instantly health

As the provider market for the healthcare consumer continues to consolidate through merger, acquisition, liquidation, or disintermediation, there is one clear outcome. Fewer providers mean heightened competition within hospitals or health systems in a bid to stay atop the food chain. With the consumer's growing realization that they need a hospital for only three things, the ER, ICU, and medical care for complex acute medical conditions, they are more in control with their physician of the buying process than providers want to admit. To become part of the consumer's choice for healthcare, successful providers will recognize that understanding the healthcare consumer buyers' journey is the new way of thinking about marketing, how it impacts growth, and can drive the organization in a better direction that is more customer-focused and responsive to their needs.  Customer Buyer Journey In this environment, providers are already losing meaningful differentiation. Marketing camp...

And it’s not a quiz either. I try extremely hard not to call out individual hospitals or health systems for their lack of understanding of the healthcare consumer, their expectations, needs, and for knowing who their patient is. But sometimes the professional healthcare marketer in me gets the best of me when I receive some marketing material from a health system, through different incarnations, I have used for 22 plus years. That’s right 22 plus years.  Oh, and did I mention that my wife, children, and mother-in-law have used them too? PH has no idea after 22 years of utilization from being a patient, using the ER, to outpatient testing, WHO. I. AM. And here is what set me off. And I can guarantee you that many a healthcare consumer, aka former patient, feels the same way. The other day, I received a direct mail piece. It was a very nicely done, four-color, a heavy stock paper mailer that looked expensive with an offer for a chance to win a Fitbit.  But the catch was if and o...

With all the things that hospital leadership and healthcare marketing executives have on their plates and keeping them up at night, here’s a new one.  And unfortunately, it’s out of one's control, and no exceptions are allowed. With the economic shift from a product and service economy to an experience economy, providers are at a clear disadvantage by continuing to market like it is the 1990s.  Now that being said, it’s not all providers, but the vast majority.   Being paid for the production of care in the fee-for-service model is a product and service approach to healthcare.  Though the payment mechanism is changing, little has changed in provider marketing.   A vast majority of healthcare providers still taking the product marketing features approach. Notice that I did not say features and benefits marketing. Providers only go halfway choosing features or warm fuzzy improbable benefits but not both in their marketing.  I have yet to see a provider o...