Healthcare 2.0 Meets Branding 2.0

- September 16, 2010 by Beverly Ingle

Regardless of your opinion on healthcare reform, the way healthcare services are consumed is changing. It will have a profound impact on current business models, provider behavior, patient expectations, informatics and service delivery, and how those industry components evolve from where they are today. Is your organization ready? If you like, you can download this whitepaper as a pdf.

Introduction

Long before healthcare reform became the topic du jour, the industry was seeing a shift toward more consumer-centered, consumer-directed care. “Consumerism” became a buzzword among industry analysts as early as 2008, with high-deductible benefits plans attracting the most attention as part of the early models to shift the industry.

Consumerism is a strategy for placing economic purchasing responsibility and decision making in the hands of individuals by: supplying the information and decision support tools they need; providing financial incentives, rewards, and other benefits; and encouraging personal involvement in health and healthcare purchasing behaviors. This strategy must work for the sick and the healthy, the low- and the high-income, and the active health manager as well as the passive consumer.

And while the cost of healthcare is without a doubt the elephant in the room, other components of consumerism need to be included in the conversation. These include tools such as preventive services, wellness and disease management programs, and communications designed to provide consumers with more real-time information about the quality and costs of the providers they visit and the services they use. All of them combine to create an “environmental expectation” for greater personal accountability in healthcare.

So, where in this shifting framework of healthcare is the opportunity for brand and organizational success? Right at the heart of it. After all, your brand should evolve in tandem with your organization.

The Consumer within Consumerism

According to the US Department of Labor, women make approximately 80 percent of healthcare decisions for their families and are more likely to be the caregivers when a family member falls ill. And, it is estimated that women spend two out of every three medical dollars and decide how households spend three of every four dollars on healthcare. With this kind of spending power at stake, healthcare brands that want to increase awareness and loyalty among these women need to capture the opportunity to provide knowledge and tools to satisfy their multiple roles as decision makers and healthcare consumers.

GDC’s own research reveals that a combined 93% of moms agree (33%) or somewhat agree (60%) to being healthy people, and most are frequently concerned about their health and that of their families. 96% of moms hold themselves accountable for their family’s health; more so their children than their spouse, as many see their spouse as having his own accountability. Moms are the food decision makers, and thus the filters for their families. They are concerned about the nutritional content that goes into the foods they serve them, and they pay attention to ingredients in the products they purchase. Common dietary avoidances include high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, saturated fats and artificial sweeteners. Moms are aware of the latest health studies and/or fads, but note that they do not necessarily take them to heart unless they have been validated for quite some time.

Some moms admit that they are more concerned about the foods they are feeding their children than those they eat themselves. One mom interviewed notes, “I’m relaxed a little bit about what I put in my body versus what I put in theirs.” Still, moms feel like they set an example for their children and if their kids observe healthy habits from parents, they will lead a healthier life on their own. More and more moms are “going organic” these days and have become firm believers in homegrown fruits and vegetables. Moms with children who have health concerns (e.g. allergies, asthma, etc.) are particularly inclined to buy from the organic sections for foods.

Accountability for one’s health goes beyond moms and their families, as they feel like others should feel more accountable for their own health. Responses suggest that moms are concerned about other people’s poor health habits and how they will eventually impact their families in some form or another, if they have not already. Healthcare costs, food costs and the physical nature of humanity are all concerns for moms and their families, especially those who struggle to obtain and/or maintain their health insurance due to rising premiums. Some moms optimistically suggest, “We’re all doing the best we can,” while the majority states the contrary: “With all the information out there, we should all be doing a whole lot more to become healthier.”

Healthcare Systems as Health Partners

Healthcare 2.0 is no longer about delivering “sick care,” but rather providing health and wellbeing care through prevention, education and promoting healthy lifestyle choices. The business opportunities are within this paradigm shift. Move from an organization whose revenue streams are reliant upon providing episodic care, illness and injury, to an organization whose revenue streams stem from services that intend to keep patients out of their facilities by improving their overall health. In doing so, opportunities open up not only for new business models, but also – and arguably more important – for creating relevant, long-term connections with consumers throughout their life cycles.

There are four trends in consumer behavior, user experience design and post-consumerism relevant to healthcare that, if addressed by your health system’s strategic plan, will lead to short-term market “wins” as well as long-term brand health.

1. Change the Experience

Healthcare is not high on any list of “fun experiences.” Ask consumers to describe a typical experience with hospitals and similar facilities, and many of the same descriptors surface: “Long waits. Crowded waiting rooms. Cold environment. Hurried staff. Too much paperwork.” In fact, Clotaire Rapaille in the book, The Culture Code, claims that Americans unconsciously define “hospital” as “processing plant.” Change the experience – improved scheduling, inviting environment, streamlined processes – and you can begin to change the definition.

2. Expand Services

Rapaille also states that the unconscious definition, or culture code, that Americans ascribe to “health” is “movement.” Little wonder then that the perception of hospitals is so poor: by design, hospitals impede patients’ movement. Expanding service lines to include or even focus on components central to maintaining good health, such as nutrition, physical fitness, psycho-social support, preventive care and education, broadens opportunities to create new revenue streams, and goes a long way toward redefining your hospital’s culture code.

3. Be Transparent

Amid the heightened conversation about quality scores and outcomes, consumers are increasingly looking at that data and placing significance on it as they make decisions regarding where to receive care. Hospitals and health systems that proactively make their quality data available to the public have the opportunity to tell their quality story on their terms, helping the consumer to interpret the data and understand how it reflects the overall care experience they receive.

4. Ask Questions and Listen

There’s no better way to solicit honest input than by asking a question directly. And there’s no better way to hear the opportunity for improvement or celebration than by listening to the answer. The key to engaging consumers in conversation about health and healthcare is to ensure the effort is ingenuous. Appreciate the input, maintain the conversation, and illustrate through action how that input has been brought into play within the organization.

Measuring Return

Every marketing professional knows the drill: Return-on-Investment is king and the measurement by which our success is determined. Healthcare marketing at its most basic is a push for increased service-line volume, an effort to put more “heads in beds.” Yet taking into account the quasi-health coach role healthcare organizations can adopt in order to better develop long-term relationships with consumers, is ROI the only valuable measurement? That’s not to say that the importance of ROI should be sublimated; the financial health of healthcare organizations continues to be paramount in order to deliver care that meets the consumer’s expectation. However, it only tells part of the story of success.

Return-on-Health is an emerging metric by which to determine the success not only of marketing, but also of service delivery. It puts the consumer and her experience at the very center of your organization’s programmatic and service-delivery planning. As business models evolve toward a more resolute “pay for performance” format, the importance of illustrating longitudinal improvement in a consumer’s state of health, linked to and illustrative of a provider’s performance, becomes critical to the livelihood of the provider.

Treat Your Brand Like Your Patients

In today’s transparent world, your brand can’t say one thing and do another. Otherwise savvy consumers will discover the discrepancy and broadcast it to their network of friends and family and beyond, slowly unraveling your brand. So as a provider, you can’t say you support health reform yet fail to reform your organization’s brand in order to be a part of it. Still, it’s easy to blame it all on a broken system, but much more difficult to admit your brand is broken. So how can you adapt to augment healthcare 2.0 with branding 2.0?

Simply apply the ideas above. First, get to know your consumer and her healthcare habits, wants and needs. Then evolve your brand into a true health partner that supports her with modern offerings like experience, services, information and conversation. Finally, don’t measure your success in yesterday’s terms. In other words, focus more on proactively nurturing your brand’s health rather than reactively treating its ailments. Gee, that concept sounds familiar…

Now get out there and create some change.