Hospitals and health systems recognize that strategic growth is only possible if they offer consumers the right programs and services in the right place at the right time. Without smart marketing initiatives, it can be difficult to reach patients with messages that build trust and organization’s brand.
During Becker’s Hospital Review 15th Annual Meeting, at a panel sponsored by BPD, four healthcare marketing leaders discussed how targeted marketing strategies can fuel sustainable growth and brand development:
- Chris Bevolo, chief transformation officer, BPD
- Andrew Chang, chief marketing officer, UChicago Medicine
- Sharon Line Clary, senior vice president, community impact and partnership engagement, AdventHealth Central Florida Division
- Ryan Younger, vice president, marketing, Virtua Health (Marlton, N.J.)
Three takeaways from their conversation:
- Trust is a key differentiator in healthcare, and it’s built on the patient experience.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the public’s trust in the healthcare sector has decreased significantly. A recent survey found that among American adults, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024. This is problematic for healthcare marketers, since trust forms the foundation of all brands.
Mr. Bevolo explained that in healthcare, trust is built through the patient experience. “Whether a person is coming in for urgent care, open heart surgery or to visit a family member, the experience is what builds trust,” he said.
Patient trust is based on factors like clinical excellence, access points, wait times, the courtesy of front-line workers and more. According to Ms. Line Clary, AdventHealth works with employees to instill trust in patients by providing the high-quality care that the organization is known for.
“Your employees represent you every time a patient comes through the door, calls a contact center, emails or texts,” she said. “To create trust, we make sure that all team members understand what it means to wear our brand on their scrubs or their coat.”
Consistency is also essential. Virtua Health reinforces the importance of every touchpoint and every person in the patient experience. “We talk a lot about the idea of ‘everybody, always.’ It only takes one thing to break trust,” Mr. Younger said. - Leading healthcare organizations listen to patients and engage in dialog.
According to Mr. Chang, bi-directional communication with patients is important for building trust and developing a growth strategy. “This is what we’re about to embark on — how do we become part of the greater community, get ingrained with the culture, keep people healthy and through that, build trust, stay top of mind and therefore get more referrals and volume,” he said.
To support its vision of being a “listening organization,” Virtua Health has built a panel of 48,000 consumers to gather feedback. “That panel allows us to ask people questions about anything brand-related,” Mr. Younger said. “It can be about the patient experience or about operational issues.”
When Virtua Health was considering the addition of weekend surgery slots, the panel said they preferred having procedures on weekdays. This prevented the organization from embarking on a costly service offering that would have had minimal consumer acceptance and uptake. - Data and technology must be used with care.
AdventHealth’s precision marketing program uses personas, deep data and analytics to identify target markets and determine the messages that will best resonate with these groups. The marketing team identifies what different consumers need for healthcare, where and when care should be delivered and what communication channels would be most effective. “We’ve seen upward of 100 to 1 ROI with this strategy,” Ms. Line Clary said. “And I think we’ll continue to get better and better as AI and other technologies come to the forefront.”
Given the highly regulated nature of healthcare, however, AdventHealth and other organizations are focused on compliance and are taking a thoughtful approach to how they reach out to consumers. UChicago Medicine, for example, vets every marketing campaign with its compliance team.
Mr. Bevolo observed that data can predict things that even a person’s closest family members aren’t aware of. “There’s tremendous power in conveying what we can offer to patients, but we must comply with regulations and think about how we would want to be approached through data and messages,” he said.
