicative of budget size.”
- More hospitals appear to be centralizing communications and marketing dollars into a single bucket. Reasons for consolidating monies included service lines with individual marketing budgets, local budgets maintained by acquired hospitals and the persistence of “slush funds” for discretionary spending by executives.
- Overall, budgets are flat. Budget restraints prevent systems from growing communications or marketing staff. Rather than hire additional employees in emerging areas like digital or employee communications, hospitals are retraining existing staff and re-engineering the current workload.
Functions
- Hospital systems are prioritizing internal communications more than previous years. As competition for healthcare labor intensifies and industry change accelerates, hospital systems have seen value in building a unified, engaged and supportive workforce.
- Hospital systems continue to use a mix of traditional advertising mediums — newspapers, magazine, billboards, radio, TV — as well as digital and web advertising.
- Hospitals systems are developing strategies to engage, align and energize physicians as they look to build affiliations and relationships with physician groups. “There is a growing need for an engagement strategy to ensure physicians become productive, successful and satisfied members of the system,” the report’s authors wrote. “[Chief communications officers] are devoting resources to ensure that happens.”
Measuring return on investment
- CCOs use several methods to measure the success of marketing campaigns. Some of the most common measurements included:
- Calls — the number of calls into the call center from a particular marketing effort.
- Clicks — how many times online visitors clicked on materials.
- Visits — the number of unique sessions initiated by website visitors.
- Email open rates — how many people opened brand emails.
- Attendees — how many people attended an event, seminar, etc.
- Volumes — increase in the number of patients to a service line.
- Net revenue generated — dollars generated from a specific effort.
- Awareness — top-of-mind awareness as measured by perception surveys.
- Share of voice — relative amount of exposure your organization received within a defined market space.
- Referrals — recommendations from physicians or other professionals to your services.
- Market share — the percentage of a healthcare business an organization owns in the area.
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