Most healthcare organizations will have some combination of a mission statement, a core principles statement, or a values statement , and invariably, when you look at these, there will be significant attention placed on the improved health or quality of life of their customers.
I have found that in most healthcare organizations, these big, bold statements do actually filter down to the employees and they do have some intrinsic value; this filtering will often be department dependent, and likely will be best represented and most pure within the clinical side of the organization.
However, in this age when a healthcare organization’s digital platform is becoming ever more important, I believe a reasonable question is how most healthcare organizations marketing department ( who are usually the gatekeepers of the digital platform), see their specific mission.
What you will find when you sit down with the head of marketing, or the individual principally responsible for the organization’s website, or the organizations social media director, is that they will see their job for what they are evaluated for, and most likely it will fall in two categories: new patient development and brand protection.
The reason this is their focus is multifactorial, but if you look at how are people are organizational placed within the corporate decision structure, you often find that they report either directly to the COO or the CEO.
Now, partly because of their age, or partly because of business tradition, or what they learned in business school, both the CEO and the COO will see the marketing department as an expense peripheral to their principal business model ( which should be health and healing) rather than as a principal tool of their business model.
Put another way, CEOs and COOs of healthcare organizations don’t look at their website homepage, or their Facebook page, or their Twitter stream as a way to directly lower patients cholesterol, treat hypertension, reduce their patient population obesity, or prevent opioid abuse.
This is a shame for several reasons, but mostly because as technology moves forward, we need to accept that a significant part of patient’s interaction with the healthcare organization will be in the digital universe, and therefore, to not directly consider ways with this can improve their health within this digital space is simply a waste.
That’s why I believe marketing needs their own physician medical director.
An experienced physician medical director knows in his or her gut the significance of such things as medication noncompliance, opioid overdose in the family, untreated depression or delayed screening tests for colon cancer.
So when these medically trained and humanity-tempered men and women look at a homepage with 5000 visits per month, or look at the organization’s Twitter stream or Facebook posts, their cognitive lens isn’t going to be about organizational wait times or how many new patients the website attracted last month. Instead, their focus is going to be on whether or not a digital widget will this save a life, will this prevent a stroke, or will this prevent a pregnancy.
Don’t get me wrong. I think putting a significant effort on one’s digital platform towards brand protection and new patient development is valuable, but, – and this is a big but – it is not as valuable as preventing an overdose on a 13-year-old.