mommyjenlin

A story on hospital urgent care centers the other day in the Sun Sentinel, Orlando, Florida caught my eye. In a nut-shell, some hospital and system owned urgent care centers charge emergency room prices. When I started looking around the country, the same story can be repeated in community after community. This is just not an isolated one-time event. What don't they get? In a consumer-driven healthcare market, pricing matters. And charging $500 for a 15-minute visit that required a Band-Aid is the perfect example of why there is such an uproar by government, employers, consumers and health plans regarding healthcare cost. It also points out why Walgreens, CVS, Wal-Mart and entrepreneurs are driving the expansion of retail healthcare and outperforming the more traditional healthcare providers. I get it. Hospitals and health systems need to expand and see the urgent care market as a means of revenue generation for combating falling volumes and declining reimbursement. Urgent care

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question? Faced with a dizzying array of possibilities from twitter to facebook to YouTube, LinkedIn, flicker and others, healthcare providers are struggling with developing a comprehensive social media strategy to engage their customers. Understandable really. Some of the concern comes from not understanding the power and uses of social media and how consumers are the new paparazzi. Some comes from trying to figure out how a social media strategy fits into the overall marketing plan. Some is purely from executive ignorance in not understanding the place and uses of social media in the life of the healthcare consumer. In many cases its all of the above and others, including and by far the most pervasive, the never ending paralysis by analysis planning loop and engaging in that quest for the perfect best practice before proceeding. In these situations it is about internal marketing leadership. As the marketing expert in your organization, you ne

Building the Intelligent Sales & Marketing Organization. IDC's best and brightest analyst teams were assembled in Boston and San Jose during the past two weeks to present their latest insight and guidance for creating the global intelligent economy; focusing specifically on the impact of social, mobile and virtual technologies on this vision. Morning speakers discussed how to position for the third wave of IT industry growth driven by mobility, clouds, big data and intelligent industries. In the afternoon, one of the many tracks included presentations by IDC's Sales and Marketing Advisory team about the vision of the intelligent sales and marketing organization and they key success factors required to achieve this vision. A few key take-aways from each of the presentations in this track are provided below. Executing for Marketing Excellence in 2011 by Rich Vancil: Start – or accelerate – your social business transformation  With communication cycle-times dropping and the p

Sustainability...Presence...Perception...Experience... These are the four constants that direct-care healthcare providers need to understand and incorporate for success in their marketing operations and campaign efforts in a consumer-driven market . No longer nice to have, these four basic concepts are now business requirements. Sustainability- The resources to effectively and continuously communicate brand and differentiate your offering across multiple channels. Presence - By maintaining a continuous presence across multiple channels as in so many other consumer-directed industries, you build brand preference. Perception- With a sustainable, continuous presence in the marketplace, sooner rather than latter, your key messages become the opinion of you by consumers and they become fact in their minds. Experience- The actual customer experience matches the brand image, perceptions and opinions of customers that you created in the marketplace that had been communicated in an integrat

Or, the dangers of only viewing the customer-patient experience management as only the patient encounter. An Intuit survey, "Healthcare consumers want online control "- HealthcareFinanceNews.com, March 3, 2011, indicates overwhelming support by the general public for more control over their healthcare via online activities. They want healthcare providers including physicians, to be accessible online. They want to pay their bills online, communicate with the provider, request appointments and get lab results. A clearly demonstrated experience need and expectation of consumers, that except for a few isolated healthcare organizations, is generally lacking among healthcare providers. Had you been conducting market research on your customers-patients in the experience management process outside of the patient interaction, you would have understood that expectation and need. But unfortunately, most customer-patient experience management programs in healthcare providers are focused

So why are you not talking to your customers-patients in experience management? As I look across the changing healthcare landscape, there is a movement gaining momentum to improve the patient and customer experience. Case studies and published articles are appearing in healthcare on Customer Experience Management (CEM). And don't get me wrong, wonderful improvements are being made. But when I delve into these improvement activities, one common denominator is missing and it concerns me. If you are engaged in the CEM process correctly, that means you are talking to and listening to your customers or patients. Healthcare providers, such as MD Anderson as well as others, are actively pursuing customer and patient engagement that includes an intense and focused effort to actively talk and listen to their customers and patients. But unfortunately, they are far and few between. Are you using only one means of gathering customer or patient experience intelligence? There is no doubt tha