by Lou Davis, Vice President, Market Street Research

Hospital marketers and planners know the value of good marketing research. If properly conducted, marketing research can provide a measurement of the efficacy of past consumer-directed marketing efforts, illuminate new market opportunities, and identify how best to take advantage of these opportunities for growth. Good research can pave the way to improving physician relations and increasing referrals, it can provide an assessment of specific healthcare needs within a community, direct the development and introduction of new service lines, and can help organizations realize—and most effectively combat—the effects of negative press coverage, among many other things.

However, conducting high-quality research that results in reliable, actionable results can be expensive. The main drivers of research costs vary from project to project, depending on the methodology or methodologies utilized, the targeting and number of participants or respondents to be included in the study, the length and depth of the instruments being used, and the type of analysis and reporting desired as an outcome of the research. Above and beyond these drivers, the quality-control measures used by the firm conducting the research greatly affect the cost—and the value—of the research, and are most often not thoroughly understood by those not in the research profession.

read more

By Jim Rattray, Vice President, Southcoast Hospitals Group

Hospital quality has been a hot media topic lately. From MRSA to mortality, the public is demanding that hospitals be more transparent — and accountable — when it comes to their quality.

A growing number of hospitals have started to self report their own quality, becoming the leaders in the movement to be more transparent about quality.

In Massachusetts, hospitals that currently self report quality data include Baystate Health System in Springfield, Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge and Southcoast Health System in New Bedford.

read more

By Paul Griffiths, CEO, Medtouch

Here’s a crazy idea: next quarter, when you take a new service line to market, update your homepage. Put the service line front and center and, much to the chagrin of the Director of the Wound Care “Center of Excellence” and the doctors who wield the latest CyberUtensils set, you will see traffic to the service line jump at least 20%.

Want to bump it to 30%? Update the content on that service line’s landing page, tying it back to the exact language in the offline campaign and resubmit to Google.

It’s classic marketing 101, but the average hospital website is so focused on representing the institutional identity, it has little relationship with offline marketing efforts. I’ve heard plenty of excuses for this ranging from the political – we’d have to get the CIO involved, to the technical – our website software is so lousy, no one uses it, to the sublime – we might get more admissions than we could handle for that program. Heaven forbid!

read more

By Lee Crouch, APR, Vice President, Dowden Health Media

Peter J. Wright, FACHE, did not follow the traditional path in attaining his C-Suite status as Chief Operating Officer at Littleton Regional Hospital in Littleton, New Hampshire. Peter’s experience was in hospitality and direct marketing where he was involved in strategic planning, marketing, public relations and customer relations initiatives.

In 2001, when a college friend who happened to be the Director of Finance at Copley Hospital in Vermont, where most of us at NESHCo first knew Peter from, told him that a new CEO with an interesting vision was newly in place. Peter applied for the Director of Marketing and Public Relations and got the job at the integrated health system. Six months later, Peter was given the additional responsibilities of planning, marketing and government Affairs where he worked with 11 different system entities, a position he held for five years.

read more