Jarrard’s Intriguing Look into a Shifting Industry

Ever wonder how your hospital’s marketing efforts stack up to competitors? If so you’re not alone. Recently, healthcare communications firm Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock set out to find common denominators among hospital marketing departments nationwide.

Their study included interviews with chief communication officers from 20 participating organizations including Saint Thomas Health. “We wanted to talk to those in sophisticated, larger systems to learn how they’re thinking – folks who are innovators and big players,” said Kim Fox, vice president and co-author of the company’s white paper, “Healthcare Communications and Marketing in the Brave New World.”

Fox and her colleagues discussed concepts like staffing, structure and budgets in today’s world of value re-engineering, new reimbursement models, mergers and acquisitions, health and wellness programs, and other transformative initiatives.

“We thought we’d come to more ‘Here’s how everyone’s doing it,’ conclusions, but we just didn’t,” Fox explained. “The most surprising finding is that as much as we’d like to think we can benchmark each other, each health system is so different. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ in healthcare or healthcare communications.”

Looking Inside

The firm did, however, identify definite trends across the continuum including a need for increased employee engagement. “Several told us if they could just emphasize one thing, it would be internal communications,” Fox said. That stems from the many complicated messages employers must continually share with employees … explaining the transition to less inpatient and more outpatient staff, or why frequent retraining is so critical.

“We know where healthcare is going and why, and there’s a quandary of explaining complex things to employees right now,” Fox said. “They need to know you believe in where you’re going, and good communication releases the stress of uncertainty. We need that in healthcare now more than ever.”

According to the report, other trends for internal communications include:

Concerted efforts to arm managers and supervisors with the right tools so that messages can be cascaded more effectively,

Multiple, overlapping methods of communication,

A combination of online and print materials that are accessible at home, as well as in the workplace,

Facebook-like platforms such as Yammer or Jive,

Public-facing internal communications platforms so that both internal and external audiences see the same messages.

Evolving Functions

Today’s marketing department is much more than newsletters and press releases. In fact, the role of a hospital communications department is evolving as quickly as the industry itself. According to the report, “The lines between the traditional functions of marketing, public relations and communications are blurring, reflecting the move from hospitals to integrated health networks. So, too, are the functions for which we are responsible. Not only must we lead traditional communications and marketing disciplines, but several organizations have charged their CCOs with leading - or at least playing a key role in - patient engagement, patient portals, data management, employee satisfaction and physician communications.”

Structure and Staffing

Fox and her colleagues found that titles, reporting relationships and staffing models are in flux as a result of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships and the changing role of communications. They also discovered health systems are “demanding an unprecedented level of coordination and sophistication from their communications and marketing teams, putting increased demands on staff recruitment, training and retention.”

Departments varied in size from a few to nearly 100 staffers. While size can matter, one organization created an impressive social presence with only one person.

Marketing Budgets

A lack in industry standard among marketing budgets also took the Jarrard team by surprise, Fox said, with numbers ranging from $2 million to $30 million. However, departments reported fewer budget cuts than might be expected in a post-ACA world. In fact, most budgets remained fairly consistent year to year, although more was often expected of staff.

For example, they found human resources and communications departments are coordinating efforts much more than in years past due to the substantial amount of information employers are required to share with staff. Their research did reveal some overriding themes, including:

Budgets are flat.

Budget restraints do not allow systems to add new staff. If a department requires additional staffing in emerging areas like digital or employee communications, they are retraining existing staff members and re-engineering the current workload. CCOs are trying to prioritize work in order to make room for additional or new assignments, but “project creep” persists, the demand for traditional advertising and newsletters has not abated, and the realities of organizational politics continue.

Sponsorships – large and small – continue as major line items in most budgets.

Measuring Returns

When it came to measuring return on marketing investments, participants identified some keys to success:

Collaborate with operations and finance to ensure your goals are aligned with their goals,

Determine how to track prior to the beginning of the campaign, and

Make sure to include all communications and marketing activities in the campaigns to be tracked.

The report closed with a glimpse into the future for healthcare communicators: “We see a changing role for communicators and marketers — a role that is deeper and broader and more strategic than ever. The tumultuous changes in the business of healthcare and in how consumers communicate today have created the perfect storm.”