Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director An expert in healthcare marketing and communications, Amy understands how to uncover a brand’s distinctive and relevant attributes in a sea of sameness. Her more than 20 years of client and agency experience give her unique insight into the complex challenges of healthcare providers and organizations today.

By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

8 in 10 Internet Users Go Online for Health Information

More physician practices and hospitals are starting to embrace Facebook as an important tool in their arsenal of marketing tactics. As marketing dollars shrink, competition intensifies, and more people look to social media as a way to become informed, empowered healthcare consumers, any hospital or practice would be wise to consider how social media can enhance their existing marketing plans. We’re now in the era of Health 2.0 - using social software and its ability to promote collaboration between patients, their caregivers, medical professionals, and other stakeholders in health. It’s really pretty cool when you think about it.

Consider this: eight in 10 Internet users go online for health information. Sure, there are things to consider like staffing, HIPAA, content and more, but can you really afford to be absent from this space and let your competitors be the only voice in the discussion?

I’ve spent the last week looking at a variety of healthcare brands - both hospitals and physician practices - and how they’re using Facebook as a marketing and commnications tool. Some are early adopters and recognize that as their younger patients age, more of them will seek information online rather than schedule an appointment with their doctor. After all, it’s faster and easier than ever to get information online. One caveat here - accessing information online doesn’t replace the value of seeing your physician face-to-face but can certainly help you ask the right questions.

Here are a few examples of Facebook tactics used by healthcare providers that I think are pretty interesting:

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By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Hospitals often seem like commodities, don’t they? With the exception of a couple well-known names, they’re pretty similar - they do surgery, deliver babies, most have an emergency department. So how do you differentiate one from another? Especially when most people really don’t want to have a relationship with your brand?That’s where we come in. As a communications company, we love to identify what makes our clients’ brands unique. Then we start to tell that story and engage customers in a dialogue. In today’s Web 2.0 world, it takes a blend of traditional and non-traditional strategies to produce great results.

This was the case with Riverside Methodist Hospital and the Innovation Campaign. The campaign features three real-life people who’ve benefited from a relationship with the hospital and its physicians. From these stories, we were able to build an attention-getting campaign that not only increased brand awareness for our client, but allowed us to stretch our creative legs in this niche, highly competitive market space.

The results went well beyond a move of the brand-awareness needle and rewarded us with a few feathers in our healthcare marketing cap. From thousands of award entries from across the country, the Innovation Campaign was recognized as the cream of the crop from renowned publications such as Marketing Healthcare Today and Healthcare Marketing Report.

We’re proud of getting awards like these, but even more proud of the results we help get for our clients.

By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Today in the New York Times, there is a story about how hospitals are moving toward the use of real, unvarnished stories about patients in their advertising.

We couldn’t agree more.

And it seems like our colleagues feel the same way, which is why we’re the fortunate recipients of several healthcare marketing awards.

Great hospitals have great stories to tell

We’re fortunate to work with great clients like Riverside Methodist Hospital that have allowed us to tell their stories in a real, human and emotional way.  And we think that our storytelling approach is critical in a society that is overwhelming us with marketing messages.

The Riverside innovation campaign, created by Fahlgren,  features three real-life people who’ve benefited from a relationship with the hospital.

The first is Bill Doherty from County Clare, Ireland, whose leg was saved because of a breakthrough vascular procedure; the second was Sarah Lancaster from Westerville, Ohio who recovered rapidly from a near devastating stroke and the final story included William Gray, MD, a New York physician collaborating on the latest in cardiovascular research with Riverside. Not only did we create television spots, but we also featured expanded patient and physician stories on videos posted on Riverside’s YouTube channel. 

Crafting a bestseller

The campaign won a Gold Aster Award for the total advertising campaign among hospitals with 500+ beds. The 2009 Aster Awards consisted of approximately 3,000 entries from across America.  Participant entries competed against similar-sized organizations in their category.  Entries must have scored at least in the top 85% to receive an award.  Judging criteria included creativity, layout and design, functionality, message effectiveness, production quality and overall appeal.

The total campaign also won a Bronze Healthcare Marketing Award and an Award of Merit for the television spots. Much like the Aster Awards, the 2009 Healthcare Marketing Awards received over 3,600 entries in this year’s competition.  

Finally, the internal innovation campaign for Riverside associates and physicians won a PRism award from the Central Ohio Chapter of Public Relations Society of America.

At the end of the day, however, what’s really important to us is that our work is getting measureable results for Riverside. To us, this makes the story a genuine bestseller.

If you want help telling your healthcare brand story, give us a call.

By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

The transition from childhood to adolescence is a big turning point — socially, mentally, physically and emotionally.

Just ask any parent with children between the ages of 8 and 14. This generation is media-wise, sophisticated, technically-savvy, and they’re influential trendsetters who are growing up much quicker than previous generations. I see this every day in my two daughters, ages 12 and 14.

If you’re a parent of a tween, teen or have any in your family, you probably won’t be too surprised by these statistics from eMarketer’s report, Kids and Teens: Communications Revolutionaries:

• While 36% of teens send a text message every day, just 16% send e-mail every day (Pew Internet & American Life Project).
• Between 2006 and 2007, usage of social networks among 10-to-12-year-old Internet users more than doubled, to 22% (Harris Poll).
• 16 million teens—nearly two-thirds of the population—own a mobile phone (MultiMedia Intelligence).
• 46% of tweens have a mobile phone, up from 35% in 2007 (Nielsen Co.).

Over one-quarter of teen mobile phone owners (28%) access the Internet via their phone (Harris Interactive/CTIA-The Wireless Association), compared with 17% of all mobile subscribers (Nielsen Mobile).

Under the Kidfluence

Their world is a different world from mine at this age. For those of us in the 30 to 40-something range, technology used to mean cassette tapes, Atari, push-button phones and electric typewriters (gosh, I feel old). In the ’70s and ‘80s, marketers didn’t see nearly the influence from kids as they do today – the phenomenon known as “kidfluence.” 

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By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Tweeting live surgeries is catching on as more health care systems embrace social media.

A couple months ago at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons used robotic surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from a man’s kidney and a benign tumor from another patient’s brain. Earlier this month, a woman had a robotic hysterectomy at Sherman Hospital in Illinois, and last week, surgeons at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Wisconsin perfomed a double knee replacement.

These surgeries are very different, but all of them were simultaneously broadcast via Twitter. While operating surgeons use Twitter to give short, real-time updates about the procedure.

A Peek into the Operating Room

I am not a nurse, doctor or other trained medical professional, but I have some medical knowledge and have watched surgeries performed firsthand. I’ve also become an avid Twitter user, so I decided to follow along when I heard about Aurora Health’s decision to broadcast the procedure.

I opened up TweetDeck and followed along, reading their tweets of the procedures.

I was fascinated at the speed, precision and honesty of the surgeons doing the double knee replacement. Pictures of the actual procedure were also tweeted. No, I wasn’t grossed out (I seriously love watching this kind of stuff), but those faint of heart followers can choose to not open and view the photos that are tweeted, another advantage of Twitter.

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By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Community benefit reports offer an incredible opportunity to healthcare brands.

AIG =Arrogance, Incompetence, Greed.

That’s just one of many negative shots being lobbed at companies in the heart of America’s economic crisis. Big businesses wrought with financial problems are being blasted by the public and media alike. The public’s frustration with these companies can very likely result in spillover to the healthcare arena.

With the rollout of the newly revised IRS Form 990H, non-profit hospitals and health systems will soon be required to outline everything they do that benefits public health and the underserved.  It’s only a matter of time until the public and the media want see your community benefit report and want to know what you’re doing to maintain your tax-exempt status.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer posted a package online outlining charity care and other community benefit spending among area non-profit hospitals. The Illinois Supreme Court is questioning how much charity care a hospital should provide to maintain its tax-exempt status. It’s not surprising that reporters are starting to smell a story in the new community benefit reporting rules under IRS form 990, Schedule H. They’ll also want to know what you’re paying your key executives.

Show Investments You’re Making In The Community

Hospital parking garages are full of Mercedes and BMWs, and hospital expansion and new construction has been prevalent across the country. So, people see that money is being made, but do they really know how it is being spent? That’s where telling the brand story comes into play.

As healthcare communicators, we’re in a unique position to help our clients tell their stories - narratives that uncover the many things that the hospital is doing to improve the lives of people within the community. Outreach programs, health fairs, uncompensated care - these are all valuable and meaningful activities. But, the best stories are told with authenticity and emotion - they help people connect with your brand and really understand and appreciate the contribution you make to the overall health of the community.