Can you sleep at night?
It’s safe to say that as a whole, our healthcare system is not functioning on all cylinders. According to a commonly quoted World Health Organization study, the U.S. ranks first in healthcare spending per capita among countries in the world, but 37th in the quality of that care. In a recent New York Times article, Victor Fuchs, emeritus professor of economics and health research and policy at Stanford University, is quoted as saying “If we solve our health care spending, practically all of our fiscal problems go away.” (And if we don’t, asks the reporter?) “Then almost anything else we do will not solve our fiscal problems.” According to many experts, if the annual rate of health insurance inflation and the slower rise in household income both continue as is, the average American family will spend all of their take-home pay on health insurance by the year 2025.
We’ve all heard these and other statistics. And, like it or not, as members of the healthcare marketing community, we are all part of this equation as the media, politicians and government officials increasingly are pointing the spotlight at our discipline and asking “Do we really need to be spending healthcare dollars on this?”
I am the first to defend the right and necessity of our organizations to market themselves. Our current healthcare system is market-driven, which requires competition to drive success. With competition comes branding and marketing, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Nevertheless, we cannot forget we are part of a larger system that plays a fundamental role in ensuring the U.S. is an advanced, compassionate and successful society. So how do you ensure that as a healthcare marketer, you are part of the solution for healthcare in our country, and not part of the problem?
The answer: Make sure you are doing everything in your power to efficiently, effectively and ethically connect people who need healthcare with the appropriate content, services or resources. There are two key qualifiers in that statement, however: efficiently and effectively.
For the past few years, our firm has made it our mission to aggressively advocate for conducting healthcare marketing the “right” way, such as building brands through better patient experiences, moving past a reliance on outdated and ineffective methods like mass advertising, and consistently measuring marketing efforts.
This advocacy stems from our commitment to supporting healthcare marketing that drives meaningful business results. But it goes beyond doing the “right” things just because they work. Those “right” things will also help ensure you are a conscientious steward of the healthcare dollars that you control. For in the end, every healthcare dollar that’s wasted is a dollar that keeps our system sputtering. Our choice is simple: do what’s right in marketing, not just because it works, but because it’s right.
[...] Chris Bevolo (who wrote a great blog post defending hospitals’ right to market themselves – “Can you sleep at night”), thinks I suffered from a semantic problem: I should have said “margin” instead of [...]