instantly health

  Image by Sebastian Thone from Pixabay Over the past several months, I have written in Healthcare Marketing Matters about the hospital response to the pandemic requiring the patient, community, and marketing engagement. Critical themes in these troubled times focused on leadership, accountability, engagement, and becoming credible sources of information via marketing and public relations. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Some blog posts addressed that since your community was no longer a hot spot and hospital admissions declined, the hospital could not fully return to business as usual with the pre-pandemic marketing messaging. It was incumbent on the hospital to maintain the momentum and reinforce its leadership and credible source of information standing by leading the community to bolster efforts to slow down community spread. Especially important considering the coming flu season. Some hospitals continued their SARS-CoV-2 leadership of the community once the first wave pass...

With the resurgence of COVID-19 combined with the start of the flu season and colder damper weather, and so much uncertainty, conflicting viewpoints, gaslighting, and outright false facts in society, how is the hospital and health system communicating value? Image by Yogesh More from Pixabay Why value and not features, benefits, and awards? Patients and the community are scared, and there has been a loss of trust exhibited by patients not returning for care at pre-pandemic levels. With so much uncertainty, is it time to move healthcare marketing beyond "all about us" to the value and benefit brought to the patient and community? Unless you are a new provider in the market, features and services or vague quality and excellence claims may be falling on deaf ears.  Image by Tumisu from Pixabay It's about value, benefit, price, and convenience on the patient's terms in today's world. It's about answering the patient's question of trust and benefit of using y...

  Image by Igor Link from Pixabay The old rules of marketing and attracting patients are being cast aside like leaves in a storm. The acceleration of healthcare transformation into a personal technology-driven digital and convenient service point changes the hospital's rules to adopt a higher patient-centricity level. But we are patient, and customer-focused is the cry. But the answer to the question is not a simple as it may seem. There is no checklist of "if I do this and this, I will be a customer-focused hospital or health system, and the patient or consumer will think so too." The answer to the question is a two-part answer. And a hospital cannot arrive at the promised land of being a patient-focused healthcare enterprise unless it accomplishes part two of the solution.   Part One- The Patient as Health Care Consumer Think of your own experiences when interacting with a customer-focused company.   One is engaged and highly satisfied. Interaction with the company...

In LinkedIn's drive to be the Facebook of business, LinkedIn Stories was launched on Sunday, September 27. week. In essence, it is the same digital story opportunity that one finds on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. With a few notable exceptions, the stories from the first 24-48 hours left a lot be desired, even the LinkedIn Story demo, which has been revised. Content has improved as major corporations figure out its place in the marketing mix. Image by StockSnap from Pixabay I did create some content and found it easy to use and create content. It's very similar to other social media platforms' story options for content creation, sharing, tagging, etc. My one disappointing note, besides the lack of content, is that stories only appear on the LinkedIn app side. If you're creating on a desktop or laptop, stories are not available. For me, that is a significant shortcoming. Maybe someday, LinkedIn will figure out that the user experience needs to be the same across all...

With all the things that hospital leadership have on their plates and keeping them up at night, there is one area that could improve their marketing. That is making the hospital marketing stickier by being more creative. Image by ptra from Pixabay Creativity in hospital marketing is not a sin.  Now that being said, the creative and production values of cable and broadcast television advertisements are particularly good and of excellent quality for the most part. Where the hospital marketing fails is on the creative side is with email, digital, paid social, print advertisements, and direct mail.  Nobody remembers the advertisements.   But the healthcare and patient remembers what they saw on social media or the Internet. The healthcare consumer is talking and searching for healthcare information to learn and make choices.   But is the hospital or health system listening?  Welcome to the experience economy, where the experience of care trumps the products and s...

Healthcare can be a harsh mistress, especially on the revenue side for hospitals and health systems exacerbated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. With revenues falling and many on the brink of closure, new ways must be found to boost revenues. The task will not get any easier as the pandemic rages, and in January, the new consumer price transparency regulations begin. The consumer will have the ability to search for prices on several hundred standard procedures among multiple providers.   Price competition comes to hospitals. As difficult as this all is, patients still, for the most part, listen to and act on the recommendation of their physician when seeking hospital care. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay And therein lies the physician experience improvement opportunity. After all the years on both sides of the healthcare marketing ledger and having worked closely with physicians, I fail to understand is why time and effort are not spent by hospitals improving the physician pra...