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Image by Here and Now from Pixabay, Sooner or later, the COVID-10 pandemic will eventually move to the endemic phase. While COVID surges and new variants require continued vigilance and preventive measures, the impacts to the current patient experience are profound and lasting. It is not too early to begin thinking and planning for an endemic patient experience in 2022. As hospitals develop their business and marketing plans for an endemic world, special attention needs to be paid to the patient experience. Image by Alexandra Koch from Pixabay. A changed “normal” healthcare experience is in place with patients choosing and accessing healthcare services in new ways. Change is never easy and sometimes unrecognizable. Providers now live in a world where the patient exercises far more control in the selection process of the healthcare services they choose, the method of access, and delivery. Hospitals have had to engage more closely and meaningfully with patients, families, and the commun...

  Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Everybody talks about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but what does that mean for the healthcare provider and vendor marketing? AI is already with us as a part of our everyday lives; look at Alexi, Siri, Google Home, and Cortana. These devices already know what we want and assist us in navigating a complex world at home, at work, and in our play. They help us search for medical services and vendors who provide medical products and services. If you think about it, AI will have a profound effect on how hospitals anticipate the needs of and engage with patients and how vendors create a new prospect journey independent of sales. At some point, direct contact with an individual, be it a physician, clinician, or salesperson, will come into play, as human touch will always be needed. But for sales, prospecting for new customers will become less about cold calling and existing client referrals, to responding to well-developed leads uncovered by the buye...

  Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay I see a trend among various healthcare vendors reviving the outdated and misused Center of Excellence moniker that became popular with hospitals in the 1990s. What is old is new, I guess. Remember those hospitals' "Centers of Excellence"? Some hospitals still use that term today to differentiate themselves from competing hospitals. The idea is good, but like in the 90s, the claim of having a Center of Excellence or program within a "center" is meaningless without benchmarks and proof points that provide validity and substance to the claim. To coin a past popular phrase, "Where's the beef?" Are you trying to find a differentiating answer in a highly competitive market, or just throwing stuff up against the wall to see what sticks to feed your ego? In a day and age when data is readily available and undocumented claims are easily refuted in the market, are your prospects doing an eye roll and chuckling at the m...

  Image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay If the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic taught us in 2020, hospital marketers need to be agile and pivot on a dime. How have you allocated the hospital marketing spend for 2021? Can the hospital quickly change tactical direction by moving dollars to where they are needed?   Can one change messaging quickly to leverage a new opportunity brought about by the unknown? Now, I am not making light of a bad situation with the pandemic, as there is an opportunity to be leveraged. The leverage is not driving revenue, but as your community's source leader with credible, reliable information and care in combating the viral community spread. The influence is also being able to engage your patients on a meaningful level so that when the pandemic eventually comes under some measure of control, the patient would return to you because the hospital established trust. Enter 2021 Much of the allocations assigned to the strategies and tactics in the marketing plan ...