Repositioning Healthcare Organizations for a Changing Consumer

This week I had a chance to stop by the Stericycle Communication Solutions user event they called “The Art of Patient Engagement.”  I live tweeted the kickoff keynote of the event with Jared Johnson, Founder of the Shift.health content network and author of the Marketing Forward book he just published. Here are some of the key insights and perspectives he shared with the audience.

At the kickoff of the event, the users were asked if this was one of the hardest times healthcare has ever seen. Not surprising, the audience hands went up in mass. There are a lot of challenging forces at play in healthcare today.

I was slow on the trigger to capture Johnson’s opening rap, but it brought a great energy to kick off his keynote. Hopefully, Stericycle will share the video on their Twitter account.

This is a main theme I’m hearing from people today. I’d suggest that healthcare has a branding problem. Thinking about whether your healthcare organization is ready to think, act, and buy differently is a good measure of where your organization is at in the digital transformation that patients want to see.

This is why your organization is going to suffer. These new healthcare entrants are painting a picture about your organization that true or not you have to combat with your own efforts. Otherwise, you’ll reinforce what they’re saying.

Johnson shared this amazing perspective from Sara Vaezy. The winds of change in healthcare are happening. The question is whether you’re going to catch that wave or not. The beauty of waves is that they can destroy you or you can ride them so they accelerate you. However, you’re not going to change them. You have to dig in to understand them so you can benefit from them.

Making this a competitive advantage for your healthcare organization is what you get when you catch the wave.

I think this is the biggest challenge that those in attendance face. There are a lot of people in healthcare organizations that are happy continuing how it’s always been done. Plus, many can only see the obstacles and not the opportunity. Johnson implored attendees to look at this as an opportunity to do something amazing for patients and your healthcare organization.

I love this framework. Frankenstein is some of the legacy technology that was just Frankensteined together to make work. That’s a challenge. Fatigue is easy to understand given all the fires that exist in healthcare. Ferraris in the garage referenced having a whole suite of great technology, but only using a small set of the features. I’ve seen all three of these in pretty much every healthcare organization.

Needless to say, healthcare marketing and patient experience professionals jobs are hard. They’re wearing a lot of hats and have to learn to balance a bunch of competing priorities.

This is a great promise that Johnson made to wrap up his keynote. What do you think of this approach? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Thanks to Stericycle Communication Solutions for hosting me at the event. It’s always great to interact with users who are on the front lines doing the hard work of engaging patients.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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